One Year on SSRIs: What Surviving the Hardest Year of My Life Taught Me

A year ago, I fell out of my own life. That’s the only way I can describe it. It wasn’t a burnout or a panic attack, it was something deeper, like my mind and body had stopped

recognizing each other. One moment I was walking to the shopping center with my mom, and the next, my world tilted. The air felt too heavy to breathe, the lights too bright, and my own reflection too foreign. I remember feeling my heart slam against my ribs and looking down at my hands like they belonged to someone else. It was the first time I felt myself disappear and it wouldn’t be the last.

That was the beginning of what I now call “the collapse.” My nervous system shut down after years of holding too much. It wasn’t sudden; it was years in the making too many traumas, too much adrenaline, too little safety. When it finally broke, it broke quietly, like a bridge that couldn’t carry its weight anymore. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t watch movies, listen to music, or even read. Every sound felt like an attack. Every thought spun into panic. My body burned from the inside out, my muscles twitched constantly, and my chest felt like someone was pressing a stone into it.

The worst part wasn’t the fear. It was the nothingness. I looked at the people I loved and felt absolutely nothing. No connection, no affection, just static. I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t feel joy, and I couldn’t even remember what “normal” felt like. I used to think emotional numbness meant calm now I know it’s the absence of life.

I started treatment. I began my SSRI journey, hoping something would finally quiet the chaos. Instead, the first months were hell. People don’t talk enough about what it’s like when your brain starts to rewire itself after trauma. It’s not peace; it’s war. Every system inside you fights to find balance while your body keeps screaming that something is wrong. I would wake up drenched in adrenaline, heart racing, mind shaking, wondering if this was what dying felt like.

The first three months were survival, nothing else. I barely slept. When I did, it was only for an hour or two before my body jolted awake, flooded with dread. My appetite vanished; even water made me nauseous. The constant buzzing under my skin felt like electricity. My chest burned every night, my vision blurred, my head felt full of fog, and there was this deep, wordless terror that something inside me had gone permanently wrong.

Doctors said it was anxiety. But it wasn’t that simple. It felt like my entire nervous system had short-circuited. The emotional pain was worse than anything physical, being alive but unable to feel alive. I stopped recognizing my reflection. I stopped recognizing my own thoughts. I stopped trusting my body. Everything that once made sense dissolved into fragments.

It’s strange how quickly life can shrink. I used to dream about traveling, working, creating, and being free. Then, suddenly, my only goal was to survive the next five minutes without collapsing. The things that once felt simple grocery stores, lights, people, sounds, became unbearable. Every day was a battle between my will to live and my body’s refusal to believe it was safe.

By month four, the terror softened into exhaustion. I was still detached, but I could walk short distances again, breathe without counting, and hold conversations. I laughed sometimes, but it didn’t feel real, like my body remembered how to do it, even if my heart didn’t. That’s when I learned that healing doesn’t arrive with fireworks. It creeps in quietly, disguised as stability. You stop spiraling, but you’re not yet back. You’re living half a life, watching yourself move through the world while wondering when you’ll finally step inside it again.

People told me I looked better. That I seemed calmer. I smiled and nodded, because it was easier than explaining that “better” didn’t mean okay. It meant less panic, not peace. It meant I could eat, but food still tasted like cardboard. It meant I could go outside, but everything still felt two seconds delayed, like reality hadn’t fully loaded. I was existing, not living, and that’s where I stayed for months.

Healing, I realized, is mostly waiting. Waiting for your brain to catch up to your body. Waiting for your emotions to return without flooding you. Waiting for the world to feel solid again. It’s not a linear climb, it’s a long, uneven crawl through fog.

The Slow Re-Entry

Healing didn’t arrive with a sunrise. It came disguised as small things, the first deep sleep in months, the first dream that felt like a story instead of static, the first morning I woke up and didn’t feel dread in my stomach. That’s how recovery starts: quietly, without ceremony. Your body begins to trust life again before your mind does.

