As you'll have seen from the previous post, I've more or less shut up shop here at Intermittently Rational. Fortunately (and completely unexpectedly), the mental health stuff isn't such a day to day problem for me anymore and as a result I have a significantly reduced urge to blog primarily about it - it no longer fits. However, I like having a blog, so I decided to set up a new one.
Now, more than a month later, I've finally actually done it! Not much there yet, but there will be . . .
If you've been reading Intermittently Rational and would like to see my new blog, send me an email and I'll send you the address. It would, of course, be simpler to just put a link in this post but I want to keep the two blogs separate and putting up a link to the new one would, well, link them.
Cheers!
Showing posts with label sanity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sanity. Show all posts
19 November 2010
06 January 2010
Disorganised New Year
It's always a disorganised new year here at my house, I've realised. I enjoy putting off things that I don't want to do and the endless bank holidaying when nothing is open for days on end is an ideal time to do so. It never fails to catch up with me and send me into a tizzy but I have this year officially declared said tizzy to be a holiday tradition, which means it is now my duty to be display as appalling a lack of organisation as I can in the first full week of postal delivery in the new year. I am, so far, doing a bang up job of keeping the tradition.
I'm in a terrible mood at the moment but for once I'm fairly sure that it's not due to mental health conditions that are beyond my control. Yes, similar symptoms but in its totality it feels different. This is absolutely not a scientific distinction. It is an instinct that may be wrong. However, I can see actual reasons and circumstances that I know are making me unhappy and may of which I can actually do something about. I don't have enough energy to do anything just at the moment but happily some of these circumstances will come to a natural end with the start of term. I don't have to do anything to bring about the start of term, just get myself through the next few days. I can do that.
So this is my new year's first project: to try to sift out how and whether I can successfully distinguish between a bad mood due to circumstances and a depressed mood due to bipolar disorder and wherein the difference lies. I'm going to get back to Foucault, too, I promise.
Happy New Year!
I'm in a terrible mood at the moment but for once I'm fairly sure that it's not due to mental health conditions that are beyond my control. Yes, similar symptoms but in its totality it feels different. This is absolutely not a scientific distinction. It is an instinct that may be wrong. However, I can see actual reasons and circumstances that I know are making me unhappy and may of which I can actually do something about. I don't have enough energy to do anything just at the moment but happily some of these circumstances will come to a natural end with the start of term. I don't have to do anything to bring about the start of term, just get myself through the next few days. I can do that.
So this is my new year's first project: to try to sift out how and whether I can successfully distinguish between a bad mood due to circumstances and a depressed mood due to bipolar disorder and wherein the difference lies. I'm going to get back to Foucault, too, I promise.
Happy New Year!
16 November 2009
Eyargh! : Or, the Demented Battle Cry of a Lunatick Philosopher
I came home early today, nominally because this is the third week in a row when I've had some sort of a virus or other and I am very tired.
Why am I so tired? Because I stayed out far too late on Saturday night. The night bus let me off in front of my door at 3.07am. Where did I go? A rather insipid student night not at my own university but at the rival one across the road. Why would I go to such a place, I who firmly dislike not only loud music but also nights out that involve dancing? Because I have an idiotic crush on a girl that isn't even a proper crush because she's not someone I would date in real life, though I'm not tremendously sure of what real life, my real life, is at the moment because everything seems to have been upended and I've had a cold for three weeks which does not make for clarity of mind and I really thought I had broken my habit of getting crushes on younger women but I guess not and I don't know whether to be distressed, indifferent or amused about it, not that she's that young but still.
Last Wednesday night I didn't sleep but a couple of hours and yet had no trouble being awake and alert on Thursday and I have been talking back to the newspaper, out loud, while on the train in the morning and distractedly twitching at noises from the street while reading in the common room and forgetting to eat and having alternating flashes of panic and rage in the morning while trying to find the right books to take with me for the day and trying to weave through the people who meander dazedly down the tube platform in the morning when really they should be trying to get away from the crowded part and get down to the very end where there are only five or six people standing and 8.00am is really not so early as to make dazed meandering really necessary. I have been staring at people generally which I have largely explained to myself as being the result of moving to a place where there are more than 1,000 times as many people as the last place I lived, to a city whose population is almost as large as that of the entire state of North Carolina, which is almost as large in area as the entirety of England and Wales put together so that, as you can see, the people were a great deal more spread out and therefore not as easily stared at but then that falls apart when one considers the subset of all that staring which is a new-found involuntary tendency to gawk - let's not mince words - at other women, which is not very polite and has the added detraction of making me feel like I've turned into an adolescent boy: I've had 'staring issues' before but not like this.
