I am in pain, I am awake. I am coming down from an anxiety attack. I have been on a self-imposed break from my normal source of social interaction and entertainment due to a mental health crisis that is hopefully being ...well. Handled a bit better. And I am re-watching my Dirty Jobs DVDs. Coming down off of/weaning off an anti-anxiety medication that I had THOUGHT was actually HELPING me I am amazed at just how much different a person becomes taking these meds and now I have a bit more empathy for folks with things like paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and any other that require medicating via psychotropic drugs.
Before I had simply said blindly 'they should take their meds and be responsible about it' with my usual Autistic, no-grey-area nuance. I still believe that to a point... that point being that I now realize why schizophrenics and bipolar folk may like who they are off of their medication better than who they are while on the drugs. Whether or not who they are off the meds are the ones safe to be around others in society or not.
I still think those who know they are dangerous when not medicated should take that medication regardless of how they feel because that's just common sense/decency, so long as they have access to those medications. And I have always believed that many of us with mental illness (or moreso than the general population) can choose to let it define us or we can try to become more than our illness/disorder/syndrome/condition. Or at least that's something I tell myself.
The medication I was taking is one I won't name, for my own reasons. But I will describe the effects it had on me.
At first, the biggest change I personally noticed was that it made me very drowsy about a half hour after taking it, so I only took it at night so that it wouldn't put anyone else in any inconvenience if I happened to say, pass out completely with no adjustment. The only other things I began to notice was that my brother and I were able to actually talk without arguing with one another. I didn't become irritated with little things he did that previously enraged me, I did and said fewer things that enraged him. Even my mother took notice of the 'new me'. Her moment of realizing something was different was a bit more dramatic than I knew.
It started when she took one of my phone calls. A college classmate had helped arrange for me to have an interview at a place she had given her two weeks' at. My mother had not only taken the call for the interview, but set it up for me. This, I was grateful for. She then told me that I would have to drive myself out there, because my brother would have our other car until well after the time my interview would take place due to yard work and such for one of our relatives. I said all right and asked her to go over the directions with me.
The day of the interview I had to get up fairly early, had breakfast and left in plenty of time. The interview took place almost an hour's drive--with traffic--from my house and timing it was a bit of a challenge. And then, on the way there when I made a slight wrong turn whilst within sight of my destination... the power steering of the car completely died and I had to strongarm the wheel to even turn into the parking lot of the office I was to be interviewed at. Just before I walked into the office I texted my mother to let her know that I would need a ride from the end of the interview because the car broke down.
I went through the interview--I did not get that job, kind of glad I didn't now--without much of a hiccup. I'm fairly certain the reason I didn't get that job was my lack of experience. Either way, I ended up not only waiting outside while my family prepared to come and get me, it began to storm. Tornado warnings, in fact, were voiced for the area and I ended up having to duck into the salon around the corner from the doctor's office to escape the weather. The salon folk were even nice enough to let me use their phone when my tracfone ran out of minutes and even let me have a glass of water without even penciling myself in for a brow wax or anything. (I also nicked a bit of candy from their jar at the front desk. Lunch had been a bit canceled due to the car's farting out on me.)
When my cavalry finally arrived in the blustering wind and almost pouring rain--thunder, lightning and everything--the first thing I noticed when I got into the working car was the look my mother was giving me. I asked her what the look was for. And she replied "...You're not crying."
If I wasn't as self-analyzing as I tend to be, this would have been something I would have either taken as a joke or been insulted by. But since I am often cripplingly self-analyzing, the fact that I hadn't noticed it was a shock. Normally even being told I had to drive to a place I had never ever been to before BY MYSELF would have brought me into an absolutely paralyzing panic attack and crying hard enough that I would need a powerade or something to rehydrate with. Not only had I managed to navigate to an area that was not only unfamiliar to me, but far away from my home, the car had broken down while I was on the way there. Not only had I made it there, I made it in time for my interview and WENT THROUGH THE INTERVIEW WITHOUT BREAKING INTO HYSTERICAL TEARS. AND THEN I CALMLY WAITED IN TORNADO CONDITIONS FOR MY FAMILY TO COME RESCUE ME FROM THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. HOLY (sorry mom) SHIT.