Sleep became my first sign of peace. I remember the first time I slept through the night and dreamed vividly. I woke up with tears in my eyes, because it meant my brain was finally resting enough to imagine again. For months, I’d been living in pure alertness, no dreams, no rest, just survival. The dreams weren’t always pleasant. Sometimes they were intense, chaotic, full of faces and memories I thought I’d lost. But even then, I was grateful for them. They meant I was coming back online.

After that, little sparks of presence began to appear. The sound of birds outside didn’t make me tense. My cats lying beside me started to feel like comfort instead of weight. I’d catch sunlight through the window and feel a tiny pull in my chest, like a whisper of connection. That’s when I knew something in me was thawing.

People assume that when you start to feel again, it’s all joy and relief. It’s not. It hurts. When numbness fades, every emotion rushes back like a flood, and it doesn’t discriminate. I cried for weeks. Cried from sadness, from anger, from memory, from no reason at all. I cried because I could finally feel myself again and it burned.

I thought feeling again would mean peace, but it felt more like exposure. My heart had been locked away for so long that when it reopened, everything stung. Every song, every scent, every silence carried weight. It was overwhelming, but also sacred. After so long without feeling, pain itself was proof of life.

Learning to Live in the Middle

Around month seven or eight, I reached a strange place not in collapse anymore, but not fully grounded either. My days had shape again. I could cook, clean, write, walk, and laugh without dissociating. I started recognizing the rhythm of normal life, but it still felt like I was borrowing it.

This is the part no one explains: healing doesn’t mean you go back to who you were. That person was built on survival, and she doesn’t exist anymore. You build a new self from fragments one that trusts slower, feels deeper, and moves differently. There’s grief in that. You miss the old version of you, even if she was living in fight-or-flight. She was familiar. This new one is quieter, uncertain, softer, but she’s real.

I used to chase progress like a finish line. I’d count the weeks, the pills, the milestones. I thought healing would look like a moment like I’d wake up one day and just be back. But what I learned is that there is no “back.” There’s only forward. And forward doesn’t mean freedom from pain. It means being able to hold pain without collapsing under it.

I started noticing how much calmer I’d become. Not fake calm, but real nervous system calm. I could stand in grocery store lines without shaking. I could take the train alone. I could walk through the city and not feel like I was going to faint. These things might seem small, but they were everything.

Still, the strange part is that once the fear faded, grief replaced it. I thought fear was the enemy, but numbness had been the real thief. When the emotions came back, I realized how much I had lost, time, memory, connection. I could finally walk through the world again, but I wasn’t sure where I belonged in it.

The Pain of Coming Back Online

There’s a strange ache that comes when your body stops protecting you. For months, I wanted to feel something anything. But when my emotions returned, it felt like being hit by everything at once. I started crying more than I ever had in my life. The tears weren’t sadness exactly; they were release.

I’d walk down a street and suddenly cry because a song from my childhood was playing. I’d smell food and remember home and break down. My dreams became intense, full of faces and emotions that had been locked away. My brain was reconnecting pathways that had gone dark, and it was painful but beautiful.

Today, one year in, I can move through the world without panic. I can be in a store, talk to people, exist in public spaces without my heart trying to escape my chest. I can sit still without the urge to flee. That kind of safety used to feel impossible.

But here’s the truth, the world still hurts. It’s not fear anymore; it’s sensitivity. I walk through life without collapse now, but everything hits me deeper. Sometimes, when I see beauty or feel warmth, it triggers tears. Other times, it’s the opposite, grief for everything I missed while I was gone. I used to think I wanted to “go back to normal.” Now I understand there’s no normal left. There’s only integration, learning to live as someone who has seen both life and its absence.

What This Year Taught Me

By the time I reached the one-year mark, I realized something uncomfortable: healing didn’t make me fearless. It just made me honest. There’s this idea that you go through trauma, take your meds, do your therapy, and come out reborn, a calmer, wiser version of yourself. The truth is less cinematic. Healing taught me how to live with fear without letting it take the wheel. It taught me that peace isn’t something that lands one morning with sunlight and closure. It’s something you build out of repetition, boredom, and the small, quiet choices you make when no one’s watching.

