I Think I Have to Quit My Pills

TL;DR I've been medicated to fix a condition, and now my other conditions have become intolerably worse.

Hello, everybody! I have to apologize for a lot of things: my extended absence, the lack of consistent formatting that's about to plague this post, and the regrettable nature of its content. If you're not in a good mood, probably skip this one. There's probably going to be a fair amount of swearing.

If you haven't already figured this out, the author of this blog is a raving madman. Not always in the fun, quirky "I like Dr. Who haha ecks dee" kind of way, either. Sometimes I'm crazy in a serious, wide-bore "I pulled out all my hair and want to eat other people" kind of way. I show everyone the funny manic side because it makes better jokes, has better hair and people think it's charming. I think there are two or so people in the world who know I'm crazy that second way, so consider yourself privileged in possibly the least pleasant way ever, dear reader.

Part of the reason I'm writing this tonight is because I wanted to write a post for you guys, after all these months. I feel bad leaving the blog to just sit and fester, and the various technologies are quick to remind me I haven't written anything. The other part of the reason is that I simply can't do anything else. I say that very literally, I have all sorts of things I want to do and I just can't start any of them.

Backstory and exposition goes here. For those not in the long-term loop, all my life I've had issues, culminating in diagnoses of severe depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. There's probably something borderline or bipolar in there too, but the summary is whoop-de-fuckin'-doo I'm nuts. For those not in the recent loop, I decided to try a pharmaceutical solution to some of my crazy, hoping it would make me better able to live the life of a normal person. Specifically I started taking an antidepressant, hoping it would make me less depress! Out of school! Working! Doing fun things on the side like my stream and YouTube (twitch.tv/mariacello). PROGRESS!

Yeah, I feel like shiet.

I had some time off work today, and my grand master plan was to edit a video or write in the morning, get coffee and eat lunch, stream in the afternoon, finish that video and write some more, make dinner, pee about seventy times, blah blah blah. None of that happened. Anything I want to do today, I just can't do. I've been thinking urgently that I really ought to be making dinner since about 5:30. Right around 7:45 I actually started eating, and that was just egg whites and carrots I had laying around. Instead of working on my own content, I just went ahead and clicked around through a giant amount of content I've already seen. For at least an hour today, I did legitimately actually nothing. I just stared at a blank-ass tab thinking about all the things I ought to be doing.

The medication I'm on is for the depression part of my whole ensemble. I'm gonna leave the brand name out because I don't want a Big Pharma death squad turning up at my door, but it's a commonly-prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Also, it's not cocaine; that's a non-selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Anyway, it's for the depression.

Sure, the depression is a little better. I probably have one day a week now where I'm totally emotionless, and maybe a day where I'm sad all day, but that's better than it used to be. Observing these improvements, the doctors said "YEEhaw, let's turn up that dosage, FUCK yeah bud," as they should.

The depression is better, and the other parts of the pie are, as they say, fucked. An old social situation that I'd about gotten over is keeping me up at night again. I can concentrate for about a total of five seconds before some little tic in my brain snaps me out of it. Writing that last sentence, for instance, I've glanced away to count the change on my desk, count the dents in my water bottle and remember where each one came from, glance at the jeweler's screwdriver on the other side of my desk and try to remember where the others in the set are, and look at a container of hummus nearby and remember the awkward interactions I had last time I was at Berkeley Bowl. That list started trivial and ended fairly bourgie, but be aware that I had no conscious intention of doing any of them, and each of them was acutely uncomfortable, as weird as that sounds.

I've never been able to sleep properly, but it's especially bad now. No sleep, no gym. No gym, no tired, no sleep. In the last few months my appetite has been shot to hell, which is bad news because my very, very worst side usually only bubbles up when the blood sugar's running low (that one was out a lot back home in Camarillo).

