002.
So this morning, I was having a dream that there was a broken alarm clock in my room that kept beeping and flashing, and that for some reason both John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and Data from Star Trek were trying to help me fix it, but none of us actually knew what we were doing and the beeping and flashing just kept getting louder, brighter, faster, and more insistent, and the clock was gonna explode or something if we didn't reset it in the exact right way. I woke up in my usual bizarre, spreadeagled position on my bed in the dark, and there was still a really annoying beeping sound assaulting my ears; it was my sister's alarm, which she had slept through. I had an early appointment with the psychiatrist anyway, so it was as well that I was wakened at 7:30 AM. You don't want to go straight from bed to the shrink. Half-asleep and disheveled just isn't a state you should ever be in when you're meeting with someone whose job is to check you for signs of mental illness and deteriorated self-care/coping skills. My mom told me in the car on the way to the doctor's office that she was worried about my a.) taking antidepressants and b.) having control over them and keeping them in my room. She said she was worried I would try to use them to get high or to commit suicide by overdose. I don't think my mom understands how antidepressants work; on further questioning, she seemed to think that I'd been prescribed some sort of sedative / narcotic / tranquilizer like Valium or Xanax, which is far from the case but does kind of explain the aforementioned concerns. I thought about pointing out that if I wanted to either get high or kill myself, there are plenty of legal, common, easily obtained substances I could use for one or the other of those purposes with far greater efficacy than freakin' Wellbutrin. I decided that would be the wrong thing to say.
I still can't tell what sort of effect the medication's having, though it certainly hasn't made me feel any worse. I'd say that I generally have more energy, more ability to concentrate and task-switch, though I'm still (and will likely always be) worse at executive function-type things than most people. My emotional coping skills are better, but that could just be because I'm less immediately stressed, or the non-depressed part of my usual mood cycle coming around again. Again, by "better," I mean there's been a gradual switch from falling into the Pit of Despair over every minor setback or upsetting newspaper article, having panic attacks about unremarkable situations like eating lunch in the cafeteria, that sort of thing, to just being cranky, cynical, and shy. (And trust me, those states feel different, and the latter is a clear and welcome improvement over the former, no matter what people like the author of this article might have you believe. I agree with some of her points re: Big Pharma, but there's too much ignorance and too many faulty assumptions in the rest of that tirade for me to not hate it. APPARENTLY I AM WASHING MY HANDS WITH SOAP MADE FROM PEOPLE. You guys. Psychiatric medications are Soylent Green.)
(...CHECK OUT THE BLAND PLACIDITY WHERE MY PERSONALITY USED TO BE. Oh, wait. No, I always have a personality. It's just that sometimes I can't express it all that well 'cause I'm too busy crying, throwing up, lying prostrate on the floors of public restrooms, contemplating suicide, and yelling at people who don't deserve it. Trust me, if I thought I was being emblandened, or negatively affected in any way, by any drug, I wouldn't take that drug. My basic position on these matters is that everyone should get to feel just fine sometimes, and if it doesn't cause real harm to anyone else, any method a person chooses for hirself to give hir some respite from the Pit of Despair is pretty much acceptable. And people who haven't been in that pit themselves definitely don't get to judge them for it, you know? )
While in the process of writing this entry, I prepared and ate two fried eggs with a piece of toast. I didn't do a bad job, but the tricky part is always making sure the toast and eggs are optimally hot at the same time. (I'm practicing my egg skills, Alicia.) The best part is mopping up the runny egg yolk with the toast so the toast gets slightly soggy and much more flavorful. I love it when the egg yolks are like ridiculously orange. The oranger the better; I don't find yellow yolks all that aesthetically pleasing.