And the real reason I came home early is that I was worried I would do something weird and aggressive because I am having the harsh tail end of a hypomanic blip and I am extremely uncomfortable and I don't quite know what to do with myself and and and...
And too many things are happening on top of one another and sometimes simultaneously in the wrong order and I can't calm down and writing this has helped some and I thought it would but (eyargh!) why have I had colds for three weeks and why do I have to choke on the dregs of mania?
Why am I so tired? Because I stayed out far too late on Saturday night. The night bus let me off in front of my door at 3.07am. Where did I go? A rather insipid student night not at my own university but at the rival one across the road. Why would I go to such a place, I who firmly dislike not only loud music but also nights out that involve dancing? Because I have an idiotic crush on a girl that isn't even a proper crush because she's not someone I would date in real life, though I'm not tremendously sure of what real life, my real life, is at the moment because everything seems to have been upended and I've had a cold for three weeks which does not make for clarity of mind and I really thought I had broken my habit of getting crushes on younger women but I guess not and I don't know whether to be distressed, indifferent or amused about it, not that she's that young but still.
Last Wednesday night I didn't sleep but a couple of hours and yet had no trouble being awake and alert on Thursday and I have been talking back to the newspaper, out loud, while on the train in the morning and distractedly twitching at noises from the street while reading in the common room and forgetting to eat and having alternating flashes of panic and rage in the morning while trying to find the right books to take with me for the day and trying to weave through the people who meander dazedly down the tube platform in the morning when really they should be trying to get away from the crowded part and get down to the very end where there are only five or six people standing and 8.00am is really not so early as to make dazed meandering really necessary. I have been staring at people generally which I have largely explained to myself as being the result of moving to a place where there are more than 1,000 times as many people as the last place I lived, to a city whose population is almost as large as that of the entire state of North Carolina, which is almost as large in area as the entirety of England and Wales put together so that, as you can see, the people were a great deal more spread out and therefore not as easily stared at but then that falls apart when one considers the subset of all that staring which is a new-found involuntary tendency to gawk - let's not mince words - at other women, which is not very polite and has the added detraction of making me feel like I've turned into an adolescent boy: I've had 'staring issues' before but not like this.
And the real reason I came home early is that I was worried I would do something weird and aggressive because I am having the harsh tail end of a hypomanic blip and I am extremely uncomfortable and I don't quite know what to do with myself and and and...
And too many things are happening on top of one another and sometimes simultaneously in the wrong order and I can't calm down and writing this has helped some and I thought it would but (eyargh!) why have I had colds for three weeks and why do I have to choke on the dregs of mania?
30 August 2009
It's a bit boring to say but I'm afraid that I am just plain slipping. Lots of disorganised thinking, the parapetetics, avoiding and avoiding and avoiding. I am tempted to just put on my sturdiest pair of shoes and walk out into the woods with a shawl over my head, and keep walking until the shoes wear out and then be a decalcite friar, but female. Then if I'm going to be a mad person, I will at least be a religious mad person in the woods. Much more interesting than a mad person hiding from her parents because she feels like an unexploded land mine and makes only brief sorties when she feels able to prop up a rational facade or needs food.
Oh, the egotism.
I have been complete rubbish at replying to comments and I apologise. I will do better tomorrow.
Oh, the egotism.
I have been complete rubbish at replying to comments and I apologise. I will do better tomorrow.
17 August 2009
The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project
The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project is something I have had in mind for a while. At the moment of starting, I am stuck in omphaloskepsitis (navel-gazing-itis) and I am glad to have thought of something to offer up that's more in tune with the original purpose of this blog.
