No Booze, no smokes, no twitter.
Four days in and i’m starting to wonder why i’m trying to do all 3 at once. Each one is a coping mechanism.
Trying to manage the stress of real life, and not being able to turn to the things you rely on a bit of a total mindfuck.
So i seem to end up sitting at home, wondering why i’m bored out of my brain, just waiting for something to happen.
This isn’t much fun.
When ENTJs sense that they are losing control, they feel an increasing need for completion. If stress continues, they become distracted by a compelling “got to” and “have to” state of mind. Their need to master a situation then becomes misdirected and they engage in compulsive behaviors that preoccupy their attention and time. Feeling helpless, and lacking confidence, they resort to completing simple, meaningless, repetitive tasks (i.e. cleaning, counting, inspecting ) in an effort to avoid a growing sense of failure. By avoiding ineptitude at all costs, their competence and ability are never fully tested. Ironically, these all-consuming distractions are the very behaviors that prevent ENTJs from fulfilling their basic need for achievement and improvement
First: No i’m not back on medication.
But i’m finding stability and happiness in strange places. Namely, being in control of my life. Honestly, i’m disorganised at the best of times, and would usually pass this off as being me and how i lived. My life used to be an organised chaos, living day to day. never remembering what what i was supposed to be doing on any given night. Forgetting everything, and never achieving anything
I have changed so much in the last 4 weeks. I’m moving into a new place, i have my “bipolar DJ book” – named by a work colleague, not because i’m bipolar, because the methods i use to remember things are methods use to cope with bipolar disorders. It also had DJ headphones in the front. By remembering things, i’m getting things done, both little things, and big things. I’m actually getting things done.
Despite a heartbreaking experience recently, i’ve never felt more in control of my life, and that control makes me happy. I planned to do a blog post this week on TPD, and i fucking did.
I’m really looking forward to the future.
I’m smashing this out while it’s in my head, and the laptop is about to run flat, it won’t be proof read.
Today feels like a total return back to the start of the year. i fucking exploded in the car, everything pissed me off. Put the slightest pressure on me, and i lose it. I actually *feel* really unhappy.
Don’t know whether it’s the extra stress going on at the moment, or something else, but i feel like i’m balancing on knife edge.
I’m totally off meds, have been for a long time, but fuck, right now, i’m ready to destroy things. After spending so many years being constantly stressed 24/7 (those who know me well will know exactly why), now being under pressure for a few weeks totally sets me off.
Tonight, i totally fucked off C. and went home so i could relax, have a beer, try and work on tunes.
I got home, my brain melted, tried playing PS3, and ended up writing.
Something has got to give.
The doctor said that i would need to stop taking prozac for 4 days before i could begin to take the efexor. I had a few days to deliberate and decide about whether I whether i’m ready to commit.
I was pretty keen to give it a shot. Just because prozac hadn’t worked perfectly, something else has got to work right? i can just keep changing until i find something that works right?
C sat me down and gave me a fairly accurate reality check. She didn’t like the idea, knowing the potential side effects. She didn’t want me to stay the way i was. She loved me before, even if i a was a little bit volatile.
She had very valid points.
For the first time, i was beginning to see exactly what this is about. By trying to change so many things about myself, it had completely changed the dynamic of our relationship for the worse. Worse than it was before.
So much to think about.
Monday i was due to start taking the efexor, that was 10 days ago. I didn’t even get the script filled.
When i first started taking antidepressants, i honestly thought that i would be a fairly easy thing to do. I’m an average kind of person. I’m not allergic to anything, medication works the way it should generally with no side effects . I take a drug to fix a symptom, symptom goes away. That’s how it works. I can’t recall i time where the first treatment hasn’t worked.
So when the prozac treats the symptoms, but changes my personality, this creates issues.
Do I stop altogether? Do I change medication? Do i stick with what I’m on?
This is nothing short of a bastard of a decision. There has been enormous changes in my circumstances, even over the past week, and the decision to medicate isn’t as easy as it was 4 months ago.
If i change medication, I’m locked in. It’s a simple as that. Efexor is much harder to come off. Once i’m taking it, whether it’s working or not, i can’t just stop. If i find it doesn’t have a different effect, i have to take a reduced dose until i can change. And when i do change, from all accounts, it will put me through hell.
