A couple months ago I made a journal about tapering off my SSRI medication, which I have. I'm glad to be going through with it, but the withdrawals have been doing a number on me and seem to be getting worse rather than better. When I started tapering I was under the impression that withdrawal symptoms were rare as long as you taper under a doctor's supervision, but it's very recently come out that that is not the case and never has been. They'd previously assume the withdrawal symptoms were a relapse of previous symptoms, but this is very often not the case.
Apparently there's been some new research revealing that A) SSRIs simply don't work for as many people as previously thought, and B) It's fairly common to get protracted withdrawals (up to 9 months or so) if you taper for less than a year. I tapered for about a month, and the specific drug I was taking (zoloft) is on the list of the most difficult to taper off of.
I might not actually be quite past the threshold into protracted withdrawals (it's been about 7 weeks since I dropped to 0) but it's getting pretty close with no signs of improvement, so I'm not gonna get my hopes up.

For the sake of brevity I don't want to go into massive details on my symptoms, but essentially my brain isn't really processing serotonin like it should.
Being productive has been a bit difficult, because I'm constantly tired and my tolerance for frustration/difficulty has gone down to near 0. If I try too hard to get work done when I'm not feeling it, I tend to spiral. I'm generally pretty ok if I just let myself be slower than usual, but that gets harder for me to do the longer I go without improvement. Social interaction has also been exponentially more exhausting and stressful which has made me pretty lonely. I'm also tired and hungry and achy and I have to pee a lot.

I have access to plenty of support from friends and family and things are okay, but it's definitely been hurting my productivity and I have no way of knowing how much longer it will last. It could resolve itself in a few weeks, it could go the whole 9 months or longer. I really just don't know, which is what bugs me the most.
On the bright side, I've basically kicked my caffeine habit due to how sensitive my anxiety has been to it.

I guess this is sorta halfway a vent post and halfway a general update to let people know why I'm even slower than usual lately. And I think that, for the sake of my sanity, I'm going to let myself slow down even more, for the time being.
I'm still doing my best to keep up with comms and patreon stuff!