So the simple statement of 'you're not crying' held a bit more significance than a joke or insult. It was as amazing to me as it was to her. She then confessed that she had been waiting all week--it had been a day or two before the interview--for me to break down and come to her crying and begging her to drive me to the interview, don't make me do it alone don't please oh my FRIG don't make me. I'd done so for things far lesser than an interview.
...And so the anti-anxiety medication felt like the one thing I had been waiting for. The 'I-give-no-frigs' pill that would even me out and maybe help me to function as an average adult.
But my drugs mantra of 'what's the side effects' was something I ignored in favor of the benefits the drug gave me. Slowly my ability to feel any sort of pleasure in things began to suffer. I stopped writing in my previously ever-present spiral notebooks which contain my notes, character profiles and ideas as well as my work on the various unfinished novels and stories I have. I stopped feeling like things had meaning.
That was at one pill a day. I then became employed at a small roofing company in my town. Due to the stress that I began to feel there and the problems that arose from my inability to cope with it like a 'normal' person I began to take more than one a day to even myself out more.
And then The Incident happened. That's something that I'll go into in more detail later as that particular story has no end to it just yet and I don't want to tell a story without an end juuuust yet. It happened, and it shook me to my very core.
In an attempt to cope with it, I began taking three of those pills a day. At this point, I thought perhaps I just had been suffering from enhanced feelings of my normal depression from an uneven blood saturation of the drug and my body was having mini-shocks from not having it at a certain level at all times. I now think that this was me trying to justify having to take the medication because of course it couldn't be the cause of or an enhancer for the unbelievable stress I was under due to The Incident.
The turning point was when my mother came into my room and asked me seriously if she and my stepfather should check me into a local mental health facility, because I was scaring her more than I possibly had ever scared her with the way I talked about how I felt. I felt there was no reason to exist, and simply desired to cease existing. Because everything was pointless, and there was nothing I could do to impact any of it. After a long talk, not only did I agree to wean myself off of the drug and to take a week long hiatus from WoW simultaneously. This was because my mother did not want me to have any additional social stress--my biggest trigger--while coming down off of the drug.
The biggest struggle was admitting that I had realized--remember that I am self-analyzing to a fault? Well, haha...--that I had been experiencing this dysphoria since I began taking the drug. And I had ignored it because... I liked that I could suddenly be able to have a relationship with my younger brother, whom I usually had alienated because I was naught but the irritable, nagging older sister who was bothered by him breathing. I liked not bursting into tears over anything. I liked not giving a frig. What I didn't like was not being able to give a frig. And my family did not like that in exchange for being a bit easier to deal with, I wanted my life to end and I took no pleasure in anything. At all. Even a visit from my toddler cousins and a gift of a betta fish failed to give me any joy.
I wanted not to feel like I was a burden due to my having Asperger's Syndrome/high functioning Autism. And I have learned that like Rumplestiltskin on Once Upon A Time says constantly: Every magic cure has its price. And my family was unwilling to trade my will to live for a more manageable me.
That's what it boils down to. And in the week so far--I began weaning off the pills on June 25th--I have noticed the change in myself. I have ideas again. I can write. I can play pokemon until my DS battery dies. I talk at a mile a minute again. I remember my almost endless repository of mostly useless facts again. I also feel as though the other shoe is about to drop. While I know feeling like myself again is amazing... that cushion of relief is going to be punched by reality again shortly. I know it is. But for now I am glad to be feeling more normal again, even if it means I'm going to end up fighting with my brother, exasperating my parents and alienating people I meet in person until the end of time.
Speaking of 'reality' (LOL, subject shift. But seriously, enough serious blog.)
If Dirty Jobs was a fictional show, Mike Rowe would likely have amazing, 4th wall shattering powers. He even breaks the tenuous 4th Wall that reality TV is 'bound' to.
The way he interacts not just with the audience and the folk he's--by his own words--slowing down but with his crew is by my eye, innovative for a show host. He demonstrates a relationship with the people whose lives he puts in danger by having to say, be in close proximity to large reptiles or having to hang thousands of feet in the air by a little harness (window washing in hawaii) and to me, that still sets Dirty Jobs apart from all other reality shows. Especially from any other that has tried to replicate the premise.
I'm halfway convinced this is because of the very nature of the show, and the fact that in these settings even a TV show host is not afforded the luxury of being anything but real, especially with the crew he worked with.
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