With a Sense of Poise and Rationality

Wednesday, May 18, 2011 || 5:50 PM

You know that feeling where you’re there, but you don’t feel like yourself? You wake up in the morning and you say ‘Ok, this is me right now, but this wasn’t me a little while go’. It’s great when the change is for better. It’s when you wake up and realize you haven’t even gone a couple step backwards, but rather somehow went completely off track, when it gets disorienting.

The voices are essentially gone, adding to my disorientation. Funny thing about them too, I’ve always been so consumed with their lives, with the low, though present hum of their existence running in my head, that they kept me busy, keeping anxiety at bay for the most part.

Now it’s all anxiety. Now that my coping mechanism’s gone ‘Lol bbl, kthnxbai’, for the first time, I’m actually alone in my head and it’s not a good feeling.

None of it is me, really. There’s no real external cause. It’s just what lithium can’t really control, and I have no power over, so I'm just waiting a few more days before starting on lamictal.

Still, the medication’s not going to get me anywhere if I don’t make some lifestyle changes, so I’ve been focusing on that.

Every ounce of creativity is gone, so that does strip me from a sense of identity as well. I’m no longer a ‘writer’ because I can’t write, and I’m no longer an ‘artist’, because all I see in a sheet of paper or a new photoshop document is blank space, not the realm of opportunity it used to be.

Lately I’ve just been looking at stuff, collecting pretty photographs for no adequately explored reason, maybe in some vain attempt at gaining some inspiration.

Looking at pretty pictures and jotting down random arts and crafts projects I want to kill time with— strictly ‘copy-from-instructions’ stuff, since the spark’s gone and I can’t think of anything original to do. Maybe being productive or even vaguely competent with my hands in something as absurd as that will get me out of this hole.

Still feel empty and all that jazz, but at least I’m not just sitting around bitching about it. I’m planning things and the like, which for the situation I found myself a few weeks ago is something. It’s progress. It’s baby steps.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011 || 10:34 AM

Curious thing. I somehow didn’t fail any classes. It’s amusing to me, because I essentially cracked and just quit showing up like a week or more before classes actually ended.

My two interview teachers were actually very sweet, sending me a couple e-mails with my grade, stressing how the grade by no means reflected my progress, that I made a great and refreshing contribution to the class, and that it was all about turning in assignments.

Whether they meant it or not, it was still very sweet and cheered me up after the fiasco that was this semester.

And I somehow passed the class I did no work for all semester. I have no clue. I just know I passed. Probably because I showed up almost every time, I have no clue.

I’m feeling relatively better.

I essentially cracked hardcore two weeks ago, and have been recovering since. Went to my doctor, and got an ‘I told you so’ speech. I honestly both overestimated and underestimated my durability at the same time.

The crisis was not pretty. First I cracked physically in the way of an extreme clusterfuck of pain due to stress, then a few days later cracked emotionally while having breakfast with the one person who jumps rope with my triggers every time we talk and we’re not talking about the weather—my father.

What it basically felt like was just a sense of being empty and indifferent (after 3 days of constant crying). Suicide actually made sense. I wasn’t suicidal, but for an existentialist like me, subscribing to the whole Myth of Sysyphus thing and what have you, for suicide to make sense? Yeah, it’s a pretty big deal.

If you’re going to wake up day after day with the same sense of hopelessness, it’s not a matter of giving meaning to anything. If you wake up every morning to the notion of ‘No matter how hard I bust my ass for something, the results never reflect my effort’, then yeah, I can see why someone would cave in.

My father came in to the consultation as well, because he’s fed up with me and wanted a bit of ‘orientation’ to understand how one deals with someone with a ‘deficiency’ like mine.

The best part? When the doctor said “Sir, the problem with this girl is that she has a low tolerance for idiots and stupidity. She’s barely 21, she’s still developing that tolerance.”

So I’m being put on Lamictal to control what Lithium hasn’t been able to keep in check.

Problem with Lamictal being, that it has a bunch of scary side effects, and if I drink, they get worse, so no drinking. Which makes me sad.

So this week I’ve been abusing alcohol, and will continue to do so until Friday, them start Lamictal on Monday and see what’s up.

What worries me? Lamictal kills mania, or hypomania, in my case. Which means I might not be able to hear the voices anymore, or tap into the vortex, or just generally do anything artistic like drawing or writing because hypomania= source of creativity.

I’m tremendously reluctant. The price of stability is giving up all that? Now I get why a former friend refused to take her medication. It killed her creativity, and she lived off of that creativity.

Not a fan of this arrangement.