Manly Men

I've never liked them. Manly men seem like an evolutionary relic that ought to be thrown away. Then again, I'm not one for feminine men, either. How about... toned down men? Men who don't base everything in their lives on being a man. It seems women often say, "Half of your thinking is from your other head." I've never wanted to be one of those men; I've always condemned those kinds of men. But women can be similar; it's just not as  cliché. Men can also be vulgar, competitive, aggressive, and many other adjectives that you often don't want to be downwind of. These things I've hated and hated for so much of my life, and even worse, seen in myself.

And now I hear that I have very low testosterone. Not just low testosterone - very low testosterone. Average testosterone for someone my age is probably 600-800 ng/dL (I'm just guessing), and 300-400 is on the problematically low in most men. So what's very low? 200 is at the bottom of average for a guy in his forties. Is mine 100? Less? What's very low, and should I be worried? I have a lot of 'female' disorders - fibromyalgia, bipolar, my suspected borderline (yet to be confirmed)... Could this be due to low testosterone? If I get testosterone replacement therapy, will I be like the guy on House and start having aggressive, angry outbursts (aside from the times that I do that already)? I mean, I'm not as chipper and unrealistically happy as the guy on House... but doesn't that mean that the possible outcome might be worse? What caused the low testosterone?

Testosterone... I've always disliked it... It's what makes men all of the aforementioned things I just... get a headache to think about. But then I'm told that it's a big problem not to have it. It's unhealthy with it, and it's unhealthy without it. But then it can be healthy with it, and occasionally healthy without a lot of it. I'm not healthy. I don't have a lot of it. So that must mean that I need more of it. Or maybe I'm screwed up regardless. Not trying to get more testosterone just seems stupid, though. Not trying a possible avenue that just might help with... something, seems stupid. I hope I don't need it - or that it isn't the cause of a problem - but the truth is... I just don't know. Maybe I'm just stubborn with my views (actually, I know I am.)

I can't imagine my life without problems, and to think that something that might be wrong with me could be solved... it makes my mind go, 'Cannot compute.' It's like a glitch. A brain fart. It's ironically scary to me. I told my psychologist that I often desire chaos. I think about dropping my meds and falling back into that chaos, but I never do it. I come back to reality and think rationally - I won't do it. I remember how unbearable it was, and how much better my life is without that chaos (even if it's still most certainly far from ideal.) But perhaps I'm still in some of that chaos - or a new chaos - and hearing about this low testosterone - very low testosterone - might threaten that chaos. That second paragraph really shows it. Those thoughts - cyclical, long tangent of thoughts - are characteristic of anxiety. The run on sentences, parenthetical dashes, scattered thoughts. Most people would probably hear about this and feel relieved in some way that issues they had been having could potentially be solved. Perhaps I just have to wait a bit longer to let it kick in.

Testosterone... Maybe I should just stop thinking and wait and see what happens. So... we'll see, I guess.

Exhaustion

I'm not 100% certain if my current med setup is mostly to blame, my fibromyalgia, or both... but I have simply had no energy lately. I'm now on three Neurontin (the med that's supposed to treat the fibromyalgia, itself), a Piroxicam (NSAID pain reliever, most likely wouldn't produce any somnolence, and hardly seems to produce any effects whatsoever), and a Norco (hydrocodone opioid pain reliever, is seemingly ineffective), and I raised my Seroquel (atypical antipsychotic/sedative) a little while ago. While some of these things would typically cause increased somnolence, the lethargy has been increasing more proportionally to my fibromyalgia pain.

