Era: Séroplex Recovery, September 2020
The week of September 13 to 23, 2020 is the most densely documented recovery in Steven’s journals. He wrote almost every day, sometimes twice, tracking the Séroplex side effects, the withdrawal from cigarettes and cannabis, and the crawl back toward function.
Day-by-day character
He wrote September 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, and 23, sometimes twice in a day, from insomnia and from the 1am side effects of beginning Séroplex.
The entries have a particular texture. They are self-monitoring, self-encouraging, and wry. He reports nausea, tremors, anxiety, and insomnia. He notes failing to resist weed despite his own warnings (“malgré mes self-warnings, j’ai subi à la tentation trop déjà trop de fois”). He catches himself in the bathroom mirror of his self-critique and pivots: “Non, je vais reformuler: je suis en contrôle de toutes les actions que j’entreprends.”
He quit cigarettes the same Sunday he started Séroplex. “Autant faire une bonne grosse table rase.” Nicotine withdrawals and SSRI side effects layered over each other for the first ten days.
Hashtags appear sardonically: “#self-help likes4likes wellness depression motivation-quotes.”
He also, in the September 20 entry, considers entering politics: “Je réfléchis à entrer en politique et devenir député européen. That’d be great.” The entry immediately pivots back to his Swift projects. The ambition reads as excess energy with nowhere to go. The flamme was returning, and it had more volume than his current circumstances could hold.
What returned
By September 23, ten days in, he reports that the Séroplex was beginning to work. The central indicator was not symptom relief but the return of “ma flamme”:
“l’un des piliers cœur de ma vie est en train de se reconstruire: ma flamme. Je me lève le matin en ayant envie de faire et de vivre cette journée à son plein potentiel.”
This is one of his most important self-concepts: la flamme. It is not motivation in the motivational-poster sense. It is the intrinsic orientation toward life, toward doing things, toward wanting to be here. Its absence is depression. Its presence is the precondition for everything else.
Séroplex context and discontinuation
He received the prescription in an emergency context from a doctor he had just met, not a psychiatrist. He had a friend who was a doctor renew it a few times. He eventually reduced and stopped the Séroplex because he “felt really well, very happy, lots of daily pleasure” in the Arthur relationship, and he suspected 3-MMC, which is serotonergic, might interact poorly with the SSRI. This was his own judgment, not medical advice. He never formally entered psychiatric follow-up.
What this period produced
The recovery was real. He joined the Covid Tracker team, worked on iOS projects, and began applying for jobs. Three weeks after starting Séroplex, he went to his first after-party, where he met Arthur.