I am asking all of you who read to save up and share any and all references you come across in literature, journalism, blogs, television, magazines, movies, day to day conversation, scholarly articles, academically dubious articles and sources: in short, anything that reflects a popular conception of the nature of mental illness and especially the perceived nature or character of those who are mentally interesting, negative or positive. I would also welcome more selective contributions from older (pre-1970) psychiatric and psychological texts.
My aim is to build up a database of popular references to mental illness so that, in true pragmatist philosophy mode, I can gain a fuller idea of what exists in the minds of the living, the influences that shapes these perceptions and the historical discursive context of current understandings of mental illness in the popular social dialectic. With this understanding, I hope to be better able to address mentalisms philosophically in a more relevant way.
If you're not sure whether a reference you have come across is relevant to this project, just go ahead and stick it up anyway. I need your help and I welcome and appreciate any and all contributions.
When posting a reference, please try to give sufficient citation in whatever form. Sufficient citation for anything in print would consist of the date of publication, author, publisher, page number and title. For blogs, as much as can be gathered of the publication citation plus a link would be great. For conversational references, date, time, local and a brief description of the relationship between the participants (e.g. psychiatrist to patient, parent to child who is mentally interesting) would be appreciated. Names and personal details are not requested or necessary. If you do not have all of the information requested, don't worry, just give as much as you are able.
I am particularly interested in anything that strikes you as a recurring conception and particularly interested in anything that strikes you as unusual.
With your help, I hope to make a useful contribution to political philosophy and, eventually, public policy for the greater good of the mentally interesting and the benefit of greater understanding to the non-mentally interesting. Thank you in advance and know that I will faithfully give due credit to any aid you can afford me in this project.
I am asking all of you who read to save up and share any and all references you come across in literature, journalism, blogs, television, magazines, movies, day to day conversation, scholarly articles, academically dubious articles and sources: in short, anything that reflects a popular conception of the nature of mental illness and especially the perceived nature or character of those who are mentally interesting, negative or positive. I would also welcome more selective contributions from older (pre-1970) psychiatric and psychological texts.
My aim is to build up a database of popular references to mental illness so that, in true pragmatist philosophy mode, I can gain a fuller idea of what exists in the minds of the living, the influences that shapes these perceptions and the historical discursive context of current understandings of mental illness in the popular social dialectic. With this understanding, I hope to be better able to address mentalisms philosophically in a more relevant way.
If you're not sure whether a reference you have come across is relevant to this project, just go ahead and stick it up anyway. I need your help and I welcome and appreciate any and all contributions.
When posting a reference, please try to give sufficient citation in whatever form. Sufficient citation for anything in print would consist of the date of publication, author, publisher, page number and title. For blogs, as much as can be gathered of the publication citation plus a link would be great. For conversational references, date, time, local and a brief description of the relationship between the participants (e.g. psychiatrist to patient, parent to child who is mentally interesting) would be appreciated. Names and personal details are not requested or necessary. If you do not have all of the information requested, don't worry, just give as much as you are able.
I am particularly interested in anything that strikes you as a recurring conception and particularly interested in anything that strikes you as unusual.
With your help, I hope to make a useful contribution to political philosophy and, eventually, public policy for the greater good of the mentally interesting and the benefit of greater understanding to the non-mentally interesting. Thank you in advance and know that I will faithfully give due credit to any aid you can afford me in this project.
09 August 2009
Greetings From Our Nation's Capital
I am up in DC where it will be around 37C tomorrow (100ish F) and humid as only a city built on a drained swamp can be. What can they have been thinking? Philadelphia (the original capital) has much nicer weather, if you ask me.
So far, I have not done much but drag myself out on walks in the heat, ducked into the National Gallery for the sculpture garden, gotten gravel in my shoes and blisters marching around the National Mall and made thick clouds of smoke in the guest room where I sit and worry for most of the day. The pleasant side effect of all this worrying is that it has driven me to reading novels with a speed and concentration I thought I had lost years ago. I'm glad to find I can still read like that, with total absorption.