Is this something that i want to commit to?
I’ve changed so much in my life in 4 months. I quit my job and found a new one. The new job is unbelievable. I’m at uni studying something i enjoy. I’m not living in the same house, and i drink a lot less, and I treat my body well.
Do i really need to have my thoughts and emotion tempered? The medication stopped me from destroying my relationship, but it’s changed me as a person and I’m no longer the person C fell in love with.
So what do i do? Do i take something knowing that it will probably produce the same results but present new issues?
Or just fuck everything off and take my chances?
(This will be national blog posting week, there’s lots to get through)
Short answer: No, i don’t have to rename it to the efexor diary. After my recent problems with prozac, and feeling decidedly too grey/warm/fuzzy about everything, i booked into the doctor. A few people had told me that if things weren’t working for, it may just be that the medication isn’t suited for you, and changing may yield different results. It was all down to the individual.
Typically, i had a different doctor again, with whom i needed to explain all the symptoms. I have little patience at the best of times, but she was already 40 mins late, and i’d been sitting down for nearly 45 minutes. I explained how i had been feeling. I feel guilty actually, I’m complaining about feeling “Okay”, when some people would love to feel as good as i do even half the time. Dealing with depression is a shit part of life, why should i be let off so easily?
The result, I can change medication, I have a script for efexor.
But i haven’t filled it yet…
I’d never thought that i’d have an issue with being “good”.
“How are you Rich?”
“Yeah, good. I guess.”
But it’s deeper than that. I don’t have an issue with being good. But what do you do when being good is the normalisation between hypomania and depression? My “good” is a replacement for everything between
I feel like i’ve lost my spark. I still function day to day, as i did before Prozac. My moods have calmed, and everything is pleasant. But pleasant sucks. Pleasant is fucking boring. I feel my life and feelings are diluted.
Ironically, being good is ruining some of the best things in my life.
It’s been two months since first writing a post in the prozac diary, and I’ve been overwhelmed by the response I’ve received. I didn’t expect so many of my friends and acquaintances to have stories similar to mine. I even discovered my father had been on antidepressants about 15 years ago, when he was still working out details of the divorce with my mother.
So, how do i feel now? Pretty much the same i think. It’s hard to quantify and describe something that isn’t tangible. Because so much of my life has changed in the past few months, if difficult to argue that one thing alone has changed my mindset. I’d say if not for one other thing, I can now identify what is making my life good, and and what is bringing it down. It gave me a bit of clarity.
I’d say its a safe bet that if i wasn’t being medicated, I would still be turning up to a job I hate, complaining that i hated my job, but accepting that’s how life was supposed to be. I’m well aware of the reality that not everything in life is going to make me happy, but something that you spend a majority of your day, five days a week doing, shouldn’t be taxing on the rest of your life.
I still have a lot of work to do, and the next few weeks will reveal a lot about me.
The past few weeks has seen me fall back into old habits. I’m finding that my temper has been harder to control, and I’ve been far more prone to snapping, especially when behind the wheel.
There’s something about it that sets me off. I broke the inside handle on the passenger door the other night, because I’d been waiting for nearly 30 minutes for C to finish work. I’d opened the door for some reason, maybe to poke my head out, and seeing that she was nowhere to be found, i slammed the door, breaking the plastic that secures the handle to the metal on the other side. Good one dickhead.
Mt days are spent doing music work, but i seem to be procrastinating more than usual, doing blogging on echo kinetic, but the thing that is really starting to get to me is that i am in no way in control of what happens the next couple of weeks.
I have a finite amount of money, which seems to be disappearing at a frightening rate. C is looking after the payout money for me (good idea, trust me), and using it to pay my bills and compulsory outgoings. She’s also paying for all my food, entertainment, everything. I don’t even have enough loose change for a quiet pint at the pub.
It’s like my freedom has been taken from me. Everything is now controlled by other people, potential jobs, my day to day living, even down to what i can do for dinner.
This really sucks to put it bluntly, and i know that I’ve got at least another week of this, because the job that looks promising has an HR department that moves at snails pace.
Wooo…