So good, now I'm only sad some of the time, and instead I feel like a fuckin' meth addict. I see disheartening comments on a political Facebook video (or whatever) and suddenly I'm full of searing, furious vitriol for people who barely remember writing the comment and certainly don't deserve such a reaction. Someone is loud and disorderly on BART and abruptly I'm off on an internal monologue of the purest, blackest hatred; sexism, racism, you name it, I've probably thought it at a million words a minute. I want to be clear and explicit here: if you sat me down and asked me, I don't believe any of that type of shit. In the most improbable feat of mental chemistry, these thoughts actually literally create themselves out of nothing and take over by force. It's all very... the ending of Shivering Isles, where Sheogorath (Prince of Madness) realizes he's just a figment of his own arch-nemesis's imagination and dubs the player the new Prince(ss) of Madness to take over the realm. That doesn't make a damn lick of sense, probably.

The point is, I'll be just motoring along thinking about spaghetti and whatever, and suddenly I'm the emissary of Satan on Earth for a little while. This is some Attack on Titan shit, dear reader.

I originally started on this pharmaceutical angle as a concession to pressure from other people, it should be noted. Pressure's the wrong word; people saw that I felt like shit and put the idea in my head that this would fix it. They were right, for a while. I graduated, and I have a job that I actually love doing (the commute sucks, but I'd do it for free otherwise [don't tell my boss]), so I'm in a good spot on paper. If I'm totally honest with myself, however, I think the pills don't really have shit to do with that. I did that, that was me. The pills helped, but I'm starting to think it was a placebo effect. I just needed something to justify feeling better.

When I get started on something, especially a project of my own invention, I'm just about unstoppable. My poor friends can testify to this; I'm stubborn as hell, and the twitchy obsessive-compulsive part of me forces me to make a plan and execute it, or I'll go totally up the wall. We're invading Rome in the spring, everybody. Dysentery among the soldiery? Fuck 'em, tell them we're bringing buckets along.

In these last few months, I don't even have the ideas anymore. I used to have vividly bad dreams, and now I just don't dream at all. I'm not as bleak as I used to be, but I very much feel like a meat robot creaking automatically through the day, completing just enough objectives to keep the machine trundling along without dying. I don't appreciate living this way. I love this job I have, and I'm deeply grateful for it, but it's not the career I used to dream about. I want my creative side to work freely again. I want to have ideas, and put them out on paper or in video, and not have this fuckin' invisible hand crushing me back down into the cabinets at the rear of my mind every time I try.

All this is to say: I think these pills are bending me into a more highly-functioning and socially acceptable person, who I happen to think is an utter and abject piece of shit.

For these and some other reasons, there's a pretty good chance I'm taking myself off these pills. I don't know when, but sometime in the near future I think I have to just cut them out. A few days ago I raised my voice in anger at one of my dearest friends, and I won't fuckin' have any more of that, thank you kindly, Your Honor.

This post has been pretty much an unformatted vomit of consciousness (I don't have the mental faculties to actually organize a nice post at the moment), but the last part I have to reserve for a call to action for you, dear reader. Knowing I'm going off my meds, the odds of my insanity increasing, or at least changing, are not trivial. I won't belabor the point, but as mentioned earlier, I am a bit of a lunatic.

So bear with me, please. For those of you who know me, I may try your patience over the next little while. I may abruptly cancel plans apropos of nothing. I may go off on unexpected tirades about my parents, or traffic control, or how narrow the aisles are at Berkeley Bowl. I may post selfies where my eyes aren't quite pointing the same way. I may even, perish the thought, be irregular in my blog posts, as regards both their timing and the content I include within them. But bear with me; I have a great network of people, and I'm trying my very best to justify their faith in (and often unwarranted praise of) me.

Okay, I'm ramblin', so I gotta cut it off there. Thanks for sticking through the whole post, and sticking with me, everybody. Also, if anything needs more explanation, or you're curious about anything (I don't think I got down everything I wanted to), do let me know in a comment or an email; stuff to contact me is under my profile. Love you guys. Sorry for the dramatic post, and for the way that I am.