So far I have made it through 'Mariana' (Monica Dickens), 'Someone At a Distance' (Dorothy Whipple), 'No Fond Return of Love' (Barbara Pym), something else too light for me to name without embarrassment - snobby of me, I acknowledge - and most of 'Persuasion' (Jane Austen). Next in the pile is 'Cheerful Weather for the Wedding', which I bought on the strength of the fact that Virginia Woolf compared the author, Julia Strachey, to Katherine Mansfield.
I have been here four days.
Unfortunately, spending time with the parents has made me more muddled than less about what I ought to do with myself. They are very sweetly concerned about my health but with the result that I am more confused about what course I should follow in the immediate future. Between that and the long wait to hear about what funding I will have for next year, my anxiety, never very well moderated, is assuming operatic proportions. I wish, in my cowardice, that someone more competent could take over my life for the next few weeks, sort everything out and then hand it back over. However, I must do as E.M. Forster has recommended and face both the external and the internal situation bravely. I aim to do better than Lucy Honeychurch; I should like to do as well as Margaret Schlegel.
Tomorrow is church, which always makes me feel better. Sunday is my favorite day of the week. I do wish, though, that my mother's church's new organist would not play everything so slowly. I don't have the breath control to make whole notes (semibreves) last that long. 'Joy to the World' sounded like a dirge at Christmas midnight mass this last year and became slower and more grandiose with each verse. I was gasping by the end of it.
I never meant for this blog to become so personal but I cannot get my mind un-mired from from the Slough of Despond that has made up so much of this summer. We are past Midsummer Night now and it is a relief to think how soon it will be autumn, my favorite season, full of the smell of rotting leaves and gloomy skies.
So far, I have not done much but drag myself out on walks in the heat, ducked into the National Gallery for the sculpture garden, gotten gravel in my shoes and blisters marching around the National Mall and made thick clouds of smoke in the guest room where I sit and worry for most of the day. The pleasant side effect of all this worrying is that it has driven me to reading novels with a speed and concentration I thought I had lost years ago. I'm glad to find I can still read like that, with total absorption.
So far I have made it through 'Mariana' (Monica Dickens), 'Someone At a Distance' (Dorothy Whipple), 'No Fond Return of Love' (Barbara Pym), something else too light for me to name without embarrassment - snobby of me, I acknowledge - and most of 'Persuasion' (Jane Austen). Next in the pile is 'Cheerful Weather for the Wedding', which I bought on the strength of the fact that Virginia Woolf compared the author, Julia Strachey, to Katherine Mansfield.
I have been here four days.
Unfortunately, spending time with the parents has made me more muddled than less about what I ought to do with myself. They are very sweetly concerned about my health but with the result that I am more confused about what course I should follow in the immediate future. Between that and the long wait to hear about what funding I will have for next year, my anxiety, never very well moderated, is assuming operatic proportions. I wish, in my cowardice, that someone more competent could take over my life for the next few weeks, sort everything out and then hand it back over. However, I must do as E.M. Forster has recommended and face both the external and the internal situation bravely. I aim to do better than Lucy Honeychurch; I should like to do as well as Margaret Schlegel.
Tomorrow is church, which always makes me feel better. Sunday is my favorite day of the week. I do wish, though, that my mother's church's new organist would not play everything so slowly. I don't have the breath control to make whole notes (semibreves) last that long. 'Joy to the World' sounded like a dirge at Christmas midnight mass this last year and became slower and more grandiose with each verse. I was gasping by the end of it.
I never meant for this blog to become so personal but I cannot get my mind un-mired from from the Slough of Despond that has made up so much of this summer. We are past Midsummer Night now and it is a relief to think how soon it will be autumn, my favorite season, full of the smell of rotting leaves and gloomy skies.
18 July 2009
Like Creeping Damp
As the day when I'll move to my parents and away from dear old urban Appalachia approaches I find that I am losing my mind. I wish I were saying that in the colloquial sense but I am not. Somehow, ending an important relationship, giving up my cat, the prospect of double moving (first to DC, then to London) and dealing with the federal student loan system has frayed my sanity around the edges. Fancy that.
