Because I am out of sorts. (See what I did there? All this and brains too. )

I feel sort of irritated and restless and sick of everything right now. I get the feeling that there is something that I want, but that I don’t know how to get or even how to recognize what it is.

So I am just left feeling pissed off and sort of under the weather and gross without being able to put my finger on just what the fuck is wrong.

I think if I could drive and had a car, I would deal with this sort of thing by just jumping behind the wheel and going for a good long drive to someplace I have never been before.

Jut for something to do with my energies and to feel like I am escaping my life for a bit.

I am telling you, afternoons have become the hardest part of my day. Mornings I sleep, and the evenings I feel fairly centered and okay.

But afternoons are way fucked up. I wonder if it is because I take my Paxil with supper, therefore the hours before supper are the ones further away from my Paxil dose.

Then I take my Paxil with supper and it smooths me out for the evening.

If so, I suppose I could divide my Paxil dose in half and take a half-dose every 12 hours instead of a full dose every 24. That might even things out in terms of effect.

I will talk with my therapist about it when I seem him next, on March 7.

Of course, my recent lowering of Paxil dosage would only exacerbate such an issue. But it will pave the way to my adding Wellbutrin or the like to my meds, and that makes it totally worth it.

And, of course, I knew the reduced dosage would have some unpleasant effects. Getting more access to my emotions comes at a price. At a minimum, there will be an adjustment period.

I mean, I have not even been on the lower dose for a full week yet.

And I have some 30 mg tablets left, so if I really feel bad, I can bump back up to 35 mg for a day. Having that option available is a comfort to me, although the odds are that my innate stubbornness will keep me from exercising it.

I will just endure. And it is not like I am depressed or utterly miserable or anything.

I just feel vaguely irritable and overwrought. Perhaps once my psyche adjusts to the new dose, this sort of mood will become something more positive, like the urge to go do something active instead of sitting down in front of this old computer of mine like I always do.

Certainly, if money was not a hurdle, I would not be sitting here right now. I am not entirely sure what I would be doing, but it would be more interesting that vegging out in front of the computer like fucking invalid all the damned time.

Maybe I should invest in a bus pass. Then if I feel the need to just leave and go DO something, I could at least catch a bus somewhere.

Granted, I would still have very little money, especially after paying for the bus pass every month. But the GVRD is full of things one could do for free, I would imagine.

It just takes unsticking myself from this computer chair, getting into street clothes, packing some supplies into my trusty bag, and heading out into that big beautiful world out there.

Sounds so simple, and maybe it is. But simple and easy are not the same thing. Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to do.

Still, I feel good about my progress versus social anxiety. I went to that Overeaters Anonymous meeting last night, and that was a whole whack of social novelty and exposure, and I was not unduly bothered by social anxiety pains.

The potluck dinner was nice. It was soup and salad based, which I don’t mind at all. I would not want to eat it for every meal, but the occasional soup and salad meal suits me just fine.

There were desserts too, but I am being a good boy lately, and so I did not partake of them. It helped that none of them were the sorts of dessert I like, though. They were all heavy on canned fruit or otherwise fruit based, and I don’t like cooked fruit desserts very much.

They all looked like the sort of thing I saw in my mother’s cookbooks but that you never see on the shelf of a bakery or a grocery store. And there’s a reason for that.

The actual meeting was okay. The ladies there seem very nice. So did the other people at the potluck. It took place at one of those little Christian churches of no particular affiliation of which I am growing increasingly fond because they seem to be the last refuge of the sort of friendly, compassionate, moderate Christianity that I think represents the best of the faith.

I am not sure Overeaters Anonymous is for me. I am not sure it isn’t, either, though. But I have doubts.

It seems geared to treat overeating like a compulsion and an addiction, and I am not sure that maps to my issues. I am more of a habitual overeater than a compulsive one. I have never been the sort of person who binges when he is feeling down. In fact, to be honest, I almost never eat between meals at all.

