What My Depressive Episode On Lamotrigine Feels Like

Before Lamotrigine, my depressive episodes were all-consuming. I notably felt absolute despair at the absence of God, the feeling that I was abandoned and forgotten. I described it as:

I am, without a doubt, difficult to love.

Supposedly God loves people despite their flaws.

But why is His love so achingly silent and empty?

Is it not cruel to create this world and then leave them in silence?

I feel like an abandoned dog, sitting at the same spot every day waiting for the one who loves me to return.

During episodes, that feeling of abandonment became etched into my identity and how I saw God.

Of course, I had severe functional impairment. Inability to work, only sleeping and sometimes finding the energy to read Simone Weil. In these moments, it only felt like I could read and write.

Before Lamotrigine, I could not function during episodes, and who I fundamentally am became attached to my feelings of abandonment, unrootedness, and despair.

This is my first depressive episode while on Lamotrigine, so I thought it would be fun to describe how things feel in my body and world.

If in previous depressive episodes I felt negative emotions too intensely, I now only feel those emotions very subtly, like hearing quiet whispers down a long and dark hallway.

Instead, I find myself analyzing despair and the things that trouble me. Instead of feeling God's abandonment, I now only feel an indifferent universe where I am just a variable in an equation that will inevitably be reduced to the ultimate sum, the heat death.

While showering the other day, I noticed my impulse was to mourn God's abandonment. But I immediately self-corrected by saying, "How could God abandon me if he left behind geometry?"

My despair became muted and analytical rather than blaring and emotional.

Of course, my sleep cycle is destroyed. I sleep from 7 AM to 3 PM, which is no doubt contributing greatly to my struggle.

My executive function is sharply worse than when I was stable just a week ago, so things remain a bit of a mess. But I have some slight energy to maintain my desk, which before Lamotrigine I did not.

I adore God in the sense that I adore an idyllic world. There is nothing I wish for more than me being an assured believer in God, but if God is love then he can only exist in this world as absence. I write primarily from a Christian mysticism lens, heavily influenced by Simone Weil. But during this depressive episode and its analytical tendencies, I suddenly have no such desire to adore God or to continue writing in that lens. This is worrying because this has been my lifeline for the past 7 months of struggle.

In this despair, all I feel is God's inability to exist under the necessity of the universe. I have been reading deeply on cosmology and physics lately, and it has been both incredible and despairing. Incredible in the way that discovering the structure of reality is, despairing in the way that your inevitable reduction from variable into sum inspires awe and horror.

I wrote in my college ethics class that the problem with arguing against theological frameworks is that they operate with a specific premise: usually their god is all-knowing, all-being, all-love, everywhere-but-nowhere. What human can argue with that?

I do not have much energy to read or write during this episode, which is rare and unusual. I still write, of course, because I must. But the only energy I've had lately is the study of algebra and geometry using Gelfand's books. Algebraic math feels fake, so I constantly remind myself that this is "God's grammar." Geometry is much more beautiful than algebra. I need to remind myself that form is imposed, but whatever form we picked for math is just exposing the structures of reality.

I miss my old despair. At least I felt oddly rooted to this world by feeling God's abandonment; now I only faintly feel it.

May this struggle have some value to this short life of mine.

The love between God and God, which in itself is God, is this bond of double virtue: the bond that unites two beings so closely that they are no longer distinguishable and really form a single unity and the bond that stretches across distance and triumphs over infinite separation. The unity of God, wherein all plurality disappears, and the abandonment, wherein Christ believes he is left while never ceasing to love his Father perfectly, these are two forms expressing the divine virtue of the same Love, the Love that is God himself.