So it's been awhile without internet. I was livid when it went out due to the circumstances but I actually got used to the "freedom" not having it gave me. I sat and spewed out creative ideas for 2 hours one morning and then sketched them out later. I felt really good about it. I'm still having a bit of the withdrawal symptoms mentioned in the last post but they are definitely getting better. I just really want to know the cause of it. Whatever. There's certainly no explaining my mind.
Therapy has really started kicking in. I think my therapist is awesome and she's definitely the only one I've had out of 6 that actually gets it. Hell, and she's "just" a graduate assistant. Such bullshit in the psych community. One high ranking psychiatrist asks me why I have a fetish with guns and knives and the next one after having just met me denies everything that another concluded after 2 years of testing. The people that have helped the most don't have any medical degree. Strange. I guess that helps reinforce why I suck on paper so much but do so well in practical application; it's not about how much school you've done but what you've actually done when it matters.
Things are better overall. During this weird withdrawal period I have been super moody, irritable, reclusive, and unpredictable. It's what I think PMS is just minus the abdominal cramping and discharge. One moment I'd be normal and the next I'm yelling at someone and fantasizing about ripping their heads off and quitting my job. It really has gotten better though. I still feel some weird zappy sensations now and then but it isn't as pronounced as it was 1.5 weeks ago.
A huge indicator of my current progress is evidenced in my feeling towards a recent acquaintance. I had met her twice at McNally's and was immediately attracted. My first thought was, "Incredibly attractive, good speech and humor, and she does nursing... awesome!" Yesterday I facebook-asked her out to lunch or whatever and she responded by saying that it would be nice but she is currently dating someone. Here's the deal: I was not at all upset. None. I just liked the interaction. Weird I know! At no point was I even partly crestfallen. I was actually just happy that I could interact with someone (albeit pathetically through facebook) without getting terribly anxious and depressed as a result. It's a good thing.
I'm still not very good at school but I think I am managing. I think my Chinese Civilization professor took mercy on me. Granted, he's the only professor I have been close to in five years since I've had him for 4 classes now. I signed up late, missed the first week, and therefore missed a huge paper assignment and have never been to my weekly recitation. I got a class-wide email last week about attendance. He sent us all our current attendance scores to keep us updated and make sure there were no discrepancies. I had 100% attendance reported. I have been to no more than 20% of them. That's a liberal estimate, too. What makes me feel bad is that I emailed him way before this asking about discussion sections and where I was supposed to be and whatnot. He responded very sternly and in a way that said, "Don't keep messing up, it's not that hard, it's all in the syllabus." After a week or so he grabbed me after class and asked me if everything was ok and if I knew what was going on with everything. He was very sincere and sounded concerned. Probably didn't help that all week I had been to class with no paper or pencil and just stared blankly at the wall when I usually am quite responsive in his classes. I just told him, "Yeah, I got it, sorry, I'm just a bit crazy lately, literally" and I smiled, cheerfully said thanks, and left. Looking back on the way I spoke and acted it was obvious that something was a lot wrong with me. It makes me really sad though to think that he cut me some slack because I had an excuse. I don't like to use myself as an excuse and I never mean to. He does have my hospital discharge papers which detail why I was there and what I was diagnosed with. :\ Makes me feel pretty weak. I'm taking 11 hours and can barely keep my head above water. It's interesting to think that I'm doing markedly better than I have since LAST September.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Whack-a-mole
I have been playing whack-a-mole with mental illness and personality disorders for a year now and I'm super tired of it. Here's what's got me down the past two days:
Last Tuesday or so I had therapy and it went really well. So well in fact that the next two days I felt amazing. I was honestly optimistic and enjoyed the company of others without being drunk. Things were really turning up and I thought that the therapy was really kicking in. Saturday was Mal's birthday and I ended it by staying up until 8am with Kailey. I woke up around 2pm and just felt so exhausted for the rest of the day. I studied with Nora from about 6 to 9 and then went to bed around 10:30. I felt so weird and tired that day but I just attributed it to the long night I had before. I also felt feverish and nauseous so I assumed that the tiredness was because I was getting sick. At the time I just knew that I was going to wake up multiple times during the night to throw up. I never did. Monday comes around and I got up at 7:30am to work on a take-home test for developmental biology. I struggled with that until 12 when the class got out. The entire rest of the day I felt incredibly irritable, depressed, hopeless, exhausted, and mildly sick. It was bad to the point where I would be sitting at my computer just being normal and then suddenly break down in tears. All day I felt like I had a golf ball in my throat because I was holding back tears. That's the kind of stuff every day was made of before I got to the hospital.
