The Sky is Up and the Ground is Down? Weird.

Here are some of the newer highlights with me... I ran out of two of my meds, recently - the first is Lamictal (Lamotrigine), which is supposed to help stabilise my mood, and the second is Neurontin (Gabapentin) which is supposed to help manage my (still being investigated, but suspect fibromyalgia) pain. Both have done quite a bit of heavy lifting in their respective departments. Both I’ve been out of for a long enough time that they are most certainly long gone and out of my system.

Want to hear the strange thing? I’m feeling fine! Better than before! What the f-... Yeah. Did the world suddenly turn upside down? Or have I just come to expect everything that can go wrong to go wrong so readily that I’m shocked and stunned when something doesn’t go wrong? I know that I’ve said for quite a while now that I expect everything bad that could possibly happen to happen (even though I also try to hope that it won’t), so it wouldn’t surprise me if I’m taking this the wrong way. I mean... good is good, right? Take it however it may come?

I’m quite sure that my mind has become conditioned so that - no matter what - I take everything and see it in a negative way. I see good things and think, “Wow, something must really be wrong, now!” Normally - or my ‘normally,’ at least - being happy and in a constant good mood was a result or symptom of something else, and never had much of a real or long-lasting basis in something good or considered ‘normal.’ Particularly mania, or more commonly for me, hypomania, was the suspect for giddiness, or even just plain and simple happiness. My brain, I imagine, would flood with dopamine, my heart would begin to flutter, and ideas and seemingly random words would flood out of my mouth as if a dam exploded.

Sans the bouncing off the walls and talking fast an in utter logorrhea, I’ve felt sort of hypomanic, though my psychologist has described this strange phenomenon as ‘happiness.’ Not mania or hypomania, not a disorder or something wrong with me. She suggested that I might just be this strange, alien thing called ‘happy.’

Now I think to myself, “Wait, so this is what I’ve been trying to achieve all this time? Weird.” I’m not saying it’s bad; it’s actually quite good! I know that. To me, though, it’s just weird. I’m not completely sure how to say it, especially in a way that would bring clarity to someone else. Let’s just say that some people live in places that have never seen the sight of snow, so something as simple as snow might be simply a marvel to them, or they may think that 68 degrees is cold. If you go to southern California in the middle of summer and it’s 68 at noontime, sure, that’d seem just crazy! It would here, too. But at the end of summer, here, that’s perfectly normal, even if others from other climates can’t quite wrap their heads around it or get used to it. No, lady, I’m not putting on a coat in September just because it’s 68 out! That’s not cold (to me)! Well, in this odd and fairly inaccurate metaphor, I’m the Californian who thinks that 68 degrees as the high in September means the world is beginning to freeze over.

Normally, after having run out of Lamictal, I would’ve quickly fallen into bitter moods and had moderate to severe withdrawals. No matter how much I anticipated them, they never came! I’ve had some minor bitterness from time to time, but it’s almost negligible; and withdrawal symptoms? I’ve had no cold sweats, no nausea and/or vomiting, no upset digestive tract, no withdrawal-specific pain, no shivers... I’ve hardly felt any sort of bad sensations since I ran out (albeit, since I ran out of Neurontin, my typical pain has increased slightly, but I’ve been constantly distracting myself from the pain, making it occur less.) Overall, I’ve been feeling better instead of worse. I certainly wasn’t expecting that. I mean... how does that happen?

One thing that I’ve noticed, however, is that - since I ran out of Lamictal - my sleep has gone from screwed up to consistently extreme. I went from an irregular near-24-hour sleep-wake schedule to a 48-hour one. I’ve been essentially going every other night without any sleep, staying awake for 34 or so hours and sleeping for 14. In middle school, I used to go just about whole school weeks without sleep, but that was because I could only sleep during the day, and school largely prevented that. This is a whole other thing, though. My body doesn’t even seem to grasp the concept of a ‘day.’ And what’s even stranger to me is that my body is staying pretty consistent with about when I get up, when I go to sleep, how long I’m up, and how long I’m asleep.

I’ve read from more than one source, now, that sleep deprivation can help with depression, and is even occasionally used as a treatment method! Since my sleep has become more extreme, with longer hours being both awake and asleep, I’ve noticed my mood is drastically improved. I’m not sure yet if those have anything to do with one another, but I’ve gotten to a place where I don’t want to ‘mess with success,’ where the success is the constant improved mood.

