Highs and Lows
Sigh.
I don't know. I just don't know.
The Wellbutrin is treating me well. The past week, I've felt better than I've felt in months. Fantastic. The side effects are virtually nil so far, unless you count the appetite-suppressing properties, which have curbed my constant depression-fueled eating.
They say this stuff takes two or three weeks to start working, but I woke up the morning after my first dose feeling like a different person.
I don't know if it was simply renewed hope combined with the massive relief of not wanting to eat all the time, or if it was genuinely my system responding quickly. It felt like I'd turned a corner. It restored enough of my creativity that I've been able to make notes for gaming, even if I'm not working on anything more complex yet. I have felt joy.
But the past couple days, I've been down a little. I've been getting those food cravings. Exercise and household tasks have become harder. I've been cranky, impatient. Jokes irritate me. Time drags. And I know that this is what the way down looks like.
I don't know if it's reading a couple hundred truly depressing horror stories, combined with my own current gynecological troubles, topped off by having to go to a doctor that I am certain is going to turn out to be a complete fruitcake.
I don't know if it's knowing that all my grandparents' stuff got sold to strangers last month, and that tomorrow I'm picking up the check for the liquidation of everything but the house.
I don't know if it's just a natural, temporary dip in my mood.
I don't know if it's the initial relief of having some control restored fading to a more normal level of functionality that seems low in comparison.
I don't know if I'll feel better again once the drugs have had time to really start working.
I don't know if I am heading back down into another well.
It's like riding a roller-coaster blindfolded. There's no way to know if you're about to take a little dip, or that headlong plummet straight into the black.
The past week has been so bright. I've come back to myself. There are still some things missing, like 75% of my creativity, like my daimōnes, but the other things that made me me have returned. I'm so happy I feel better. I'm so relieved. I'm trying to take advantage of it while I can, but today I'm worried again, afraid again.
I tried to talk to Sargon about it after he badgered me into confessing what was bothering me.
"This is just like you," he said. "Coming up with things to worry about when there is nothing to worry about. Just try to enjoy this while you have it."
And I thought to myself, "My god, even after all this, he still just doesn't understand how bad it is." Because if he did, he would understand how horrifying the prospect of revisiting that place truly is, and understand why it is so hard to just ignore the fear.
Which is not fair. He does understand. He was just frustrated with me for picking at a healing wound. He wants me to stop making this worse for myself, as we both know I often used to do. Words, words are nothing, I forgive them. But they make me wonder.
Do I really do that, invent things to worry about? Or am I forced, chemically, to feel the worry, fear, and depression, regardless; and so I look for something to explain it, because if I can find a way to explain it, it's possible I can fix it and make it all better?
Maybe all this time, I've been putting the cart before the horse.
I just don't have an answer.
All I know is that I'm tired of this. I'm tired of lows so low they drain the savor out of the happy hours in between. I'm tired of never knowing if what I feel is the result of something real that is upsetting me, or the result of faulty wiring making the world seem unpleasant even when it isn't. It makes me doubt everything I feel.
And here I am, after the best week I've had in forever, rambling just as depressively as ever, instead of taking pleasure in feeling as good as I do. Sargon's right. It is stupid. Very. And you know how I hate stupidity, inefficiency. But that doesn't make a difference.
It will get better. I already know that. I have total faith that there will be normal, happy times again. I'm not afraid of never seeing the dawn again. It will come. Duh.
I'm afraid because I know there is always a shadow, for every light. And I can't face the raw pain in that darkness again. I can't face the numbness that comes after the pain, the un-human nothingness I became, less than animal, a fungus, featureless, alive in only the meanest sense of the word.
It was a living death.
We should only have to die and be reborn once. But with half my life ahead of me and a fractured soul, I may have to do it a dozen times. More.
I don't have the strength to face it again so soon, I swear to you by bell, book, and candle, I don't. But I have no control over whatever's coming. For all I know this is just a brief surfacing between plunges. That's the nature of this thing, and all the positive thinking and self-talk and behavioral modification and forced fun-having can only stave off the beast for so long.
Ultimately, it has nothing to do with how cleverly I try to outwit it. It's a physical disorder. All I can do is hope my strength lasts long enough for the drugs to work or for it to cycle around on its own. That takes a lot of strength. If it comes back before I've got my wind again, oh, Christ, that might do the trick at last.
