MussoLOLen is Always Right! |

Which would you rather be:

a) pretty but constantly depressed (and I’m not talking about the “I’m sad” kind of depression. I mean the sort where you spend hours either crying your eyes out for absolutely no reason at all, or staring into space because you honestly don’t care whether you live or die the next minute) and picking stupid fights with your boyfriend just because you can?

or

b) not-so-pretty, but at least you’re capable of being as happy as a mentally unstable 22 year old can get?

Believe me, this is not an easy question to answer.

I’ve been taking this birth control pill Yasmin for some time now, not so much for the “I’m too young to get knocked up” reasons as the “my skin has been ugly ever since I hit puberty and I’ve done everything to make my skin stop breaking out and for just once in my life I’d like to be pretty” reasons. My mom wasn’t too thrilled about my decision to get on the pill due to our family’s history of breast cancer. She was convinced that the estrogen in the pill would transform my breasts into little tumor farms. To appease her I had my gynecologist run some (rather expensive) tests on me and when everything checked out okay, I made my way to the drug store with my prescription of Yasmin.

Little did my mom or I realize that breast cancer is the least of the more serious side effects to get worried about.

Over the next couple of weeks, not only did my skin do a wonderful job of clearing up – I debunked the myth that the pill fattens you up like crazy. The other positive side effect I got from the pill is that it took my appetite to a place far far away and made me almost skinny like a model. For about two weeks I couldn’t bring myself to eat more than a couple of mouthfuls during every meal, no matter how delicious the food in front of me was. It even came to a point where the only reason why I bothered eating was to make the grumbling noises in my tummy stop. Every time I went out my friends, the first thing they’d tell me was that I looked prettier and skinnier than the last time they saw me. That made me feel damn good – but not good enough to make up for the huge waves of depression that kept hitting me once I started taking the pill.

It started out as me being ten times more cranky and sensitive than I usually am. Random little things that wouldn’t normally have bothered me, like getting lost in a strange city, became disasters of epic proportions – and I would deal with it all like some helpless heroine. (If you had gone with us to Cebu and Bohol, I bet you would have insisted on leaving me on the roadside. I would have done that, if I were another person.) When Ale left the Philippines I cried for hours everyday, but I wasn’t too worried since that was obviously normal reaction. However, the depression didn’t go away once we settled back into our familiar, comfy, long-distance routine. In fact, it got even worse. One minute I’d be okay and the next, I’d either be crying for no reason or picking a fight with Ale for some ridiculous reason or another. Like he’d make some offhand comment that wouldn’t have bothered me on a normal day, but because it’s been a while since I had a normal day I’d end up blowing things completely out of proportion. Really, with the way I’ve been acting up the past few weeks, I’m surprised I’m not single yet.

I can’t decide which is the worst part though – the moments where I’d be staring off into space feeling numb and empty because I pretty much lost the will to do anything (except stay in bed and watch Dexter or Grey’s Anatomy for hours), or the unexplained crying fits like the one I had last night. What frightened me about that episode is that it wasn’t just any kind of crying. It’s the way women cry when they’ve just been dumped or when someone they love has died, except I haven’t been dumped and no one I know died recently. For over an hour, my bed was practically shaking because I was sobbing so hard. I tried to calm myself down and figure out why I was freaking out so badly, but that made me cry even harder because I couldn’t come up with one good reason for that heavy, profound sadness. I wish I could attribute the mood drop to yesterday being my brother’s death anniversary, but that wasn’t even it. I had a similar crying fit just a few days ago, and it was just as unexpected and unexplainable as last night’s.

Getting depressed or crying for no reason is nothing new to me, but it’s never happened this frequently nor this intensely. I did some poking around the internet and discovered that the progestin component in Yasmin (or any other combination birth control pill) wreaks havoc on your serotonin levels by increasing a brain enzyme that inhibits the production serotonin. Serotonin is that neurotransmitter in your brain that affects your mood. If you have too little, you’re probably depressive and not much fun like I am. If you have too much, you’re probably one of those irritatingly chipper people who deserve a bullet in between their eyes. So I guess when you already have too little serotonin to begin with, and you take a pill that kind of kills what little serotonin you already have – it’s amazing I haven’t tried to kill myself yet.

Despite the wonderful things the pill has done to my physical appearance, I stopped taking Yasmin last Sunday. Being prettier and skinnier doesn’t mean anything when I can no longer appreciate the simple fact that I’m alive. Hell, these days it takes a Herculean amount of effort go out and show the world that I’ve gotten prettier and skinnier. I’m a little worried that my mood hasn’t improved yet, but I guess I’ll see how I’m like over the next couple of days.

So have any of you ever tried taking the pill or know someone who did, and had a reaction as bad as mine? How did you or that person deal with it? And do you think I should stop taking the pill, or take it with a combination of serotonin supplements? Really, I should be asking my gyno all these questions instead of consulting random Internet doctors. Unfortunately, her waiting room is always filled with pregnant women, screaming babies, and (for some reason) nuns, and I don’t really feel like surrounding myself with a lot of estrogen right now.