Plus, the meeting took place in this tiny room of the church, and by the end of the meeting, I was feeling the highly unwelcome rising panic of my claustrophobia.

I will think it over, though. It reminds me a lot of group therapy, and I have had plenty of that in the past, and while I am sure it did me some good, I am not keen for more.

Oh well, I have a week or so to decide whether I want to go back.

Had a dream this afternoon (man, this afternoon naps are wacky!) that I woke up in the year 2006, a whole seven years ago. I was my 2006 self, but with my 2013 mind.

You know, the whole “time travel via inhabiting your previous body” schtick. Clears up that whole “what do you do if you meet yourself” issue, among others.

Anyhow, I knew I was displaced in time, and I seemed to be treating the whole thing as temporary, like I knew I would revert to my proper place in time eventually.

This, I am convinced, is due entirely to thinking in television terms. I knew, deep down, that this was just one of those “character travels into their past to learn a valuable lesson” episodes, and that if I just went with the plot, I would be back to my normal life at the end of it.

And of course, here I am, awake in 2013 in my normal life, so in that sense, the dream had it right.

Unfortunately, dream 2006 was not exactly historically accurate on either a global or biographical level, but was instead the usual confused amalgam of Vancouver, my home town of Summerside, bits and pieces of other places I have visited or lived, and of course, completely insane places that could never exist in the reality outside the zeitgeist.

Too bad. An actual trip back in time to visit my past would be pretty interesting. That is a story I would love to read.

But this story is packed with weirdness. How weird are we talking?

We’re talking Elvis weird.

Yup, Elvis was in my dreams. Me and my imaginary cohorts had to go someplace where Elvis was about to break up with the love of his life and make sure everything went right, in that annoying way that time travel plots have of assuming there is a “right” version of history that must be preserved because any alteration can only make things worse.

Bloody temporal provincialism, if you ask me.

At one point, I actually had the pleasure of telling Elvis off when he was saying crude and offensive things to this lady he was breaking up with. I told him to fucking lay off, amongst other things.

So that was pretty cool. Apparently, in this dream world, Elvis was a suspicious, jealous guy who hired spies to keep tabs on his girlfriend.

No idea if that is even vaguely accurate. I hope not. I like The King.

So we leave with this lady in tow, dressed in a pretty nice pink lace outfit.

(Her, not us. Pity. )

We lead her to this tiny graveyard behind a fancy restaurant (??) and then one of my cohorts surprised me by whacking her on the back of the head and knocking her out.

They explain that she is “supposed” to be found here with no memory of how she got there. Was still a bit of a shock, let me tell you. Not sure I approve, honestly.

There was more bits and pieces, but nothing all that noteworthy.

Outside of the dream realm, today has been unusual because I had therapy this morning. Usually, my therapy appointments are Thursday mornings, but my therapist will be out of town by then, so we had to change it.

We talked about the effects of my lower dosage of Paxil, and I told him about saying a few things that I had not intended to say out loud, which is a bit tricky. But mostly, I told him, I feel better. More solid, more real, more alive. The emotional volume levels are definitely higher, but so far, that has been mostly a good thing.

I then learned some pretty interesting new information about SSRI’s and brain chemicals. Turns out, Paxil is great at turning up the serotonin and turning down your emotions, but at a cost, and not just the cost I already knew about with the whole emotional numbness thing.

It also reduces the brain’s levels of another neurotransmitter called noradrenaline or norepinephrine, and that is considered the “motivation chemical”.

So for the decade I have been on Paxil, it has suppressing my motivation levels all this time! No wonder I have found it so hard to focus and be motivated to do things. My norephineprhine levels are wack!

The end result of all this is that once I have been at least a solid month on the new level of Paxil (30 mg), the doc and I will discuss adding a norepinephrine booster like Wellbutrin to my drug regime in an effort to get me back to normal on both fronts.

I look forward to seeing what it would be like to have both greater access to my emotions and higher levels of motivation. Who knows, I might become a dynamo of activity.