I think of the truly horrific suicide statistics for the bipolar. I don't want that to be me. And for all the well-meant assurances that it won't be, you know, nobody else was there in my skull the night a couple months back when I realized that dying really was an option.
I weighed it and measured it and put it aside. I chose another path. What, was I going to leave my husband and my friends and my cats behind? Was I going to give up thunderstorms and shooting tin cans and cracking open a new bottle of perfume? Could I really step out of a world that has blackbottom pie in it, and Steven Strait, and tiny golden frogs? Oh, hell, no.
But I decided that. And if I'm brought back to that crossroads again, and again, and again . . . I'm afraid that someday I'll decide to take the only path I haven't tried a hundred times before. I mean, I don't think I will, but I think I understand some of what makes it so attractive.
It's not always giving up, when you choose to die. Sometimes, it's like this:
You're taking the only option left to take. It's a kind of fighting. It's a last act of resistance, a final voluntary step taken in spite of everything else you can't control. Whatever else you may say of suicide, it is not a passive act. It is the ultimate defiance, because it's the only thing you can do that your sickness cannot ever undo. It cannot steal your death from you.
Suicide is destructive, and violent, and cruel. It is unspeakable. It's a horror. It is all those things. But to the people who choose it, it must seem like something else, too, or they wouldn't do it. And I'm terrified because I've come so close to it that I understand that point of view now.
Right now, the suicidal thoughts are gone. I want to live again. I very passionately want to live. And I want it to be a life: full of gladness, and free of the threat of the dark.
So I'm going to commit a different sort of defiance, and try to live tomorrow as though that threat did not exist, as though this is really it: the turning point, the beginning of better days, for however long it lasts.
I'm going to turn my back on that darkness, no matter how it howls. I might fail, but yanking another day from the jaws of the thing that will hunt you forever is maybe the only victory I can have against it.
I'm tired, and afraid, but if I have to steal back my humanity one fucking day at a time, so be it. It's always been this way, hasn't it? The world's throat, my teeth.
Edit: un-f-locked.
I don't know. I just don't know.
The Wellbutrin is treating me well. The past week, I've felt better than I've felt in months. Fantastic. The side effects are virtually nil so far, unless you count the appetite-suppressing properties, which have curbed my constant depression-fueled eating.
They say this stuff takes two or three weeks to start working, but I woke up the morning after my first dose feeling like a different person.
I don't know if it was simply renewed hope combined with the massive relief of not wanting to eat all the time, or if it was genuinely my system responding quickly. It felt like I'd turned a corner. It restored enough of my creativity that I've been able to make notes for gaming, even if I'm not working on anything more complex yet. I have felt joy.
But the past couple days, I've been down a little. I've been getting those food cravings. Exercise and household tasks have become harder. I've been cranky, impatient. Jokes irritate me. Time drags. And I know that this is what the way down looks like.
I don't know if it's reading a couple hundred truly depressing horror stories, combined with my own current gynecological troubles, topped off by having to go to a doctor that I am certain is going to turn out to be a complete fruitcake.
I don't know if it's knowing that all my grandparents' stuff got sold to strangers last month, and that tomorrow I'm picking up the check for the liquidation of everything but the house.
I don't know if it's just a natural, temporary dip in my mood.
I don't know if it's the initial relief of having some control restored fading to a more normal level of functionality that seems low in comparison.
I don't know if I'll feel better again once the drugs have had time to really start working.
I don't know if I am heading back down into another well.
It's like riding a roller-coaster blindfolded. There's no way to know if you're about to take a little dip, or that headlong plummet straight into the black.
The past week has been so bright. I've come back to myself. There are still some things missing, like 75% of my creativity, like my daimōnes, but the other things that made me me have returned. I'm so happy I feel better. I'm so relieved. I'm trying to take advantage of it while I can, but today I'm worried again, afraid again.
I tried to talk to Sargon about it after he badgered me into confessing what was bothering me.
"This is just like you," he said. "Coming up with things to worry about when there is nothing to worry about. Just try to enjoy this while you have it."
