Just Prompts: "Disturbia" Lyrics
What's wrong with me?/ Why do I feel like this?
I'm going crazy now...
It's a thief in the night / To come and grab you
It can creep up inside you / And consume you
A disease of the mind / It can control you
It's too close for comfort
So these are apparently lyrics for some song or another. I haven't listened to the song, probably won't, but I don't need to because the words alone touch enough of a nerve. (This part of the words, anyway, the "bum-bum-bum-de-dum" part not so much.)
Something you have probably gathered about me if you read my journal, especially in the last week or so: I take prescription medications to help me regulate my mental and emotional states.
I refer to these as my "happy pills" because deprecation and humor is often the best way to tame a thing we hate. And let me be clear: I hate being on medication. I hate lots of things about that. I hate the stigma, the whispering inner voice that says I'm weak because of this, I'm broken, I'm a nutcase. I hate that I can't drink, an activity I used to enjoy immensely, because now I run a good chance of alcohol poisoning myself due to the interactions of the drugs in my system. I hate the side effects of the Prozac and the other drugs I take, which include but are not limited to: headaches, random bouts of nausea, sporadic insomnia. I hate that most days it feels like there's a layer of muffling cotton in between me and the world-- I don't have to deal with the black depressions and the uncontrollable fits of anger, but the tradeoff is that I don't get that much pleasure from the highs, either; this is called mood blunting. I hate the effort it takes to motivate myself to do everyday things, the effort it takes to care.
The only reason I take my medications is because I hate who I am without them even more.
I'm being very blunt about all this not because this is fun to talk about. It isn't. If you think it's in any way enjoyable to confess shit like this to a varied group of people on the Internet, some of whom I barely know... it isn't.
Being crazy (yes, I know, this is neither accurate nor PC but it's the way I think of it) is neither fun, nor romantic, nor interesting, nor glamorous, nor cool. None of that. It's tedious and frustrating and it is, for me, just a fact of life. Something I have to take into account each day-- did I take my pills this morning? Did I remember?-- that never gets any less distasteful but I have to do it because that's the cost of living my life.
The reason I'm discussing it so publicly is not, as I've said, that I enjoy it. I don't want attention because my brain chemistry is wonky, and I sure as hell don't want anybody's pity. But I'm talking about it because I can talk honestly about it and it's something that should and has to be talked honestly about. Because of the stigma.
In our so-very-therapied-and-medicated society, it's almost become a running gag-- if someone loses their temper or says something unacceptable, it's become a joke to wonder aloud if they forgot to take their meds that morning.
Nobody wants to be the person for whom that isn't a joke, but a reality.
Nobody wants to be the person pointed at and whispered about as having gone round the bend, as being a little cuckoo. Nobody wants to acknowledge they might have something messed up in their brain, because of what it says about you. If I admit I need drugs to help me function, then doesn't that mean I am broken? That I am fundamentally messed-up in some intrinsic, deep-down way?
The last eight years have largely consisted of my learning to make the distinction between myself and my brain. The brain is an organ just like the lungs or heart, and it can and does get injured, sometimes through accident and sometimes through trauma and sometimes through genetics. If a bone is broken, we set it, and we don't tear ourselves up inside over the fact that it needs to be fixed. But the brain's trickier, because when it's injured, what's broken is our very ability to think rationally about ourselves.
I don't have any magic words for how to get over this particular hurdle. Educating yourself is good: back when I was first considering medication (and wrestling with just these associations), my therapist recommended I read up on what, exactly, I would be putting into my body and how it works. I did, and that helped-- when you can name things, when you can say, all right, my serotonin levels are very low, and this is the reason why I am feeling like I am a complete failure at life and that everyone and everything in the universe holds me in contempt and disgust-- when you can tell yourself that, it's like a life preserver thrown out to you in the middle of the ocean. The ocean-- the despair-- is still there, but there is something to hold on to. It helps.
The hurdle is one of ego. It's essential to comprehend that whether or not your brain is acting up has nothing to do with how tough you are or how smart you are or whether you deserve it or not. Clinical depression (or other disorders) is not something that can be out-stubborned or out-thought (or diagnosed yourself, I hasten to add). It can be dealt with, but only when you accept that you are, in fact, wounded, and that you will have to be treated like you would for any more tangible injury.
That you may have to continue being treated, for many years, because the science is not exact yet and the drugs are very, very far from perfect. Injuries of the mind are the sort that cripple.
Science isn't the only way to go about this, for that matter. There are other routes. I can't speak to them all because the drug way was the one I took and it's the one that has, more or less, worked. Again: not perfectly. Again: I hate being on meds. I have not stopped looking into alternatives for myself.
Despite my intellectual awareness of everything I've just said about separating the disease from your sense of self, I'm still instinctively leery of posting this, of discussing this. I am doing so anyway because I think it needs to be said, but more so because it's entirely possible that there are people I know-- or people I don't know, total strangers maybe, surfing the Internet-- who need to hear it. If even one person gets something helpful from this, then that outweighs the question of my dignity.
Done now. Off my soapbox. Thus ends your Public Service Announcement of the week from Zippy Levine. I can only speak for the benefit I myself have gained from medication, your mileage may vary, all disclaimers as they apply.
But if you're reading this and have been wrestling with the idea of letting drugs control your moods-- if that concept is distasteful to you-- I pose to you in return this concept from someone who's been off her drugs the last two weeks, and isn't having a fun time of it:
Is it any better to let your moods control you?
