I type these words on an IBM Model M, a behemoth keyboard with a solid steel bottom plate and and spring-loaded keys. It weighs heavier than five iPads. I prefer this keyboard because my hands shake as I type; the very loud clicks it makes with each keystroke confirms I’ve hit a button.

It has kept my hands steady for years, even when my mind was not.

What kept my mind steady, for the past 13 years at least, is the antidepressant Celexa, which I had been taking for a generalized, often debilitating anxiety. Over the summer, I decided it was time to stop, curious to see what life, and writing, would be like.

“A poet confessing to mental illness is like a weight lifter admitting to muscles,” British poet Roddy Lumsden writes. Still we confess: over the 12 years I lived in New York City, my fellow poets and I talked so openly about psychiatrists and medications that I fell under the impression that it was the norm to do so. There is the notion that mental illness in general, and anxiety in particular, is the poet’s occupational hazard. One explanation is that we don’t enjoy any therapeutic benefits from telling stories; that, to write a poem, a good poem anyway, requires holistic, no-holds-barred approach to language and, by extension, oneself. That takes its toll. For myself, I attribute a large part of my anxiety to a mix of ambition and living in a city where a great poet seemed always around the corner.

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes that the modern poet “stands always on the farther edge of solipsism, having just emerged from it.” On meds with my retro keyboard, I could escape myself and write for as long as I wanted. Head and hands steady, poems came out two, three at a time. It seemed like too good of a thing to mess it up.

Thirteen years later, however, I reached a point where life, and writing, had settled down. I was less anxious. I published four books, edited another. I got a teaching job, was seeing a great therapist. It seemed time to stop. I did all this all gradually over the summer, when I was not teaching undergraduates how to avoid comma splices: my prescribed daily dosage was 30 milligrams, down to one 20mg capsule and one-half of another, 20mg for a month, 10mg the next month.

Then I was off my meds. That was eight months ago.

The online Urban Dictionary defines the phrase “off your meds” as “Crazy,” “Exhibiting bizarre behavior,” and “Making merit-less arguments or defending ridiculous positions.”

Have I exhibited bizarre behavior? Possibly. Made merit-less arguments or defended the ridiculous? Yes.

Here’s the thing: I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t aspire to be bizarre or ridiculous. For my essay collection, How to Be Inappropriate, I engaged in extreme tanning, took male enhancement pills, and sung the praises of mooning and passing gas in English language poetry. All of this was written while I was on my meds. How would I tell the difference if I was bizarre in the first place?

The hardest part of going off the meds was admitting I might be well without them.

The first difference, as many will tell you, are the “brain zaps.” Part of withdrawal symptoms drug companies call “antidepressant discontinuation syndrome,” brain zaps are best described as a cross of a migraine and getting hit on the head with a shovel.

Eight months later, the brain zaps had gone away, and my hands shake only when I thought of getting one. Writing poems, my hands pound just as heavily on the keyboard, the anxiety floats in and out as before.

It takes a greater toll on women: in a study, James C. Kaufman dubbed the “Sylvia Plath effect,” which found female poets were more likely to suffer from mental illness than female fiction writers or male writers of any type. Regardless of sex, stories of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg’s stays in mental hospitals or the suicides of Plath and Anne Sexton stay on the tips of our tongues assured us we are not alone; it emboldens our muses, however neurotic, and gives us street cred.

There comes a time when the ex-New Yorker realizes the world isn’t the set of an early Woody Allen film, where mentions of therapists and anti-depressants occur as often as literary gossip. Maybe this is why Marni Kotak’s “durational performance” work from last summer, “Mad Meds,” seemed so potent. Kotak confined herself to a small gallery and sat in a hospital bed as she went off her own meds — Wellbutrin, Abilify and Klonopin — which she took for post-partum depression. In my non-New York poet life, reactions to talking about my therapist or medications ranged from muted silence to looks reserved for a circus clowns or durational performance artists.

“If you really believe in mental illness,” one asked me, point-blank, “then why would you stop taking medicine to treat it?”

“Life, ten years ago,” F. Scott Fitzgerald writes, “was largely a personal matter.” He was writing about his “crack-up.” What he had before him was “not the dish he had ordered for his forties.”

I hit up my old poet friends on social media to talk about S.S.R.I.’s and their relation to writing. Many discontinued medication out of frustration that their edge has been blunted or lost touch with their duende, the idea of heightened awareness popularized by the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Others thought I was, well, crazy for going off my meds.

“If you really believe in mental illness,” one asked me, point-blank, “then why would you stop taking medicine to treat it?”

Many will disagree, but I think it’s entirely possible that some poets’ regard talk of mental health as part of their own persona portfolio, alongside journal credits and a dark presence onstage. Don’t get me wrong: there’s mental illness and then there’s mental illness. I’m talking largely about Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. In his book Pharmageddon, David Healy, professor of psychiatry at Cardiff University, writes that although “the idea that there is an imbalance of serotonin in depression is completely mythical,” it does provide for the pharmaceutical companies a potent image, like bacteria in Petri dishes shrinking from antibiotics.

Combined with promotional literature that links creativity to major mental illnesses (complete with images of Plath and Vincent Van Gogh in promotional brochures), and you have a potent myth.

The hardest part of going off the meds was admitting I might be well without them. I continue to edit my memoir, write the odd poem and lesson plan, waiting for my usual anxieties to kick in. I’ve had brain zaps. I continue to monitor progress and won’t rule out going back on the meds if things get rough.

As Healy writes regarding S.S.R.I.’s, “myths always have the last word.”