I’m not sure I want to mess with my sleeping schedule for fear that it might mess with other things, as well, such as my good moods of late. I’m not sure I want to mess with my meds, either, for the same reasons. Somehow, I’ve fallen into a system that seems to be working, at least relatively well, and I know that it could be, and could get, so much worse. This has been a drastic improvement, believe it or not! So why would I want to mess with that, at least right now?

Like always, I suppose I’ll just keep on trying to figure things out as I go. Make adjustments, gain knowledge... I’ll see how things go, try to go with the flow, so to speak.

A Reflection, Darkly

I used to see people die right in front of me in some of the most gruesome ways. Necks being sliced in half, eyeballs being diced, limbs being chopped off by some disembodied, evil force. Of course it was all in my head, but it was real enough to scare the shit out of me. I loved these people. Well, most of them, anyway. Looking back, I don’t know if I could ever say that was mutual with them, but I blindly loved them, anyway. Seeing someone being brutally murdered right in front of you - but not - repeatedly, day by day, with the blood dripping from the walls and ceiling, all the worse in a large crowd... I have to admit, it took a toll on me.
 
Most of my days back then, I looked down, trying not to look at people. As long as I didn’t see them, I didn’t hallucinate their horrible deaths over and over. They would still talk and act normal, since... well, they were actually perfectly fine, but that only creeped me out all the more. Just several years ago, I handled hallucinations - both auditory and visual - as well as mood swings, paranoia, and just plainly my full blown insanity much better than I currently handle my semi-treated, moderately-medicated, much more ‘blah,’ grey life now.
 
I can’t explain it - I truly can’t - but I crave with such deep, powerful longing to return to that unfettered, crazed state where my mind ran rampant and I had almost no control and very little grasp on reality. Well, I take that back... I could always tell a hallucination from reality, my mind just also maintained a constant break from reality. But these ‘breaks’ from reality were what, ironically, held me together. Without them, in my current state, I have no adequate coping mechanisms. My hallucinations were what got me from point A to point B. Now... I’m just stuck somewhere around G, not moving forward, but perhaps steadily moving backward, heading back to A.
 
Now, I don’t want to be mistaken; meds were certainly the route to go. Without them... well, my brain just might be mush and my life might’ve been exponentially worse off. These are hypothetical possibilities, of course, as I obviously didn’t stay off meds. I have fought with the costs and effects of my various med regimens for quite some time, now, of course, and it’s altered me both biologically and psychologically in quite a drastic way. I look back at what my life was five, six years ago... at it seems almost like an entirely different life from this one - an entirely different world.
 
It feels as though my soul doesn’t really belong in this new world, however, and I’m constantly being tugged back toward the old world through distant memories that hardly seem completely real; more like dreams than memories. Writing about my old self almost feels like writing fiction when it’s far from it. It’s probably some of the truest stuff I’ve ever written about, but it goes in circles, in a continuous pattern repeating itself over and over, and I can hardly elaborate further. My memories are both very finite and continuously expanding through finding the keys to those memories through scent, taste, touch, or other sensorial data. The slightest, most seemingly trivial thing can trigger an uncontrolled tsunami of memories, and these memories sometimes pour over me over and over, overwhelm me, and even control me. They’re unpredictable, and closely tether to my senses and my heart, and can sometimes seem like flashbacks or glitches, flickering on and off erratically.
 
Unless a person has personally gone through what I have, I’m not sure I could ever get someone to completely understand. It’s like I phase in and out of this world, always on the edge, on the border, between two parallel universes that are all too different simply because of a matter of perspective. There’s the old world, before meds, and then the new world, stable and sane, and I seem to have started to ebb and flow between the two. I’m not quite insane, but not quite sane, either. I’m constantly on the edge of the cliff, not even knowing where I am or how I got there, staring down and down and down, knowing that a gusty wind pushing in the wrong direction could send me falling to an inevitable demise, and yet I can’t seem to simply take a few steps back. I become petrified, staring into that seemingly endless canyon, only able to dwell on the possibility of danger.
 
I feel drugged; not from meds, not from anything I know. I feel as though I were slipped a mysterious, foreign drug to which I’m at the mercy of, for I don’t know its effects, nor do I know how much I’ve taken, how potent... anything. It’s a mystery to me. All that I know is that things don’t feel right. Things don’t feel familiar or comfortable. Things have changed and I can’t control them - I’m out of control. All I can do now is try to weather the chemical state I’ve somehow fallen into and hope to come out the other side...