It's rather disappointing. I've been doing so well. Now around 11am and 4pm every day, I find I have to stop whatever I'm doing and lie down for a bit. I'm not much of one for tears but I find myself weeping a little with the slightest provocation - like an emotional incontinence. I feel like a specimen of Victorian female frailty. Perhaps I should go somewhere for my nerves and take a rest-cure...
My mother is going to come down and give me a hand next week. I was hoping not to have to ask her and it worries me a little to ask her (after all, won't that make her secretly hate me?) but something has to give and I'd rather it not be my mind. I need the help. I keep saying out loud - to myself alone and not the cat, alas - 'Yes, if your mother comes to help you she will secretly hate you and take it out of you in other ways.' Put that way, it is risible. My mother never takes anything out on anyone, not even the mean-spirited, gossip-mongering faction of the hospitality committee at her church. If she can forbear them - I can't, it's not even my church and I still almost lost my temper with them - then she can easily bear with me.
It'll be all right once I get up to my parents. I'm just pretty thoroughly uncomfortable, for now.
It's rather disappointing. I've been doing so well. Now around 11am and 4pm every day, I find I have to stop whatever I'm doing and lie down for a bit. I'm not much of one for tears but I find myself weeping a little with the slightest provocation - like an emotional incontinence. I feel like a specimen of Victorian female frailty. Perhaps I should go somewhere for my nerves and take a rest-cure...
My mother is going to come down and give me a hand next week. I was hoping not to have to ask her and it worries me a little to ask her (after all, won't that make her secretly hate me?) but something has to give and I'd rather it not be my mind. I need the help. I keep saying out loud - to myself alone and not the cat, alas - 'Yes, if your mother comes to help you she will secretly hate you and take it out of you in other ways.' Put that way, it is risible. My mother never takes anything out on anyone, not even the mean-spirited, gossip-mongering faction of the hospitality committee at her church. If she can forbear them - I can't, it's not even my church and I still almost lost my temper with them - then she can easily bear with me.
It'll be all right once I get up to my parents. I'm just pretty thoroughly uncomfortable, for now.
22 April 2009
Happiness and Illness
What a funny, lovely year this has been so far. I feel as though I have landed in an alternate reality. For one, we have a president who keeps doing good things; for another, I am about to graduate from university. All the time life gets more and more stressful and I seem to be getting more and more well in response. I've gotten through nearly the entire semester without staying up all night or even late, really, and I've just finished my comprehensive exams and my thesis defense without even taking a klonopin.
As though all this, the wellness, the graduating, weren't enough, I seem to have fallen in love. It seems to soon to say that but it is nonetheless true. I see no sense in pretending to myself or anyone else that I feel otherwise. I have no idea what to do about it; certainly, this is going to upset my plans in some measure but I don't seem to mind about that. I'm just happy.
It is the happiness that makes me wonder whether the world I live in now can be the same as the world I lived in last spring. Nothing, no object nor word seems to have the same significance as it did. Even the colors seem different. I hope that I will not fall into the ranks of the healthy and chauvinistic, despising illness and unconvinced of its reality. When I remember - and it takes effort - I can see how overwhelming it was, how very real and very horrible it was. I wasn't ever being lazy or weak. I wish I had let myself be ill instead of twisting everything around and trying to convince myself that I wasn't really or that any rate I ought not to be, or ought not to take it into account. I wish that I had been able to say to myself, anyway, that I was ill and that it was wrong and unreasonable to expect myself to be able to do even the simple things as easily or as well as others. I think that it is probably inevitable that there will be people who would think me lazy or malingering and I doubt that I will ever live in such an ideal world that I would truly be allowed to be ill whilst ill and convalescent while convalescent but I hope that the next time I will be able to tell myself the truth, even if nobody else believes it. It was a cruelty to have done otherwise and I wish I had not felt it necessary to be so mean to myself: after all, isn't that what mental health professionals are for? I shouldn't try to do their job for them, especially if I'm not getting paid for it. Not that I'm cynical or anything...
As though all this, the wellness, the graduating, weren't enough, I seem to have fallen in love. It seems to soon to say that but it is nonetheless true. I see no sense in pretending to myself or anyone else that I feel otherwise. I have no idea what to do about it; certainly, this is going to upset my plans in some measure but I don't seem to mind about that. I'm just happy.
