My antidepressants work better than yours

This title is a joke… kind of… mostly

I went on antidepressants during a rough patch in high school. Four years later and I’m like, damn, ya, that shit really works. And while of course every day for the past four years I take the pill and it releases the happy chemicals in my brain (idk how it really works and I don’t like to think about it too much)(I am a psychology major) (I should probably know), it actually took much more than that for me to become the optimistic glass half full kind of person I am now.

I would say I am an overall positive and happy person, and I think my family and friends would agree. In any developmental psychology class, you will learn that a baby’s temperament is usually one of the few things that remains constant throughout their life. I like the idea that we have an innate baseline reaction to the world from the day we’re born. My parents talk about me as a baby being a chill, easy, sweet, youngest-of-three-sisters, just-happy-to-be-along-for-the-ride kind of girl. And while I would agree that, for the most part, that holds true in regard to my current nature, I have not always been this way.

As aforementioned, I started taking antidepressants in high school, because, let’s get real, shit gets hard! However, while the molecules or whatever the fuck were in there working their magic to make me physiologically happier by producing more serotonin, I didn’t feel like they made me an overall happier person until much later. Which leads me back to the title. Obviously, my 50 mg of Prozac doesn’t work better than anyone else’s 50 mg of Prozac. But, this shift, where I began to think “my antidepressants work better than yours” came gradually as I matured and continued developing my character and emotional intelligence.

I don’t know how to write this without feeling like an idiot/loser but, once I realized that you are in as much control of your happiness as you choose to be, I began to feel like the positive and happy person I am at my core and have been since the day I was born. You might be rolling your eyes and wishing technology hadn’t gone so far as to give every sheltered twenty-something a platform to share their understanding of life’s fundamental truths, but I digress. (I hope you aren’t though. You probably are now because I just said it. Fuck. I’m my own worst enemy. At least I’m self-aware.)

Making the active decision to be happy (and yes, it is a decision) has changed how I approach almost every facet of my life. I certainly still have days where I wake up on the wrong side of the bed and feel like I hate everyone and everything. But, putting on those rose-colored glasses and choosing the endless opportunities of a happy life has done more for me than my antidepressants ever have. They still work better than yours though btw.