Writing without a goal.
16 months.
Even during the peak of action against covid, I had people around. Social opportunities. While my social capacity falters with regularity, there were things happening then.
16 months ago, I was confined. Any idea of a social life disappeared. It has been 8 months since the event that ended that containment. I’m sore, and I don’t want to talk overtly about it. Using a particular pad for menstrual purposes broke me a week ago. My heart aches.
I needed time. Made strides toward socializing a bit when I could.
Two months.
I became sick, and as the neurological conditions wore down on me, I shut in for a month. Efforts to socialize after that resolved were made, but not kept up with.
I am contained within my own shell now.
It is difficult to determine the cause, exactly. Lack of getting out is certainly a part of it, but is that due to lack of energy otherwise? And the diminished return on communication seems odd. Perhaps it is just a time of being a hermit crab. Perhaps the lower dose of my medication is creating some issues. I do not feel cognizant.
It is most notable during psychological visits, where when pressed to think and ask and answer questions, I find myself unable to focus. I draw blanks. But I am finding it coming up in other conversations too, from a good friend even to talking with my Dad.
The phone calls with the friend have frustrated me. I think he may not necessarily notice as much, since he tends to dominate conversation and hop all over topics — not a dig at him, I know he has ADHD, and I tend to find these conversations rather freeing. Still, I have found myself annoyed when he will mention something and I focus on it and lose track of our conversation. In one call, I had to ask for clarification on every point he’d made while in this state of my own confusion.
I told him earlier tonight that I think the lesser dose of my antidepressant was causing issues. While I didn’t really say that it seems to be impacting me cognitively (if that is the reason), it is noticeable in other areas.
While the SSRI was prescribed to me for use with depression, it did also cause a notable impact on my anxiety. That has heightened dramatically now that I have more or less regulated to half the dose. And then the depression, feeling so utterly miserable during this bout of PMDD. It was, I could tell, incorrect. PMDD certainly does make things worse (not going to get into the premenstrual exacerbation thing, although I still think it’s largely preemptive to separate it into two things), but the amount of worse I felt was simply too much.
In my last appointment with my psychologist, I stumbled into stating that depression was Easy. It sounds weird, and in a moment of absolute clarity and lack of filter I described it, saying, “Depression is the one that will kill me, but anxiety is the one that dominates me.” We, of course, had to go back to the first part of that sentence as it erred a bit too close to suicidal ideation. Clarification made things better there.
What I mean is that, unmanaged, depression is extremely dangerous for me. It has a huge impact and fucking around with my medication in any capacity of necessity scares me. Managing my depression with medication and therapy has been extremely helpful. It feels like something I can handle with the tools I have been given and have been helped to develop. It is the dangerous one, but it is Easy.
Anxiety is this beast that hovers over me at all times. We’ve knocked around the diagnosis a bit, unspecified vs general, but it is ultimately all-encompassing. I face an impassable mountain every day with anxiety. I work with it because I have no choice but to do so, but of the two things that ail me, it is the one that is not easy. It is hard. It is heavy.
The beast of anxiety has worsened. It was never gone, necessarily, but it did genuinely feel more manageable at my full dose of SSRI. I think that its extreme return is an indication that I need to resume the full dose, but more evidently, the absolutely horrific way I’ve been feeling — depressed — is a far greater indicator. I think this all ties into my inability to articulate myself, to focus, to be present, to formulate sense.
There were moments the psychotic aspect of my depression shone through as well, some heightened paranoia. Something I have gotten a bit better at talking my way through.
Somehow I didn’t realize that the bulk of our treatment was cognitive behavioral therapy. In all the things I sit here and google — and I’ve had a dictionary pulled up while writing this — I didn’t bother to check into what kind of care I was receiving. I just went with Whatever It Is because it worked. CBT works for me. And I cannot fathom how it doesn’t work for others, but that’s viewing things very narrowly and selfishly. The tools built within that have helped me tremendously, so dealing with that paranoia seemed a bit easier a task to handle.
We also talked of ACT, and I realized it’s something I’ve been doing for a while. I am now paying closer attention to the times I do, and times I do not, however it was a technique I must have picked up at some point in dealing with anxiety as there have been many times I’ve said “this is okay to feel this way right now.”
I am hesitant to alter my dose of my SSRI without talking with my doctor. I see him in 3 weeks or so. I think two days after my birthday. All the same, it doesn’t make much sense to wait to take action if I am feeling so awful.
But who knows. I could always message, I guess, not that I feel like doing so.
There’s no point to any of this. I wanted to write, I’m just too tired, too lost. So another one to the void.
