Hello, out there! It's been a while, no?
Well, yes. It has. It's been a strange stretch. The short answer is that I had a bit of a brainsnap. I had a small health scare that fortunately (and completely as predicted all along) turned out to be nothing, but in combination with a few other things was enough to trigger the kind of protracted anxiety attack I usually associate with talking to immigration officials.
It was rough. There's no point in trying to make it pretty or funny, really: I wasn't functional, and even once I got the medical all-clear, I still couldn't calm down. And that's the bit that seems to make the least sense to other people, and I understand that; the best way I can explain it is this: you know when something happens that really, really pisses you off? And it pisses you off so badly for whatever reason that even if it's comparatively small, you just can't shake it off? And then you're in a shitty mood, and every little thing that happens to you after that seems designed to make your life hard, and in a tiny corner of your mind you know you're being irrational but you're just so mad about the world that your logical brain can't get a look in? Well it's like that, except it's being worried about stuff, all the time. It doesn't matter if the original source of the anxiety gets resolved; my brain is so frantic that it can't stop worrying and will start to seek out other things to focus on. Everything I encounter makes me feel more and more anxious, sets me off more and more and more, and I can't break through it at all. When I'm at my worst, I feel like I'm spending all of my time talking to myself in my head, with my logical brain trying so hard to calm me down and talk some sense into me, and my anxious brain spinning unstoppably right the fuck out.
While I tend to be a bit keyed-up generally [audience: shocked gasp], I don't get this bad very often; but this wasn't the first time and it's far and away the smallest thing that ever triggered me to this extent. And it's so fucking hard. I disappear into my own head; I try to maintain in public but am clearly not with it; I can't sleep or eat properly. I neglect people around me, or am so distracted that I might as well be neglecting them; and if I can actually manage to focus I'm often unpleasant because the social contract has been chewed up and spat out by the Anxiety Monster. Nothing works right.
To make matters worse, the timing this time around really sucked too. I got the phone call from my doctor moments after arriving at my new house to find that a) we had no keys; b) the house hadn't been cleaned; c) there was some horrible treatment on the floorboards that had left a sticky, waxy, black sludge in every room of the house, which immediately transferred itself to everything that touched it, including our boxes and furniture and selves; and d) I couldn't get hold of the landlord. This was on a Thursday; by Sunday most of the house stuff was mostly sorted out, but the damage was done and it was all aboard the crazy train. Fast forward two and a half weeks and Colleen's so completely freaked out by the way I've unravelled that she's seriously considering moving out. It got that bad that fast.
I'm doing better now, fortunately. That's how it goes: eventually the fog starts to lift, and all of my coping tools start to work better, and given enough time I'll get back to normal. But the problem is that it happens at all. Bad things are going to happen in life, actual bad things, and I need to be able to deal with them. I can't just fall to fucking pieces every time there's a mere possibility of something having gone wrong. That's not a viable way to live. I can't put myself through that, I can't put the people around me through that. It's too fucking hard.
...Which is why I've started on daily anti-anxiety meds. I fought this for a long time. I have no problem with the idea of head meds (though I do believe that they're over-prescribed - especially Stateside, of course - because insurance companies would rather pony up for medication than for long-term therapy), and I've seen them work wonders for other people. But when it came to signing up for it myself... yeah, no. I didn't want to do it AT ALL. I didn't want to take anything that might fuck with my head. I live in my head all the time, ALL the time, and I was really afraid that I might lose that piece of me somehow.
For a long time I was able to manage my occasional anxiety attack with propranolol, which is a heart medicine that can also be used to treat the physiological symptoms of anxiety. Once I had the physical stuff in check, I could usually intervene with my logical brain and start using those tools to fix the kinks. It was nice: I only used it when I needed it; it didn't have any weird side effects; and it didn't change anything in my head. I was still in control of that aspect myself.
But this last time the propranolol didn't work. I was taking as much as I could, and I'd physically relax a bit, but I couldn't get my head together no matter what else I tried. And even though now I'm feeling better, I'm afraid of what will happen next time something triggers me. Which is as good an indication as I could ask for that it's time for me to try something else.
So... I'm trying. I started on Celexa, but after only three days I was having wild side effects from it so we left it cheerfully behind. I'm now on Wellbutrin, and it seems to be going much better. I can't say that I've felt a major breakthrough, but I'm at least not feeling worse, so that's a step in the right direction. I'm on a very low dose to start with, so it may be that I'll feel more of a positive effect when the dosage goes up; if I don't, I'll try something else.
But here's hoping that I will, because I'm looking forward to finding some fucking peace. One of the worst things about anxiety, when it gets that unmanageable, is that I never feel rested. I'm on overdrive all the time, and even my comparatively calm moments aren't nearly calm enough to let me relax properly. Right now I feel pretty good; yesterday I felt pretty good; last night I was shaky and tense for no apparent reason. I can't trust that the good times will last, and that's hard. I would like to be able to enjoy the good times without feeling like something horrible is inevitably lurking just over the horizon.
Well, I guess that's that. I hope this wasn't too much of an overshare, but I wanted to explain why I'd dropped off the face of the earth, and I decided that it wasn't worth trying to cover with fibs or vagaries. So... thanks for listening. You're a lot cheaper than my regular therapist.
*****
In other and much funnier news, Colleen and I were driving through Mattapan (a very high-crime neighbourhood) the other day, and we saw a billboard that read:
'Murder... it's not okay'
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you know that gentrification has failed.
XOXO
