Mirror Work: Antidepressants, Low Libido, and the Long Way Back to Pleasure
Can you not read this one, mom?
Mirror Work are reflections or prompts on what the mirror taught me this week — confidence, shame, surprise, or just neutrality. The mirror scares the shit out of me. So think of it as character building and seeing myself without the performance.
Antidepressants hijacked my sex drive.
I can’t point to a definitive test result and say this was the cause, but the timeline adds up. If you’ve been here for a while, you know I’ve been vocal about the benefits of antidepressants, and truly, they are lifesaving. But, for roughly 15 years, my sex drive has been negatively impacted.
I was put on Prozac at nine and took it inconsistently until I was 19. I felt ashamed that I needed something to help me “feel better.” In college, after my first semester as a freshman, my roommate decided we were no longer friends, and therefore spent the rest of the year living in silence. I sank into a deep depression and finally began taking my Prozac every day. That was when I realized just how impactful and necessary it was. What I didn’t realize was that something else was slowly changing, too.
After a few years of taking my Prozac daily, my sex drive began to decline. I chalked it up to hating my body, wanting to be thinner and, because of that, not allowing myself to feel sexual or desirable. At one point, I even blamed laziness. After stressful days at work, I couldn’t pull myself away from the TV.
There was truth in all of that, but there was also something I didn’t fully understand at the time: how a medication that had benefited me so profoundly could also take away something meant to be pleasurable, something fundamental to human nature.
The hit my libido took became a lesson in patience and in trial and error. Over the years, I worked with two different couples therapists, spaced several years apart, and experimented with switching medications, both birth control and antidepressants. Throughout it all, there was no quick fix, no overnight success.
My sex drive is still a work in progress, and there have been times when I’ve felt undeserving of it because of my complicated relationship with my body. One of the most important steps in reclaiming it has been learning to like myself—my body, specifically. I feel some guilt admitting that, because I know I deserve pleasure regardless of appearance. Yet, for me to fully experience that pleasure, I first need to feel like myself.
My desire to have sex and to initiate it has changed dramatically over the past year. So much so that I never imagined I’d be writing about it. I’ve learned a great deal along the way, and I know there’s still more to learn. Even so, I’ve often felt unable to fully relate to the narratives around “getting your sex drive back.” It feels like a Cosmo article waiting to happen, yet rarely one that speaks sincerely to the experience of a woman in her late thirties. In the hope that someone else might find relief and recognition in my experience, here are a few of the things that have helped me.
Couples Therapy: Couples therapy can be tricky, largely because it’s often seen as a sign that something is wrong. And while we did come in with a specific need—better tools to communicate around my lack of sex drive—it has since become a form of maintenance we didn’t realize we needed. Having a third person in the room can feel surprisingly liberating. She’s helped give us the language to express what we want and need, so Ben understands me and I understand him.
A Vibrator: It took me a long time to buy a vibrator. Remember when I said I didn’t feel like I deserved pleasure? That extended here, too. I wasn’t comfortable using one. As someone with an eating disorder, control has always felt necessary, and a vibrator felt like a surrender of that control. Giving myself pleasure in this way felt strange, almost wrong. I was wrong. Very wrong. Get a vibrator. I highly recommend the Maude Vibe. You’re welcome.
Routine: This ties back to my relationship with control, but having a routine, before or even after sex, is really important to me. I know routines don’t leave much room for spontaneity, but as someone who has only recently found her way back to herself, I trust that spontaneity will come. For now, routine matters. Working out, checking something off my to-do list, or simply feeling productive helps me get in the mood. I may sound like a control freak, but doing things that make me feel accomplished has been a powerful way to set myself up for success.
I don’t know if my sex drive will ever feel effortless. I don’t know if there’s a final version of this story where everything is resolved and uncomplicated. But it’s present now, in a way it hasn’t been in years. And after such a long absence, that feels significant.
Collected Distractions
A brain dump of what’s holding my attention (and worth yours).
In Praise of Being a ‘Just a Girl’: 25 Reasons I’m Not Mad About It
I’m a big fan of all things Elin Strong Bang Voyage, but a line from her latest newsletter about her daughter truly made me feel seen: “I could listen to her talk all day like I’m tuning into a never-ending, ad-free podcast hosted by my favorite person… and I do.” I feel the exact same way about my son. It’s almost indescribable how incredible he is and that I get to witness every little thing he does. The way Elin captured this feeling about her toddler was such an aha moment for me, something I’ve never been able to put into words until now.
Can Ozempic ‘Heal’ ADHD and Alcoholism? The Alt-Wellness Community Think So
I’m not a doctor or chemist, but I do trust science. I know GLP-1s are genuinely life-changing and even life-saving for many people. That said, the current conversation around microdosing them for ADHD feels a lot like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. I keep coming back to this line from the Dazed article: “Whether Ozempic can really ‘heal’ beyond its regulated purpose is almost beside the point. For the time being, its experimental use should be marked as exactly that: experimental.” Sure, my ADHD brain would love anything that helps me focus and be more present. But until psychiatrists—not creators—confirm that GLP-1s can actually support attention and focus, I’ll stick with what’s evidence-based and familiar.
The Return of Rachel Zoe to Bravo
We need more discourse around Rachel Zoe returning to our TV screens. She’s the ultimate reference for Millennial women who were fashion-obsessed and she taught us all what a stylist actually does. She helped cement the stylist as a celebrity and, at one point, dressed Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Mischa Barton, all the women who made me want to live in Roberto Cavalli and chunky statement necklaces in the early aughts. She’s quite literally a time capsule of Y2K fashion, and I love it. I can’t wait for her story to progress on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Therapeutic Add-Ons
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Ziip: Highly recommend this and this.
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YOU DID IT! You wrote about your sex life and survived!! Sending this to your mom now.
I'm a firm believer in scheduling! if it's in the calendar, it's happening!