“I will be okay. This is not real.”
“This is as real as it gets.”
“No, I know better. This isn’t me. What I think is happening is not actually happening.”
“Just take it then. Take the Xanax and this whole thing can disappear.”
“My emotions are not controlled by a drug.”
“No, they’re not. They’re controlled by four drugs to be exact.”
“…”
“Yeah, you knew that. So just take the damned thing and be done with it.”
Here, I am staring down this little, round, blue pill. This one of many, they are the glue of my existence. With them, they grant me the power to condense and contain the … what’s the word? Chaos. But, the container is still me, my head. It pollutes the one place I can recede into for solitude.
Without these pills, I am doomed to living out the chaos in bad cinematography. Sometimes, the shots are grainy, and in low resolution. There are bad angles and lighting. The acting is mediocre at best. That life is a stage and a poorly written screenplay. And in the end, not only are hearts broken, but people are shattered beyond repair.
My chest rises slowly and falls suddenly to exhaust a heavy sigh.
Damned if you do, condemned if you don’t. I will be a good girl. I will devote myself to this struggle. I will reside in this godforsaken place. At any cost, even if my frayed nerves are sparking, and the layers, upon layers of residual emotion cloud my vision to blindness. Here, I accumulate the garbage my psyche and senses excrete.
“This is not depression.”
Is it? Because, I’m not sure I know how to tell anymore. I put my BP monitor and it reads E. One of us is broken. I’ll check the pulse instead.
I am more reactive and in a very intense way. It’s as if I’m conductive, like liquid. It comes as fast as it goes. I am powerless to stop it, because it originates from me.
The idea of socialization annoys me. I’m tired of talking in circles. Hell, I grow weary imagining myself spewing meaningless words in circular logic.
But worse, I don’t want to be alone. I just want something, anything, to have a significant meaning. I am not yet willing to adopt Nihilism, and live an autonomic existence. I am more than the sum of my parts. I am not a body. I am a heart, mind, and soul, no matter how defective and dysfunctional. This existence is more than it’s face value.
I am disinterested in the repetitive, mundane activities that I participate in daily. I am exponentially aggravated by the fact that it now takes me twice the time to complete them. And I’m irreparably infuriated when my body gives up before the day is over.
Worse, I’m nearly in tears because the whole ordeal in my head is so pathetic and petty.
If it’s cyclic, then yesterday’s post is akin to The Grey Season, written two months ago. That would mean that this post is a precursor to a future post that would be synonymous with Confessions of the Pain of Payment.
Did I unlock the pattern? Or can a cause and effect pattern be substantiated?
Even if I found the map, I’m haunted. I know where this road goes and there is no off-ramp.
As the Pendulum Swings 
I never feel bad about taking the Xanax. It is what keeps me glued together, out of the paranoid everyone-is-out-to-get-me realm.
But today when I had to go pick up my Lamictal…I really had that head hanging moment of shame,knowing the kid ringing me up knew what the drug was for and that without it, I’m “sick in the head”. Which even with it, I am sick in the head, because mental illness is the bastard child of medicine.
You try to do the right thing, you feel bad.
You do the wrong thing, you feel bad.
Your description of being haunted is about as accurate of one I’ve ever heard to describe this existence, battling the demons inside ourselves.
I hope the next cycle is a better one for you, my friend.
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Sometimes, I get in this fit where I don’t even feel like I have control anymore because I’ve handed the reigns over to medication. Yeah, I was a wreck before medication. But I could handle things like stress and anxiety, even if I couldn’t control my emotions (and sometimes my actions). Now, everytime to going gets rough, I see myself grabbing for a pill bottle.
I am stronger than this. But should I deny myself relief to prove a point? Is the medication a crutch? Or is all of this really necessary? (I know most of it is). I don’t want to become reliant on medication to cope. That’s the same thing as relying on alcohol, sex, gambling, etc. It becomes an addiction. And I refuse to let addiction to hold of me again.
Ya know, what you are feeling is exactly the mind frame I was in for the better part of eight months. It was my undoing, to view medication that corrects an imbalance in the same way as one views illegal drugs and booze. I do not pop a xanax every time my panic sets in. I do not pop a prozac every time my mood dips. I take the meds as prescribed at specific times. I am functioning, in good spirits, calmer, and more level. I don’t see that as a problem. The way I was without the meds, paranoid, fearful, suspicious, angry, rapid cycling…that was a problem.
If this is the answer to correct it, I will accept the stigma of the pills.
I have mostly accepted that this medication is the same as a diabetic and insulin and heart disease and those various medications (nitros, statins, etc). It’s the benzos that I have trouble accepting. I will admit, if I feel like I’m getting out of control and I need to get a grip, and quick, I will use a benzo. Yes, I’m prescribed them to take throughout the day. But, first, I do not want to become chemically dependent on them, and secondly, they make my head too fuzzy to actually get anything accomplished. I can go through the motions, but I have to be completely aware and alert at both work and home.
This does not happen all of the time. For me, anxiety itself is a mood. I will go through highly responsive moods that result in anxiety. That’s when this problem starts cropping up. I can’t say that it has an environmental cause, because my life is always this way. It really is always something. It’s like that in everyone’s life. So, what do I do? Take the benzo and function at a lower level or not take the benzo and be in a bad mood because I’m entirely too distracted?
That’s the thing with meds, never know how they will affect us. I am sorry for your reaction because mine, to Xanax, at least, is quite the opposite, I am calm, clear headed, lucid, and high functioning.
I was just like that on Ativan, but it wasn’t enough to get the really bad symptoms. It didn’t even swipe at the serious anxiety. I probably just need to take it upon myself to lower my dose for less severe episodes. I’ll remind myself, “You always take more, but you can’t take it away once it’s in there.”
You are not defective nor dysfunctional. You need to wipe those thoughts from your head. You function differently. We all function differently. Just some of us function further outside society’s definition of acceptable. But that doesn’t matter, does it? All that matters is what you can or cannot live with or through.
Also, there is an off-ramp, it’s just unmarked and not easy to spot on the road you are so used to. If you honestly feel like things are building towards a climax of self-harm, you need to get to your psychiatrist and work on a solution to prevent it. Because now that you recognize it, you have the capability to stop it. It’s just going to take some creative thinking and dedication. Both of which you have. 🙂
That’s the struggle. Can I live with it? And how do I go about living with it? Do I just take the pill when I deem that I need it, because I know I have good judgement? Do I even have good judgement? I’d like to think so, but I’m not always so sure.
There is no self-harm involved. There are hardly any pangs of, “I want to kill myself.” I get the stirrings of depression, and the alarms go off. I’ve struggled with depression and finding my way out of those trenches for entirely too many years. I don’t want my life to come apart at the seams because I couldn’t get a handle.
So the question is, do I take the benzos? Do I take them and squash these feelings until I can properly process them?