And honestly, it would be about time.

Speaking of activity, tonight I will be going to a meeting of Overeaters Anonymous with that darling of the hoi polloi and international best friend of mine Felicity, primarily as moral support.

But after agreeing to accompany her, it also occurred to me that this will also be a good exercise in stretching my boundaries and going against my social anxiety full on.

After all, it will be a group of strangers with whom I have little in common and we will all be sitting around a circular table together.

There would have been a time in my life when that would have been absolutely out of the question. Unthinkable. Not a chance in hell.

But now, I am only slightly concerned, and actually looking forward to it a little. I am not anticipating great results re: weight loss, but that is not a high priority for me right now.

Plus, admittedly, having my best friend with me makes a huge difference. If I was going there all by myself, I would be pretty scared.

But as is, I will be there with Felicity, and we can face it all together.

Plus, there’s a free potluck dinner beforehand, and that helps too.

Free potluck before OA…sure, that makes sense!

Holy crap, have I been dreaming today.

It’s been one of those days, at least so far.

I am a storm-tossed dreamer who can’t find his way home
This shipwrecked existence is all that I’ve known
And if I met a policeman who knew my address
I would follow him blindly and take leave of this mess

Sorry for the sudden poetry, but I just had my exposure to this dude, and wow did it make a huge impression.

His name is Ben Kaplan, and he makes my beard feel inadequate.

That is seriously my kind of music. Emotional, poetic, raw, lyrical, withtouches of madness and sadness and badness and gladness and all the other nesses of the big old messed up world.

So today has been kind of surreal on a couple of levels. I am certainly going to hunt up whatever Ben Kaplan songs I can find. Apparently, dude is so indie that there is not even much of him on YouTube yet, and what there is of him there is all live performances, no studio tracks.

Color me intrigued.

It does not hurt that the guy kind of looks like me. Mostly, that’s just the beard (epic beard!) and glasses, but still. Us bespectacled beardies do not get a lot of media exposure, let alone get to be represented by such a rocking out dude.

But back to the dreams… oh, so many dreams.

I know that at one point, I was having a ball exploring some rich person’s sex dungeon. (Don’t worry, this does not get that erotic or personal. )

I know that before that in the dream, I had an angry confrontation with some shallow rich bitch about what a shallow, vain, and stupid person she was.

But to be fair, I kind of started it by making fun of her dress to some unnamed person who was with me, and I guess she heard.

And it was a fairly ridiculous goth type outfit. What I said to the unnamed person was that there was a fine line between dressing to impress and wearing a costume, and this girls was clearly ready for Halloween, not a night at a club.

Pretty bitchy thing to say, but what the hell, it was a dream and I am coping with a lower Paxil dosage and that seems to be shortening the distance between my thoughts and my mouth.

And that is going to be one tricky bitch to work with, as I have had a long time getting used to being able to think my bitchy little thoughts in private and amusing myself without them escaping my brain through my face and wreaking havoc in the real world.

So I will either have to learn to stop thinking evil little thoughts in order to amuse myself (boring!), or I will have to exert more willpower in order to keep my thoughts to myself.

The latter sounds preferably. I have no idea what I would do with myself if I had to stop letting the occasional nasty thought pass through my mind and amuse me, safe in the knowledge that I would never actually do or say any of the things my little inner demon whispers in my ear.

But anyhow. Sex dungeon. After my run-in with Rich Bitch, someone (I guess the person I made the bitchy comment to? Maybe?) suggested we check out the Dungeon, and I said “Sure!”.

Still, as we made out way there (via a series of increasingly bizarre and athletic steps that involved things like climbing carpeted ladders and jumping down three floors with apparently no damage to us), I felt the need to explain to my guide that I was not into BDSM per se. To me, pleasure and pain are simple, I said. Pleasure is great and pain is bad. But I was sure that there would be something in a well appointed sex dungeon that I would find interesting.