Last November, I quit my useless office job at iWebmasters to pursue grad school and the Dream of Becoming A Member of the Academe. Despite my sometimes self-deprecating humor, which is really just for show, I don’t have any real issues about myself and my abilities. Not this time, though. Lately I’ve been plagued by the thought that I might not smart enough to do this grad school thing.

My frustrations come from the fact that I think and view the world in what the structuralists would call “ordinary language.” (See what I did there? I’m using words that end with -ist to make it appear like I’m learning something!) I don’t use fancy terminology, I can’t quote academics because half the time I forget the connection between the idea and the name and the other half, I just plain don’t get what they’re trying to tell me. Put an academic text in front of me and my mind shuts down. If I were given the same text in the original French or German instead of the English translation I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. It’s as though these damn literary critics think on an entirely different plane of thought and use a language only academics understand, and for the life of me I can’t grasp how that language works and therefore, how their thoughts work.

Well okay, maybe I exaggerate. After crying a lot and smoking a lot, I go back to the text, read and read and read until my head is swimming in concepts I only have a vague understanding of. That’s the thing that bugs me. I only have a vague understanding of everything I read.

When I was in college, I used to roll my eyes at people who would freak out over their school work. It’s different now. This Dream thing is all I have and I feel pressured to live up to it. Unfortunately, I’m just an ordinary person with an average mind who would like to understand literature and the world and so far it’s looking like I’m not even competent enough to do that.

What I find really funny is that despite my plummeting self-esteem, I know I’m going to keep on crying and trying. Not necessarily because I want to achieve The Dream (at this point, I’m just keeping that on the distant horizon so I can fool myself into thinking that my life has some sort of purpose and direction) but because the only other alternative is to go back to being an office monkey, and I would rather kill myself than be chained to a cubicle again. That, and I have way too much pride to allow myself to get defeated by academic essays written by dead guys.

So yeah, I guess I’m going to cry some more then go back to studying. Maybe this time I’ll be able to make sense of whatever I’m reading.

I got invited to this beach trip two weekends from now by friends who party like Cory Kennedy and I’m damn excited since it’s been months since I last went out of town. At the same time I’m worried about being the fattest girl in the group by default because I eat real food for breakfast instead of taking a cocktail of pills, and spend my evenings sleeping instead of partying hardcore. This upcoming beach trip, compounded with the pressure to be cool and my plunging self-esteem, made me decide to become skinny like a scenester in two weeks. Unfortunately for me, I discovered over the weekend that I’m not cool enough to do drugs.

During the party I held at my house on Saturday, my friend Sammi and I had a conversation about mixing marijuana and booze. Since girls with pink mohawks make me want to impress them with my drug knowledge, I proudly proclaimed that you’re supposed to do pot after drinking. Apparently, it’s the other way around. Sammi laughed at me while I hung my head in shame, and we came to the conclusion that I’m not cool enough to do drugs. As if to rub salt into my wounded ego, Sammi made me install the nickname application on my Facebook page, where she gave me the nickname Lauren “Not Cool Enough” Dado. Yeah.

See her? What a fat fat fattie.

I’m so fixated on dropping ten pounds that instead of working, I’ve been spending the entire morning thinking of ways to be cokehead skinny without actually developing a coke habit. Here are the ideas that I’ve come up with so far:

Ditch your skinny friends. Hanging out with a bunch of fatties makes you the skinniest person in the group by default. Unfortunately I don’t have this option for the beach trip, so I’ll have to resort to other methods.

Go to the gym. Ideally I should be working out around three times a week, but I’m usually too tired after work to hit the gym. Well, that’s going to change now! I solemnly swear to go to the gym after work maybe four times a week until the beach, no matter how fucking exhausted I am.

Starvation. This idea was so obvious, it took me a while to realize this. During my morning cigarette break, my coworker was telling me about how he dropped 75 pounds in college by eating nothing but soup. I have no idea how much I weigh right now but my estimate is that I must be about a hundred pounds. If I follow my coworker’s strict diet regimen, I’ll weigh 25 pounds by the time I hit the beach. I think that’s just about right.

What works for Jeffree Star will work for me too!

Throw up after every meal. I hear that this is supposed to be some eating disorder called “bulimia” but if it works for models, it might just work for me too! Then again, I can’t force myself to vomit to save my life. The idea of sticking a finger down my throat is revolting, plus it’s a waste of perfectly good food. Let’s cross this item off the list and move on to the next one.

Wear loose clothing. Really loose tops automatically make me look ten pounds skinnier than I really am, but again I don’t have this option for the beach. Unless I do a fashion faux pas and go swimming in the ocean wearing a big t-shirt instead of a bikini. Which is not exactly an option since I’m going to be with very hip people, and I’m already uncool enough as it is.

If you can’t be cokehead skinny, you could just look like a cokehead, period. All you need is smeared red lipstick, lots of black liquid eyeliner, and mad Photoshop skillz. Perfect.

Pseudo-cokehead much?