I'm going crazy now...
It's a thief in the night / To come and grab you
It can creep up inside you / And consume you
A disease of the mind / It can control you
It's too close for comfort
So these are apparently lyrics for some song or another. I haven't listened to the song, probably won't, but I don't need to because the words alone touch enough of a nerve. (This part of the words, anyway, the "bum-bum-bum-de-dum" part not so much.)
Something you have probably gathered about me if you read my journal, especially in the last week or so: I take prescription medications to help me regulate my mental and emotional states.
I refer to these as my "happy pills" because deprecation and humor is often the best way to tame a thing we hate. And let me be clear: I hate being on medication. I hate lots of things about that. I hate the stigma, the whispering inner voice that says I'm weak because of this, I'm broken, I'm a nutcase. I hate that I can't drink, an activity I used to enjoy immensely, because now I run a good chance of alcohol poisoning myself due to the interactions of the drugs in my system. I hate the side effects of the Prozac and the other drugs I take, which include but are not limited to: headaches, random bouts of nausea, sporadic insomnia. I hate that most days it feels like there's a layer of muffling cotton in between me and the world-- I don't have to deal with the black depressions and the uncontrollable fits of anger, but the tradeoff is that I don't get that much pleasure from the highs, either; this is called mood blunting. I hate the effort it takes to motivate myself to do everyday things, the effort it takes to care.
The only reason I take my medications is because I hate who I am without them even more.
I'm being very blunt about all this not because this is fun to talk about. It isn't. If you think it's in any way enjoyable to confess shit like this to a varied group of people on the Internet, some of whom I barely know... it isn't.
Being crazy (yes, I know, this is neither accurate nor PC but it's the way I think of it) is neither fun, nor romantic, nor interesting, nor glamorous, nor cool. None of that. It's tedious and frustrating and it is, for me, just a fact of life. Something I have to take into account each day-- did I take my pills this morning? Did I remember?-- that never gets any less distasteful but I have to do it because that's the cost of living my life.
The reason I'm discussing it so publicly is not, as I've said, that I enjoy it. I don't want attention because my brain chemistry is wonky, and I sure as hell don't want anybody's pity. But I'm talking about it because I can talk honestly about it and it's something that should and has to be talked honestly about. Because of the stigma.
In our so-very-therapied-and-medicated society, it's almost become a running gag-- if someone loses their temper or says something unacceptable, it's become a joke to wonder aloud if they forgot to take their meds that morning.
Nobody wants to be the person for whom that isn't a joke, but a reality.
Nobody wants to be the person pointed at and whispered about as having gone round the bend, as being a little cuckoo. Nobody wants to acknowledge they might have something messed up in their brain, because of what it says about you. If I admit I need drugs to help me function, then doesn't that mean I am broken? That I am fundamentally messed-up in some intrinsic, deep-down way?
The last eight years have largely consisted of my learning to make the distinction between myself and my brain. The brain is an organ just like the lungs or heart, and it can and does get injured, sometimes through accident and sometimes through trauma and sometimes through genetics. If a bone is broken, we set it, and we don't tear ourselves up inside over the fact that it needs to be fixed. But the brain's trickier, because when it's injured, what's broken is our very ability to think rationally about ourselves.
I don't have any magic words for how to get over this particular hurdle. Educating yourself is good: back when I was first considering medication (and wrestling with just these associations), my therapist recommended I read up on what, exactly, I would be putting into my body and how it works. I did, and that helped-- when you can name things, when you can say, all right, my serotonin levels are very low, and this is the reason why I am feeling like I am a complete failure at life and that everyone and everything in the universe holds me in contempt and disgust-- when you can tell yourself that, it's like a life preserver thrown out to you in the middle of the ocean. The ocean-- the despair-- is still there, but there is something to hold on to. It helps.
The hurdle is one of ego. It's essential to comprehend that whether or not your brain is acting up has nothing to do with how tough you are or how smart you are or whether you deserve it or not. Clinical depression (or other disorders) is not something that can be out-stubborned or out-thought (or diagnosed yourself, I hasten to add). It can be dealt with, but only when you accept that you are, in fact, wounded, and that you will have to be treated like you would for any more tangible injury.
That you may have to continue being treated, for many years, because the science is not exact yet and the drugs are very, very far from perfect. Injuries of the mind are the sort that cripple.
Science isn't the only way to go about this, for that matter. There are other routes. I can't speak to them all because the drug way was the one I took and it's the one that has, more or less, worked. Again: not perfectly. Again: I hate being on meds. I have not stopped looking into alternatives for myself.
Despite my intellectual awareness of everything I've just said about separating the disease from your sense of self, I'm still instinctively leery of posting this, of discussing this. I am doing so anyway because I think it needs to be said, but more so because it's entirely possible that there are people I know-- or people I don't know, total strangers maybe, surfing the Internet-- who need to hear it. If even one person gets something helpful from this, then that outweighs the question of my dignity.
Done now. Off my soapbox. Thus ends your Public Service Announcement of the week from Zippy Levine. I can only speak for the benefit I myself have gained from medication, your mileage may vary, all disclaimers as they apply.
But if you're reading this and have been wrestling with the idea of letting drugs control your moods-- if that concept is distasteful to you-- I pose to you in return this concept from someone who's been off her drugs the last two weeks, and isn't having a fun time of it:
Is it any better to let your moods control you?