The Signals We Learn to Silence

Burnout Part 2: On antidepressants, misalignment, and the cost of numbness

I started taking antidepressants in my mid-twenties, after being diagnosed with PMDD. For up to ten days every month, I would fall into a dark, heavy fog. I felt disconnected, unhappy, sometimes like I didn’t want to be alive anymore.

At the time, the medication felt like a solution. The extreme lows softened. The mood swings evened out. I could keep functioning.

And I did. I functioned extremely well.

I finished a PhD at Princeton. I built relationships with National Geographic. I produced work that earned recognition and respect. From the outside, it looked like a period of incredible success.

But looking back, I can see something I couldn’t see then.

My life during that time was deeply misaligned. I was in a relationship that didn’t feel right. Living in places where I didn’t feel free to be myself. Pursuing a PhD that, if I’m honest, never felt fully like mine. I was following paths that made sense on paper, paths that looked impressive, meaningful, responsible, but something inside me was constantly protesting.

The antidepressants made that protest quieter.

They gave me the ability to keep going down roads that didn’t actually fit me, because I was numb to the pain of them. I was productive, successful, high-functioning, but I was also strangely flat. Disconnected. Not quite alive inside my own life.

Emotions are part of the body’s stress cycle. They’re signals, not flaws. They rise, crest, and pass, carrying information about what is and isn’t working in our lives.

But when those signals get numbed, the underlying tension doesn’t disappear. The cycle never really finishes. The body keeps carrying the load, quietly, in the background.

I used to think my PMDD was a random biological curse. Now I suspect it was my body reacting to a life that felt profoundly wrong for me. The hormonal shifts simply made that misalignment impossible to ignore.

Instead of listening, I numbed it.

For eight years, I stayed on a path that looked impressive and productive, but felt increasingly disconnected from who I actually was. The medication didn’t cause that misalignment, but it allowed me to stay in it much longer than I otherwise might have.

When I finally went off the antidepressants, after my Nat Geo cover story was published, the numbness lifted. And what came back wasn’t instant joy or clarity.

It was pain.

The relationship I was in didn’t feel right. The place I was living didn’t feel like home. The work I was doing still didn’t quite fit. Without the buffer of numbness, I could feel all of it.

It was overwhelming. But it was also honest.

That pain eventually forced me to change things I had been too afraid to touch. It didn’t feel like a breakthrough. It felt more like burning down a life that didn’t belong to me.

And in the ashes of that life, something truer had room to grow.

✨If you liked this post, read more on my Substack.