It is the happiness that makes me wonder whether the world I live in now can be the same as the world I lived in last spring. Nothing, no object nor word seems to have the same significance as it did. Even the colors seem different. I hope that I will not fall into the ranks of the healthy and chauvinistic, despising illness and unconvinced of its reality. When I remember - and it takes effort - I can see how overwhelming it was, how very real and very horrible it was. I wasn't ever being lazy or weak. I wish I had let myself be ill instead of twisting everything around and trying to convince myself that I wasn't really or that any rate I ought not to be, or ought not to take it into account. I wish that I had been able to say to myself, anyway, that I was ill and that it was wrong and unreasonable to expect myself to be able to do even the simple things as easily or as well as others. I think that it is probably inevitable that there will be people who would think me lazy or malingering and I doubt that I will ever live in such an ideal world that I would truly be allowed to be ill whilst ill and convalescent while convalescent but I hope that the next time I will be able to tell myself the truth, even if nobody else believes it. It was a cruelty to have done otherwise and I wish I had not felt it necessary to be so mean to myself: after all, isn't that what mental health professionals are for? I shouldn't try to do their job for them, especially if I'm not getting paid for it. Not that I'm cynical or anything...
08 April 2009
Nonsense
Well. Here I still am.
It's been a funny old week: I am unendingly behind on my schoolwork and happy because I'm dating a very sweet girl and very anxious that I won't be able to graduate because I am subconsciously convinced that I have screwed something up irremediably without realizing it. I am on the verge, I believe, of having an offer of a place at one of the MA programs I applied to and it snowed quite a bit yesterday but did not kill the flowers, thank God. I have a tension headache and yet keep finding myself singing because I'm happy.
So yes: my emotional life makes no sense at all right now.
It's Holy Week, too. Lots of church, which I like, with lots of music that I like. Time to get the house cleaned out on Good Friday, which is really a Jewish custom for Passover but which I have adopted because I like it. Really, what good is the church calendar if it can't occasionally tell you when to plant things and clean your house?
This is a fairly nonsensical post, which only makes sense given the circumstances, and really I just wanted to say 'hello, I am alive', anyway.
Hello. I am alive.
It's been a funny old week: I am unendingly behind on my schoolwork and happy because I'm dating a very sweet girl and very anxious that I won't be able to graduate because I am subconsciously convinced that I have screwed something up irremediably without realizing it. I am on the verge, I believe, of having an offer of a place at one of the MA programs I applied to and it snowed quite a bit yesterday but did not kill the flowers, thank God. I have a tension headache and yet keep finding myself singing because I'm happy.
So yes: my emotional life makes no sense at all right now.
It's Holy Week, too. Lots of church, which I like, with lots of music that I like. Time to get the house cleaned out on Good Friday, which is really a Jewish custom for Passover but which I have adopted because I like it. Really, what good is the church calendar if it can't occasionally tell you when to plant things and clean your house?
This is a fairly nonsensical post, which only makes sense given the circumstances, and really I just wanted to say 'hello, I am alive', anyway.
Hello. I am alive.
02 March 2009
The Thick Fug of Exhaustion
If anyone has advice on how to be less exhausted all the time, I would be happy to hear it. I can't take it anymore. I don't think I would be so bothered if I weren't being conscientious about getting enough sleep. Help.
28 February 2009
Music hath the charm to sooth the savage beast
I am having a rough couple of days because, even though I finished the thesis (hurray!), a good friend of mine is acting strangely and I'm worried about her and also, next week is classics awareness week and I'm about one more phone call away from strangling Imperator Nostri with my bare hands. (That's not his official title; I just enjoy thinking of him as one of those less than reasonable Roman emporers). I've tried reasoning with him but it seems to make no impression. I hope I can keep it together enough not to volunteer to do anything else for the rest of the semester. I'll show up, mind you; I just don't want to arrange anything else.
I am also supposed to be getting my grad school applications done this weekend. I have the GSIS (pronounced gee-sis): grad school inadequacy syndrome. I'm trying not to be unduly alarmed because I have yet to see anyone apply to grad school in any other state of mind. However, I'm still sick with dread and fear over it. I want to get out of here so badly.