Also, I started noticing "the zaps". It's a colloquial name for a symptom of "discontinuation syndrome" which is just a euphemism for withdrawal. I've had this before when I stopped taking Cymbalta a few times. It's really hard to describe but it feels like all of your nerves and brain suddenly buzz for half a second. Kind of like a cold chill but more unpleasant and more up in your head. It also feels like a brief moment of dizziness. It's incredibly annoying is the point. I was super irritable for the rest of the day and got progressively more depressed. Today I woke up feeling pretty fine. I took a test at 9:30 and did quite well. I was pretty positive until I went to parking services to get a parking pass. They assigned me SG4 again for the 5th time. That made me mad. I went back to my car and had a ticket that I missed by 15 minutes because I just couldn't find that last dime in my pocket. I of course found it when I got to my car. So that stuff pissed me off more. I dragged myself to work where I just got more and more tired and irksome. Oh, and the stupid zappy/shocky stuff is still happening.
The reason that this is strange to me besides just feeling physically and mentally like shit, is that I am not stopping any medication. I stepped down my Paxil dose for 2+ months and the last one I took was over a week ago. The half-life for paroxetine is about 10 hours is what wiki said so I should have been feeling this right after I missed the next dose if I even felt it at all. Usually people get these withdrawal symptoms after abruptly stopping their meds. The only other thing I can think of is that I haven't had any alcohol since Saturday night. It doesn't make any sense though because the symptoms started the next day. I've gone multiple days before without a drink and was fine so it doesn't make any sense for me to be feeling any kind of alcohol withdrawal. I don't even crave it. Now that I think about it, the first drink I had Saturday was around 7pm and it actually made me feel sick and I had to take a nap. I admit that I'm pretty borderline on having an alcohol problem but these would be the symptoms that someone would feel if they drank hard all the time, wanted it in the morning to start the day, hid it from people, etc. None of this makes sense and I hate it. I wish it was something like alcohol withdrawal because then I would know what it was. This is just dumb.
Last Tuesday or so I had therapy and it went really well. So well in fact that the next two days I felt amazing. I was honestly optimistic and enjoyed the company of others without being drunk. Things were really turning up and I thought that the therapy was really kicking in. Saturday was Mal's birthday and I ended it by staying up until 8am with Kailey. I woke up around 2pm and just felt so exhausted for the rest of the day. I studied with Nora from about 6 to 9 and then went to bed around 10:30. I felt so weird and tired that day but I just attributed it to the long night I had before. I also felt feverish and nauseous so I assumed that the tiredness was because I was getting sick. At the time I just knew that I was going to wake up multiple times during the night to throw up. I never did. Monday comes around and I got up at 7:30am to work on a take-home test for developmental biology. I struggled with that until 12 when the class got out. The entire rest of the day I felt incredibly irritable, depressed, hopeless, exhausted, and mildly sick. It was bad to the point where I would be sitting at my computer just being normal and then suddenly break down in tears. All day I felt like I had a golf ball in my throat because I was holding back tears. That's the kind of stuff every day was made of before I got to the hospital.