The pain's been getting persistent and increasing in intensity. Tramadol became utterly ineffective and I stopped feeling its effects totally. I got an increase to hydrocodone (about six times stronger) which I've taken almost once a day for several days... I still haven't really been feeling the effects. I could almost swear they were merely placebo pills... without the placebo effect. Then again, there's a thing called the 'anti-placebo effect.' It's doubt about a drug reversing or negating the effects of said drug. It's been too little time, I think, to start building up a resistance to opioids and we've been pretty careful about dosage and how often I take the pain meds. The Tramadol I noticed was supposed to be working when the signature itchiness and slight dizziness kicked in. With the hydrocodone, I haven't noticed any effects. I can't tell when it kicks in after taking it. I just don't 'feel' it. I'm afraid that I'll have to keep on increasing the strength and dosage of pain meds and I'll become House. Actually... House takes Vicodin, a.k.a. hydrocodone. If I take something stronger, and more often over time, I'd be worse than House.

The pain's no longer dull. It's sharp, stabbing pain, wincing pain. Sometimes it's so sudden and so bad that I have to let out a moan or a groan. I can't hardly do anything before the pain starts to grow and grow and I just get completely drained of my energy. Lately, I've been having to take sudden deep breaths like I'm low on oxygen. I slept from about 4:00 a.m. (normal, if not a little early for me) until 10:00 p.m. (much, much later than normal.) I woke up more refreshed than the day before, but that doesn't say much. I was still exhausted, achy, and with stabbing on again off again pain. I just don't know the next step to this. The fibro's getting worse instead of better. It's not as bad as before taking Neurontin at all, where I was in total agony as if I were dying, 24/7. But it's climbing back up that way. It's like a race between meds and symptoms, which will prevail.

A month... Hopefully in that time something will be better and I'll be able to give a positive report to my doctor. Hopefully.

The Spectrum

I decided to make a spectrum depicting the different levels of moods I can be in. In the past, I typically wrote: very depressed ← depressed ← neutral → hypomanic → manic. This was exceptionally simple and lefts a few gaps. So... I made a new spectrum with one particularly special add in: very depressed ← depressed ← negative ← emotionally impressionable ← neutral → positive → emotionally impressionable → hypomanic → manic.

Everyone can be in a positive or negative mood. Usually, we aim for positive, and sometimes we achieve it. This spectrum, however, stretches from a central point to the extremes, not necessarily the 'base point.' I probably tend to lean more toward the negative part than the neutral or positive part, but I think that 'emotionally impressionable' is less extreme than 'negative' on the negative branch, whereas it can be more extreme than 'positive' on the positive branch. One example of being emotionally impressionable is having mood swings because of the things around you. For instance, sometimes my mood can be like clay, and every event in my day molds and morphs that clay into constantly fluctuating shapes. It's not always bad, it's not always good, but it has a consistently unstable behavior. Negative is more concrete, so that's the reason why I think that emotionally impressionable can be considered less extreme, but it's instability is also the reason why it's more extreme than the more solid positive.

For the last half year or so, I've had a great deal of being emotionally impressionable. I've identified it fairly well - almost immediately - but never quite found the right words to describe it... until now. Today... I went from crying at every little thing on Parenthood to laughing hysterically at Community to feeling like crap because of my fibro flare-up (that Tramadol simply isn't dealing with effectively.) I can't list all of the constant changes in my mood and behavior from this past day - there's just too many to remember! However, I do know that I slipped from the emotionally impressionable state to the hypomanic state. I had accelerated energy, accelerated mood, accelerated reactions, accelerated irritability... you get it - accelerated! That's hypomania.

Having this new spectrum now to identify all of my states... I could probably analyse my issues better. I can try to link the states to events or to specific behaviors (e.g. emotionally impressionable on the negative branch can cause sudden angry outbursts or quickly swing to the whimsical, careless, strange, and extroverted positive branch [though being on the positive branch doesn't always mean it's good, and the opposite with the negative branch.])

So, once again, hopefully this will help me better identify my different states to analyse and learn to cope and deal with each state as it comes along - after all, you can't simply ward off certain feelings with 'feeling repellant' or some sort of talisman of warding. They're inevitable, so instead of trying to expel these moods and feelings, I simply need to learn how to handle them. It'll be a long uphill battle, but it's a battle that needs to be fought.