And I thought to myself, "My god, even after all this, he still just doesn't understand how bad it is." Because if he did, he would understand how horrifying the prospect of revisiting that place truly is, and understand why it is so hard to just ignore the fear.
Which is not fair. He does understand. He was just frustrated with me for picking at a healing wound. He wants me to stop making this worse for myself, as we both know I often used to do. Words, words are nothing, I forgive them. But they make me wonder.
Do I really do that, invent things to worry about? Or am I forced, chemically, to feel the worry, fear, and depression, regardless; and so I look for something to explain it, because if I can find a way to explain it, it's possible I can fix it and make it all better?
Maybe all this time, I've been putting the cart before the horse.
I just don't have an answer.
All I know is that I'm tired of this. I'm tired of lows so low they drain the savor out of the happy hours in between. I'm tired of never knowing if what I feel is the result of something real that is upsetting me, or the result of faulty wiring making the world seem unpleasant even when it isn't. It makes me doubt everything I feel.
And here I am, after the best week I've had in forever, rambling just as depressively as ever, instead of taking pleasure in feeling as good as I do. Sargon's right. It is stupid. Very. And you know how I hate stupidity, inefficiency. But that doesn't make a difference.
It will get better. I already know that. I have total faith that there will be normal, happy times again. I'm not afraid of never seeing the dawn again. It will come. Duh.
I'm afraid because I know there is always a shadow, for every light. And I can't face the raw pain in that darkness again. I can't face the numbness that comes after the pain, the un-human nothingness I became, less than animal, a fungus, featureless, alive in only the meanest sense of the word.
It was a living death.
We should only have to die and be reborn once. But with half my life ahead of me and a fractured soul, I may have to do it a dozen times. More.
I don't have the strength to face it again so soon, I swear to you by bell, book, and candle, I don't. But I have no control over whatever's coming. For all I know this is just a brief surfacing between plunges. That's the nature of this thing, and all the positive thinking and self-talk and behavioral modification and forced fun-having can only stave off the beast for so long.
Ultimately, it has nothing to do with how cleverly I try to outwit it. It's a physical disorder. All I can do is hope my strength lasts long enough for the drugs to work or for it to cycle around on its own. That takes a lot of strength. If it comes back before I've got my wind again, oh, Christ, that might do the trick at last.
I think of the truly horrific suicide statistics for the bipolar. I don't want that to be me. And for all the well-meant assurances that it won't be, you know, nobody else was there in my skull the night a couple months back when I realized that dying really was an option.
I weighed it and measured it and put it aside. I chose another path. What, was I going to leave my husband and my friends and my cats behind? Was I going to give up thunderstorms and shooting tin cans and cracking open a new bottle of perfume? Could I really step out of a world that has blackbottom pie in it, and Steven Strait, and tiny golden frogs? Oh, hell, no.
But I decided that. And if I'm brought back to that crossroads again, and again, and again . . . I'm afraid that someday I'll decide to take the only path I haven't tried a hundred times before. I mean, I don't think I will, but I think I understand some of what makes it so attractive.
It's not always giving up, when you choose to die. Sometimes, it's like this:
You're taking the only option left to take. It's a kind of fighting. It's a last act of resistance, a final voluntary step taken in spite of everything else you can't control. Whatever else you may say of suicide, it is not a passive act. It is the ultimate defiance, because it's the only thing you can do that your sickness cannot ever undo. It cannot steal your death from you.
Suicide is destructive, and violent, and cruel. It is unspeakable. It's a horror. It is all those things. But to the people who choose it, it must seem like something else, too, or they wouldn't do it. And I'm terrified because I've come so close to it that I understand that point of view now.
Right now, the suicidal thoughts are gone. I want to live again. I very passionately want to live. And I want it to be a life: full of gladness, and free of the threat of the dark.
So I'm going to commit a different sort of defiance, and try to live tomorrow as though that threat did not exist, as though this is really it: the turning point, the beginning of better days, for however long it lasts.
I'm going to turn my back on that darkness, no matter how it howls. I might fail, but yanking another day from the jaws of the thing that will hunt you forever is maybe the only victory I can have against it.
I'm tired, and afraid, but if I have to steal back my humanity one fucking day at a time, so be it. It's always been this way, hasn't it? The world's throat, my teeth.
Edit: un-f-locked.