So I was wondering if you'd like an update of what's going on -- honestly, writing it down in an email helps me too, so thanks for being someone who I can email about what's happening, and I don't think there's much you can do at the moment to help besides what you do do, which is get my emails and say hi in the corridors and stuff. But I appreciate the chance to exchange ideas with you and be open to telling someone about things.
Me and the doctor decided to increase my medication dose about a month ago to try to get out of the pit I'd been in, especially with feeling really anxious in the morning before work, because I'm on Pristiq (an SNRI) it's supposed to help with both anxiety and depression symptoms. I had a short 'honeymoon' where it looked like it was working really well, I came to work a couple times, and besides some physical side effects (dizzyness) things were good. The third week was when the other 'start-up' side effects that I thought might happen started, agitation, racing thoughts, the 'fidgets' where I can't really sit still, and spirals of negativity that cycle all the way down to suicidal thoughts. It all came to a head last Thursday (not the day before yesterday, a week ago), when I hadn't left the house for three days, hadn't slept, couldn't taste my food or feel satisfied when I ate, felt sick to my stomach, and just, everything seemed like it was going wrong. So I spent about 2 hours on the couch bawling my eyes out (Dave wasn't home but we were talking over text) and making all sorts of crazy plans...gave serious consideration to going to the hospital because I felt so unsafe. But since that would have involved leaving the house, Dave and I decided to 'sleep on it' and see how I was the next morning, and I booked a GP appointment (since he's the one that manages my meds and stuff anyway). Surprising to me anyway, I actually slept that night :s and the next day felt shaky and nervous, but also like I was coming back up out of the spiral. I got advice from the doctor, which involved keeping up with the higher dose of meds for another month but also taking my diazepam (anxiety med) regularly instead of as-needed, so now I take a half (small amount) in the morning before I've even felt anxious and it does seem to stop it from getting to that point. Since then I've felt like yes, I am recovering, I've done some more therapy work with my counsellor (unfortunately my lovely psych is away for six weeks) and talked a lot with David, my best friends Nate and Trav, and Helen about what's going on and what I need to do.
I decided to withdraw from my coursework unit for this semester to help lighten the workload on me, and for the forseeable future I'll be working part-time rather than full time, and using the other days for appointments (as needed) and resting, reading, thinking, relaxing, and creative pursuits. So I'm building up to being able to consistently get in to work Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, do work while I'm there, and take other steps that I want to to get myself healthy again. I've kinda came to the realisation (which I hadn't before, I think this might be why situations repeat themselves so often, everyone's gotta learn sometime) that if I don't start taking my issues more seriously, and actually trying to care for myself, they won't get better on their own for ignoring them, to the point where my brain will have a go at trying to kill me. So I'm considering myself as having two jobs now -- work at TICHR and recovery for Ami.
I'm probably repeating myself from other emails we've exchanged, I think I have already said a few times that I want to start taking care of myself etc etc so I am already feeling dubious about whether 'this time' is different or not, but I guess that's gonna be the way anyway. I am feeling far more motivated and positive about being able to get better than the position and feelings I've been having recently, and it feels like I have a more realistic sense of what that might involve -- it's possible (and maybe desirable, god knows how I was before was probably not the best either) that I'll never really be how I was before all this, but that's not so terrible a thing. It's a learning process and I'm learning a lot about myself, and developing empathy for other people that I don't think I used to have, and I think those are good things, or at least, things I want.
Your ideas last night about retreating from asking the 'existential questions' definitely piqued my interest, I'm quite fascinated by that and I'm going to do a bit of thinking about it -- meta-thinking, as in, thinking about the asking, not actually asking.
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