First off, the part where you said “what I have been feeling is what I know how to feel” landed for me. That’s a hard sentence to write, and going to the doctor at all after carrying something that long is the actual work. Whatever the SSRI does or doesn’t do, you already did the difficult bit. I’m not on Lexapro and I can’t speak to it directly, so take this as a confound to check rather than a contradiction. I’m a type 2 diabetic, and back when my A1C was 9.1 my list looked almost identical to yours: emotional numbness, no motivation, brain fog, couldn’t hold a thought for more than a minute, irritable over nothing. I was sure it was depression. Some of it probably was. But a chunk of it was my blood sugar living in the high 200s and dragging everything else down with it. Here’s the comparison that took me eighteen months of tracking to see, because the two feel identical from the inside but don’t read the same on data: - Mood-driven fatigue tends to sit flat all day. Heavy on waking, heavy at night, not especially tied to meals.
- Dysglycemic fatigue clusters. For me it spiked an hour or two after a high-carb meal, then a crash, then a fog that lifted if I walked. Once I was wearing a CGM I could watch the curve do it in real time. A flat-line glucose day and a roller-coaster day produced two different versions of “me.” The honest part: I still can’t fully separate the two even now. A bad sleep night raises my fasting glucose AND my mood tanks, and there’s no device that tells me which one caused the brain fog that morning. So I’m not claiming your symptoms are metabolic. I’m saying they’re confoundable, and one is cheap to rule out. If you haven’t had bloods done recently, it’s worth asking your GP for an HbA1c and a basic metabolic panel alongside starting the Lexapro. Not instead of. Alongside. If it comes back clean, you’ve lost nothing and you know the SSRI is aimed at the right target. One practical thing that helped me in the early weeks: I logged a daily mood and energy score against what I ate and how I slept. CareClinic’s daily check-in took under a minute and the pattern it built over a couple of months told me more than any single day ever did. Wishing you gentler days ahead.