Also, I started noticing "the zaps". It's a colloquial name for a symptom of "discontinuation syndrome" which is just a euphemism for withdrawal. I've had this before when I stopped taking Cymbalta a few times. It's really hard to describe but it feels like all of your nerves and brain suddenly buzz for half a second. Kind of like a cold chill but more unpleasant and more up in your head. It also feels like a brief moment of dizziness. It's incredibly annoying is the point. I was super irritable for the rest of the day and got progressively more depressed. Today I woke up feeling pretty fine. I took a test at 9:30 and did quite well. I was pretty positive until I went to parking services to get a parking pass. They assigned me SG4 again for the 5th time. That made me mad. I went back to my car and had a ticket that I missed by 15 minutes because I just couldn't find that last dime in my pocket. I of course found it when I got to my car. So that stuff pissed me off more. I dragged myself to work where I just got more and more tired and irksome. Oh, and the stupid zappy/shocky stuff is still happening.
The reason that this is strange to me besides just feeling physically and mentally like shit, is that I am not stopping any medication. I stepped down my Paxil dose for 2+ months and the last one I took was over a week ago. The half-life for paroxetine is about 10 hours is what wiki said so I should have been feeling this right after I missed the next dose if I even felt it at all. Usually people get these withdrawal symptoms after abruptly stopping their meds. The only other thing I can think of is that I haven't had any alcohol since Saturday night. It doesn't make any sense though because the symptoms started the next day. I've gone multiple days before without a drink and was fine so it doesn't make any sense for me to be feeling any kind of alcohol withdrawal. I don't even crave it. Now that I think about it, the first drink I had Saturday was around 7pm and it actually made me feel sick and I had to take a nap. I admit that I'm pretty borderline on having an alcohol problem but these would be the symptoms that someone would feel if they drank hard all the time, wanted it in the morning to start the day, hid it from people, etc. None of this makes sense and I hate it. I wish it was something like alcohol withdrawal because then I would know what it was. This is just dumb.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Days and days!
Therapy yesterday was quite revealing for me. We pulled out another "part" of me: Avoidant-attachment. It's pretty much the overarching problem with my psyche. I want to be with people and be involved with them but it makes me really uncomfortable. This leads to me reaching out to people, getting close, and then pulling away. Through a little meditation/visualization exercise I learned more about the purpose of my Critical-judgmental part. It's there for a reason and everyone has it but mine is super out of control. It is there to check ourselves and others so that we know what we did right and wrong, it's just that mine does this to myself all day and just beats me up. This causes me to become more detached from people because they start to irritate me. I get isolated and then feel guilty for distancing myself from the people I love. We came to the conclusion that this part has intentionally created a chasm between me and everyone so that I don't hurt them or get hurt myself. I'm terribly afraid of hurting people and if I do, I pull away and avoid it. This realization made me cry because it was so powerful and descriptive of my troubles with others. It was a good session.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Here I am
Things have been pretty good. I dropped Ochem 2 because I simply don't have the mental faculties to deal with it right now. I've missed a lot of work in my other classes due to my craziness. I'm done taking Paxil. I got a Yamaha DX7 today. I've started practicing the piano again.
Therapy is going well. We're focusing on practicing mindfulness and meditation right now. Interpersonal process groups start up sometime soon but we still haven't heard anything from the counseling center about it. Overall I'd say my moods have been generally pretty good. Some days are a little wacky still for no reason but I'm just glad that I don't have days where I wake up and start crying anymore. There are of course triggers still but they don't completely destroy my day like they used to. I guess right now I'm just trying to actually relax.
Therapy is going well. We're focusing on practicing mindfulness and meditation right now. Interpersonal process groups start up sometime soon but we still haven't heard anything from the counseling center about it. Overall I'd say my moods have been generally pretty good. Some days are a little wacky still for no reason but I'm just glad that I don't have days where I wake up and start crying anymore. There are of course triggers still but they don't completely destroy my day like they used to. I guess right now I'm just trying to actually relax.
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