Imaginary

If you need to leave the world you live in
Lay your head down and stay a while
Though you may not remember dreaming
Something waits for you to breathe again

I’ve stepped out of the stupor of a few weeks ago, it seems to have been theraputic. I think I’d been pressuring myself too much, and it was nice to just give up on life and have a break from it. No worry, no stress, no hates, no passions, just lying in bed and waiting to waste away. I think it was a bit of a shock to my system when I started eating again though… lets just say that I’ve become familiar with the bathroom in my new place.

Venlafaxine awaits it seems, as the prescription I picked up this morning was for a reduced dose of dulox. I have no idea yet when I will be starting the new pills, as I have yet to see my doctor. It’s nice that they’re tapering down the dulox this time, I certainly wish it had been tapered when I started it.

I don’t really know where I’m going at the moment, it’s difficult to see what the point is in life. I’m surrounded by people who seem busy, happy, absorbed, yet I feel cut off from whatever it is that they know. This past year has changed me so much – I never even expected to be alive now. How can I profess interest in the mundane things that people use to make their lives tolerable when I know that I should be dead, that my very presence here brands me as a failure.

The presence of all the years gone by, all the different Chouettes, weighs heavily on me. It’s almost hard to remember that they are all the same person, that all those experiences happened to me, not to someone else.

Today I was reminded of the first proper album I ever bought (I refuse to count the Spice Girls as “proper”!) – Fallen by Evanescence. It was the first thing that made sense of some of my feelings, gave me music to express them in and to lessen their power. Listening to it now is a bittersweet experience – I still feel the same emotions on listening to the music, but it also makes me feel regretful that I have not been able to move on, that I’m still having the same struggles with mood as that lonely confused 15 year old me was.

Maybe the change isn’t possible, maybe I’m trying to medicate myself out of existence.

I linger in the doorway… of alarm clock screaming monsters calling my name
Let me stay… where the wind will whisper to me
Where the raindrops, as they’re falling, tell a story…

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Tick Tock, Tick Tock

This.

I’m so good at pretending, so good at putting on a front, that I even fool myself. I’m acting well, even mananging to seem outgoing and carefree, but that’s what it is, an act.

I can’t see further ahead than 24 hours, can’t contemplate planning further ahead. Just concentrating on sleeping, eating, keeping going, not accidentally trying to kill myself. It’s easier to act carefree when that’s the case, because there are no consequences.

I’m not suicidal, I don’t want to die. However, I don’t want to live. Just to crawl up in my little ball of numbness, to stop this insane situation, to admit that I can’t handle things.

I want to isolate myself, I want nobody to care if I go missing, to be able to slip away and drown in my own incompetence.

I haven’t yet managed to sort out the change to venflaxine, which is providing plenty of self-flagelation fodder. What price being too ‘depressed’ to get an antidepressant prescription? Ironic, rather…

I suppose there’s fear here too. Fear every time I hear something odd, or see something out the corner of my eye, fear when I feel “odd” because often these things have preceeded things getting a lot worse, these have preceeded suicide attempts and slight side-steps away from reality.

I think I am fine, that these are normal things that I’m just being particuarly bothered with at the moment due to my slight low mood, and the chances are that I will be fine… but that it is not hugely helpful, since I do generally think I’m fine even when I’m really not.

Meh, long moan, but I do feel that it is so very hard doing it on my own. Even more on my own at the moment, since my keyworker from the young-persons-place is away at the moment, has been for weeks, and instead I’m seeing someone else who does not know me so well.

I really honestly do not know how everyone else manages it so seemingly effortlessly.

I feel like I’m pedalling frantically just to keep my backwards drift to a managable rate, got no idea how to move forwards instead of backwards…

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Antidepressant, Take #5

Today I saw Coloured Mind‘s psychiatrist, though of course I didn’t tell her (the psych) that. She seemed nice, though did take part in the usual linguistic dance whereby professionals refuse to say very much and instead you get to do the talking, and thereby condemn yourself in your own words. I hate it when medical appointments feel more like an assessed interview (and one that’s going badly at that) – it’s not really an atmosphere that’s conducive to talking and explaining difficult things.

Her first suggestion was to reduce the duloxetine from 60mg to 30mg in order to reduce my sleeping problems, which I was unsure about due to the “interesting” time I had after my citalopram dose was halfed last year.

So then she suggested that I just carry on with the duloxetine, which had been what my GP wanted to do. At this point I surprised myself and burst into tears – it seems that that had been the final straw needed for my desperation to find some way of expressing itself.

However, it seemed to be a good thing, as she then agreed with me that cutting my antidepressant wouldn’t be a good idea, and commented that I “shouldn’t be this depressed” on 60mg of duloxetine, as it’s a high dose. So, she offered to switch me onto venlafaxine, which is apparently “good for treatment-resistant depression, especially in young women”.

So, here goes with antidepressant number five… 😕

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