error code 5001
Having a functional brain and a non-disastrous mental state is weird. I mean, it's cool, but it's also deeply bizarre.
I have now been on anti-anxiety/anti-depressant meds for almost two years, and most of those two years were pretty rough just because of general life happening so much and me not being able to handle it, which is in fact how I got to the point of asking for the meds in the first place. Over the last few months most of the things that were causing perpetual life-quakes have been resolved and put away, and--holy crap is this what other people feel like? Is this what it's like to have a functioning brain? I have so been missing out.
I think maybe the additional vitamins that my doctor had me start taking might have been the final piece of the puzzle (my vitamin D levels were, as previously mentioned, hilariously/horrifyingly low, and I am now taking like 4x vitamin D pills daily most days, and it's like. I am sleeping more (6 hours vs 4, per Fitbit), and when my brain takes a flying leap off a cliff and tries to take me with it, which it has decided to do twice in the past week, I am more or less stepping back and being like "okay, this is my brain doing anxiety, this is my brain being wrong, now how do I make it shut up?" instead of just crawling under a blanket and crying into a cat. (In one case it involved asking other people for reassurance, in the other I tried to more or less just deal with it.)
Oen of the weird ways this has been manifesting is with writing; even when I'm in an anxiety and depression spiral I can usually make words, largely by hating myself into it wiht many insults and scathing internal remarks, but that mental state is not really conducive to coming up with new shiny ideas, so I also end up hating myself for not producing anything truly new and just working on these ideas that have been on my bunny list for a while.
By contrast, the last few weeks have been a bonanza of Things I Want to Write (I really need to do this year's bunny list!), though not much in the way of impetus to actually work on things. Which is fine, since I can document the ideas and have them in a folder for when I do have the impetus to work on them. Things I have come up with in the last month: an FF12 postgame epic, an FF4 AU epic that is Cel's fault (because I need more of those like I need to be on fire, goddamn it, Highwind), completely fixed the plot of the third book of the trilogy which means I can actually finish editing/rewriting books 1 and 2, an original fiction thing (or two), and a crossover of FF12/FF6 crossover that's Sev's fault. And I started writing an ending to the 2015 NaNo, because even if it's the wrong ending and I hate it it's an ending and I can fix it later. (I'm not sure there is a right ending. There are so many varieties of Pyrrhic victory here, I need to decide which one is happening. I dislike all of them for different reasons, and I like all of them for different reasons, and writing is hard.)
I am still wary, and sort of side-eyeing this entire affair and poking it cautiously with a stick because I keep feeling like my brain is tricking me - making me think we're good so it can crash me harder later. It's extra weird because usually this time of year I'm especially anxious and especially depressed because lol sun what sun you live too far north, summer will never return and this year I seem to...not be that? Unless I am just tricking myself into thinking I'm not? And in case you ever wondered how I talk myself in circles and wind up more anxious than I started, this is it, right here, because I assume that my brain is always messing with me (in fairness I have ample evidence to support this theory.)
The other weird thing about this is that my mental OS error handling is super screwy right now--things that should not be nearly as upsetting as they are are causing massive mental errorsplosions. It's like now that there isn't a GIANT OVERWHELMING PILE of anxiety crushing me, I don't know how to deal with the smaller things that just added to the weight before but are now actually recognizable individually. It's a lot like when I left hell job and crawled out of the stress pit, and then didn't know how to handle stress at all anymore because all my coping mechanisms had been desperately unhealthy and also tailored to "just try to keep the elephant from sitting all the way down on top of me," so when the elephant was gone and a wolf came in to sit on top of me, it caused freaking out in vehement disproportion to its actual existence just because I didn't know how to deal with small things, and this metaphor ran away a long time ago but whatever. Anyway. Little things still seem to be causing spaz attacks, but it seems to me that it's mostly that I have to learn (re-learn?) how to process them individually instead of just shoving them all under the rug of NOT RIGHT NOW THERE ARE BIGGER PROBLEMS and allowing them to build up into said bigger problems.