For months, I waited for a sign that I’d crossed over, that “click” moment where I’d suddenly feel like myself again. But there was no grand return, no light flooding in. What happened instead was slower and stranger. My body began healing first. My hands stopped shaking before my mind did. My heart steadied while my thoughts were still tangled. It’s disorienting, to feel physically better but mentally far away. But that’s what recovery is: your body goes first, your mind follows when it’s ready.

Sleep became the language of my healing. It’s funny, because before all this, I took sleep for granted, just something that happened at night. Now it feels sacred. Each dream feels like my brain filing away fragments of a story it once couldn’t handle. Some dreams are tender me walking through my old neighborhood, hearing the language of my childhood, feeling that familiar warmth in the air. Others are chaotic and full of ghosts from the collapse, all the unfinished conversations, all the versions of me I had to leave behind. But either way, it means my system is processing again. That’s what I’ve come to love about dreaming, it’s proof that my brain is remembering how to live.

I wake up calmer these days. The dread that used to sit in my chest like a weight isn’t the first thing I feel anymore. I make breakfast. I step outside. I see light without scanning for danger. I function. But I won’t romanticize it, part of me still feels half-here, like I’ve returned to life but not fully landed in it. My body trusts again. My sleep is deep. My laughter is real.

Yet my mind still floats somewhere in between, not lost, just not fully grounded. It’s as if my roots, the sense of home and familiarity that used to anchor me, are still finding their way back through the soil.

There’s a strange grief that lives in that in-between, grieving the months I was gone, grieving the life that kept moving while I couldn’t. I grieve the girl who thought she’d never come back, and sometimes, I grieve the one who did. Because she’s different. Softer. Quieter. Slower. But that’s the cost of survival, you don’t come back untouched. You return gentler, but sharper in what you allow. You learn what peace actually means: it’s not happiness or stillness or some romantic self-love ideal. Peace is being able to exist without your nervous system mistaking it for danger.

And even now, a year in, peace still feels fragile. Some days I can hold it in my hands; other days it slips away and I have to find it again. I still get waves of sadness, flashes of disconnection, moments where I feel like a ghost in my own story. But the difference now is that I don’t panic when it happens. I know it will pass. That’s what healing has given me not a cure, but a sense of rhythm.

When I look back on this year, I see a pattern I couldn’t see while I was inside it. Every “nothing’s happening” day was actually healing happening quietly. Every week of exhaustion was my system trying to regulate. Every tear, every rage, every numb spell, all part of the same long rewiring. I used to think progress meant joy, but now I see it’s often just less suffering. And less suffering is still a miracle.

I’ve also learned to stop rushing the process. There’s no going back to the person I was before — she was made of survival, and survival has an expiration date. She got me through the storm, but she can’t live here anymore. I thank her for every moment she held on when I wanted to give up, but I don’t want to resurrect her. I want to build someone new. Someone who eats slowly, rests deeply, and doesn’t measure her worth by how much she can endure.

It’s been one year. I sleep well. I dream vividly. I feel emotions again, even if they hurt. I still miss my old sense of self, my city, my family, my home. I still crave that deep-rooted familiarity, the feeling of belonging that I lost when everything collapsed. But maybe this is what rebirth actually looks like: not arriving somewhere new, but continuing to exist while the ground slowly reforms beneath you.

I don’t think healing ever truly “ends.” I think we just get better at carrying it. The pain dulls, the memories lose their sting, the fear stops running the show. And one day, you wake up and realize the worst thing that ever happened to you has become a story you can tell without shaking. You realize that even if your mind isn’t fully back, your life is, and that’s enough.

So here I am, one year later. I’m still healing. Still rebuilding. Still finding pieces of myself in new places. But I’m here. I sleep. I dream. I cry. I laugh. I love. I live. And that’s the lesson this year gave me: surviving isn’t the opposite of living. Sometimes it’s the bridge to it.

Medical Disclaimer

This story describes a personal, subjective experience with trauma recovery and prescribed treatment. It is not medical advice and should not replace professional evaluation or guidance. If you are struggling with your mental health or considering any change in medication, please consult a qualified healthcare provider.

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