At that point, we parted company. I think she (it was a definite she) was disgusted at my confession of non-kinkiness (if only she knew!) and ditched me. But it didn’t matter because I was there, apparently.

So I wander into a random room, and it is a pretty normal room, set up like a simple hotel room, with a big bed and a bathroom and a sort of living room type area.

Now is when things start getting distinctly weird.

Because in the room is a pleasant seeming lady who is watching a video about this weird device that supposedly removes your shed skin cells from your skin and then uses them to “patch” gaps in your skin, which would supposedly protect you against disease and, I kid you not, mosquitoes.

Now that I am awake, this idea seems impossibly gross. It sounds like it would just result in you smelling terrible and having a lot of zits. But whatever.

After watching the video, I noticed that there was one of these devices in the room with us. So I decided to try it out just on a patch of arm, see what it felt like.

Turns out, it was like getting zapped by static electricity over and over again. Not my cuppa. But I suppose it was someone’s kink.

So I got bored, and decided to see what this place had in its pocketses, or in this case, drawers. I started checking out what was in the drawers of the room I was in.

Nothing too crazy. One drawer had lots of panties in it. Nothing my size though, le sigh. Another had things that looked vaguely like whips or floggers. Boring. Another had a light blue bodice with some other bits of frilly stuff that looked like straps of some sort.

Eventually, I found a computer room, where there was a big screen and porn and stuff, and most of the computer was locked away from tampering fingers. I looked over the porn selections. All boring straight stuff. The only title I remember was ZEBRA, but don’t get excited. It was just interracial.

I don’t remember much more than that. There was more, but dreams melt in daylight.

So, weird shit going on in the cabesa del Fruvous.

Weirder than usual, I mean.

Seeya later folks!

Emotionally speaking, that is.

See, my therapist and I both agreed last Thursday that it was time to take the next step and lower my daily dose of Paxil from 35 mg to 30 mg.

So today is my second day on the lowered dose, and I think I am maybe starting to feel it, because tonight I felt a great and terrible sadness settle into my soul from seemingly nowhere and I am thinking perhaps that is my body and brain missing that extra serotonin boost.

Or not. To be honest, I have no idea what causes my emotional flux. A lot of it could just be from the deep inner processing of emotion and ideas that is constantly going on way back in the background of my psyche.

It would be nice, I suppose, if this deep thought could proceed in some locked off chamber of the mind that only speaks when spoken to, but that is simply not how human beings are wired.

Instead, it is more like my consciousness is always adrift on a deep and mysterious sea which rolls and pitches due to forces far beneath the surface, forces I myself put into place but that I have long since lost the ability to control or predict.

But I cannot entirely discount the chemical changes I will be going through over the next few weeks. I have taken Paxil for over a decade for a reason, and reducing the dosage on it is not something to take lightly. I am wise to be wary of the changes I will go through in the next few weeks. Depression and social anxiety are serious illnesses and not mere phantoms of the mind, easily dismissed.

So why the reduction of dose? Depends on who you ask, in a way. My therapist wants me off Paxil eventually because there are new drugs available now which are superior. Fewer side effects, more effect with smaller dosages, and so forth and so on. And I am down with that. I agree that switching to a better drug sounds like an idea worth pursuing.

But to me, the real reason is that I want better access to my emotions. I think I am ready to reduce the dose and face more of my personal demons. This might be pretty unpleasant some of the time, but judging from the long term effects of my last reduction of dosage, I think it will be worth it.

By letting my inner demons out of their cages, it forces me to deal with them and thus rid myself of them. Paxil and other SSRI’s act as a kind of emotional anesthetic, and when I was deep in the depths of social anxiety and depression, scared of the world and feeling like I was not even real, I needed that kind painkiller in a big big way.

But past a certain point, the swelling is gone, the bones have healed, and it is time for the patient to throw the crutches away and learn to walk on their own again. Those crutches, so necessary during the first part of the patient’s convalescence, become a barrier to it in time, and you cannot learn to be a healthy person unless you put them away.