But for now, I am generally doing pretty well, and it is great. I also need to remember that this is a work in progress, not a light switch.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1139294.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
I have now been on anti-anxiety/anti-depressant meds for almost two years, and most of those two years were pretty rough just because of general life happening so much and me not being able to handle it, which is in fact how I got to the point of asking for the meds in the first place. Over the last few months most of the things that were causing perpetual life-quakes have been resolved and put away, and--holy crap is this what other people feel like? Is this what it's like to have a functioning brain? I have so been missing out.
I think maybe the additional vitamins that my doctor had me start taking might have been the final piece of the puzzle (my vitamin D levels were, as previously mentioned, hilariously/horrifyingly low, and I am now taking like 4x vitamin D pills daily most days, and it's like. I am sleeping more (6 hours vs 4, per Fitbit), and when my brain takes a flying leap off a cliff and tries to take me with it, which it has decided to do twice in the past week, I am more or less stepping back and being like "okay, this is my brain doing anxiety, this is my brain being wrong, now how do I make it shut up?" instead of just crawling under a blanket and crying into a cat. (In one case it involved asking other people for reassurance, in the other I tried to more or less just deal with it.)
Oen of the weird ways this has been manifesting is with writing; even when I'm in an anxiety and depression spiral I can usually make words, largely by hating myself into it wiht many insults and scathing internal remarks, but that mental state is not really conducive to coming up with new shiny ideas, so I also end up hating myself for not producing anything truly new and just working on these ideas that have been on my bunny list for a while.
By contrast, the last few weeks have been a bonanza of Things I Want to Write (I really need to do this year's bunny list!), though not much in the way of impetus to actually work on things. Which is fine, since I can document the ideas and have them in a folder for when I do have the impetus to work on them. Things I have come up with in the last month: an FF12 postgame epic, an FF4 AU epic that is Cel's fault (because I need more of those like I need to be on fire, goddamn it, Highwind), completely fixed the plot of the third book of the trilogy which means I can actually finish editing/rewriting books 1 and 2, an original fiction thing (or two), and a crossover of FF12/FF6 crossover that's Sev's fault. And I started writing an ending to the 2015 NaNo, because even if it's the wrong ending and I hate it it's an ending and I can fix it later. (I'm not sure there is a right ending. There are so many varieties of Pyrrhic victory here, I need to decide which one is happening. I dislike all of them for different reasons, and I like all of them for different reasons, and writing is hard.)
I am still wary, and sort of side-eyeing this entire affair and poking it cautiously with a stick because I keep feeling like my brain is tricking me - making me think we're good so it can crash me harder later. It's extra weird because usually this time of year I'm especially anxious and especially depressed because lol sun what sun you live too far north, summer will never return and this year I seem to...not be that? Unless I am just tricking myself into thinking I'm not? And in case you ever wondered how I talk myself in circles and wind up more anxious than I started, this is it, right here, because I assume that my brain is always messing with me (in fairness I have ample evidence to support this theory.)
The other weird thing about this is that my mental OS error handling is super screwy right now--things that should not be nearly as upsetting as they are are causing massive mental errorsplosions. It's like now that there isn't a GIANT OVERWHELMING PILE of anxiety crushing me, I don't know how to deal with the smaller things that just added to the weight before but are now actually recognizable individually. It's a lot like when I left hell job and crawled out of the stress pit, and then didn't know how to handle stress at all anymore because all my coping mechanisms had been desperately unhealthy and also tailored to "just try to keep the elephant from sitting all the way down on top of me," so when the elephant was gone and a wolf came in to sit on top of me, it caused freaking out in vehement disproportion to its actual existence just because I didn't know how to deal with small things, and this metaphor ran away a long time ago but whatever. Anyway. Little things still seem to be causing spaz attacks, but it seems to me that it's mostly that I have to learn (re-learn?) how to process them individually instead of just shoving them all under the rug of NOT RIGHT NOW THERE ARE BIGGER PROBLEMS and allowing them to build up into said bigger problems.
But for now, I am generally doing pretty well, and it is great. I also need to remember that this is a work in progress, not a light switch.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1139294.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.