How am I dealing with it all? I had a long walk, that helped. I'm about to go sort out my closet, that will help. But, I have decided that something I really want is new music to listen to. I think it will make me feel better. The only flaw in this plan is that I have no idea where to start looking. To resolve this, I respectfully implore all of you to suggest something to me and help me save my sanity.
I am also supposed to be getting my grad school applications done this weekend. I have the GSIS (pronounced gee-sis): grad school inadequacy syndrome. I'm trying not to be unduly alarmed because I have yet to see anyone apply to grad school in any other state of mind. However, I'm still sick with dread and fear over it. I want to get out of here so badly.
How am I dealing with it all? I had a long walk, that helped. I'm about to go sort out my closet, that will help. But, I have decided that something I really want is new music to listen to. I think it will make me feel better. The only flaw in this plan is that I have no idea where to start looking. To resolve this, I respectfully implore all of you to suggest something to me and help me save my sanity.
21 February 2009
And I Shall Sing as I Push the Rock Back Up the Hill
One thing that I had forgotten about feeling well is that one doesn't always feel well. I feel rather rotten most of the time, being stuck, as I am, in a corner of the world for which I am not suited among friends whom I love but with whom there is so much I cannot share.
This sounds like pretentious weltschmerz from the mouth of an ingrate but it isn't meant that way.
What I do mean is that I often feel almost as bad as I do when I'm depressed but the trick of it is that now I only feel that way for an hour or five minutes and not two months. I'll feel unbearably anxious but whenever the reason for the anxiety is removed, it fades away, quickly. It's amazing.
I have worried, as I know that others do, that the medication could only ever take away from me; that I would either be artificially happy and well or still miserable and sick with side effects. I thought that it could only be a compromise between how much depression I could stand and how much medication I could stand. There was, indeed, no reason for me to think otherwise. I had learnt from experience that medication would make me not-depressed, which is not at all the same as well. As it turns out, that's not what has happened this time.I've not turned into a smiling shell of myself. I'm not a morose lump either. I seem to have as complete a range of human emotion as I ever have had. I think that this is what it's like when the medication works.
Good job it finally did.
It only took twelve years, two hospitalizations, three depressive episodes so bad that I had to drop out of school, two so bad that I had to stop work, three pronounced periods of hypomania, years of insomnia, years of horrendous anxiety, and more than a decade of seeing various psychiatrists, psychologists and so on. It's only taken up the past seventeen years of my life.
I'm laughing though, it's absurd, but I'm laughing like Sisyphus. I'm glad something finally worked.
12 February 2009
Three for a Girl and Four for a Boy
The semester is almost half-way over and we are not yet suicidal.
Occasionally, the old flock of magpies swoops down and squawks, reminding me of "the sixteen things I have left undone that must be done this very minute or the world will end" or "the eighty-seven unforgivable things you did before the age of six that mean you ought to lie down and eat dirt". They were so thick and fast when they came, at last, and more and more and more, but now they come mostly in two's.
There are so many Very Important for the Future tasks I must complete this month and I don't know why I'm not lying in bed, unwashed and fearful. Bizarrely, I am getting more exercise than I have in years, sleeping and keeping up or almost up with everything I'm supposed to do. I keep taking showers and getting dressed in the morning in clothes that are starting to be a little big for me.
It is unutterably strange.
It feels vaguely immoral.
It feels fantastic.
Occasionally, the old flock of magpies swoops down and squawks, reminding me of "the sixteen things I have left undone that must be done this very minute or the world will end" or "the eighty-seven unforgivable things you did before the age of six that mean you ought to lie down and eat dirt". They were so thick and fast when they came, at last, and more and more and more, but now they come mostly in two's.
There are so many Very Important for the Future tasks I must complete this month and I don't know why I'm not lying in bed, unwashed and fearful. Bizarrely, I am getting more exercise than I have in years, sleeping and keeping up or almost up with everything I'm supposed to do. I keep taking showers and getting dressed in the morning in clothes that are starting to be a little big for me.
It is unutterably strange.
It feels vaguely immoral.
It feels fantastic.
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