Luckily, in the case of these chemical crutches of mine, I can throw them away a little at a time. I am reducing my dosage by 1/7th, or around 14.3 percent, and that is not such a big thing in the grand scheme of things, or so it seems.

But I am wary wise of the true nature of brain chemistry altering substances. They do not operate as simple vectors, X amount of drug getting you Y amount of effect.

Biology is rarely that simple, and that goes triple for brain chemistry. Instead, it operates on thresholds. Above a certain threshold, and you get effect Y, period. Below the threshold, you get jack shit, or if you are lucky, maybe a quarter of the previous effect.

I am exaggerating a bit to illustrate the principle, but you get the idea. Each reduction of dosage of a complex drug like an SSRI could have a much larger effect than the mere proportion of dosage would suggest. My mental landscape might change by a lot more than 14.3 percent.

So I will be wary, but on the other hand, I will try not to obsess over it, because that never leads to anything good. An overactive and overpowered brain like mine can easily pick itself apart if not held in check, as I learned in my early twenties when I had severe IBS, hypochondria, depression, anxiety, and a host of other problems.

So the key is to integrate things into your consciousness in a natural and easy way, without either letting the new thing dominate or burying it under a crossroads at midnight.

Just let things unfold in their own time without trying to control the outcome. That is one of the deep and difficult lessons I am learning at this point in my life’s path.

No more micromanaging myself. It clearly is toxic to the desire outcomes, no matter how the false feeling of control lies to you and tells you that only via controlling things can you get good outcomes.

That notion rests on the false assumption that exerting control over something has no cost. But it does have cost, and the more control you exert, the greater than cost, until you are squeezing the very life out of yourself in a vain and misguided attempt at self-control.

True self-control must also include control over the desire for control. It involves leaving things alone which are best left alone, and exerting control only where it is most effective, and then, only as much control as is needed, no more.

As hard as it is for many of us who have a very deep mistrust of the universe, some things truly are better off left alone, and work just great on their own with no interference from management.

And that goes triple for all the little things that go to make up a mind.

Just let go. You will be amazed at how better things will be.

This, I hope to learn. Amen.

I don’t want to SAIL with this Ship of Fools!

Oh no no no no NO!

Heya folks. Guess what, I am getting chatty again. You knew it couldn’t last! But I might throw some links in here too. Fair warning.

Overall, I have felt fairly good recently. All that venting last week must have done me some good, because I feel less crappy than usual. More upbeat. More willing to look at the world instead of just hiding under the covers and waiting for it all to go away.

Still spending too much time in bed, though, and that bothers me.

I have been really struggling with this feeling of time as a burden lately. I think feeling better energetically just makes the problem of how clogged up inside I am all the worse, which might be why a fellow like me develops the deep but unconscious (mostly) tendency to live very gently and very quietly, practically sleepwalking silently through life for fear of waking the demon inside.

Or, to be more honest, for fear of the pain that comes from trying to access one’s energies through the big thick clog in the pipes that depression represents. It hurts so much to try to shift that thing that you just stop trying and eventually it just plain crushes you under its weight, and you learn to live a flat life, with your face in the dirt all the time.

Live that way long enough and it becomes the New Normal, a phrase that is much on my mind lately. It is a phrase with no inherent connotation. The New Normal might be better than The Old Normal, or it might be worse. Either is possible.

But I realize I have always thought of it negatively before, for some reason. Probably just the inherent pessimism that comes with depression.

But really, for someone like me, it can just as easily be a keystone phrase of hope, because inherent in the idea of a New Normalcy is the possibility of change that leads to a new better stability.

Thus, change becomes a way to a New Normal, just as safe and stable as this one, but happier and more fulfilled. Thus, change can be viewed not, as depression would tell you, as a sacrifice of all safety and stability for a random chance that things might get better, but will probably get much worse.

Instead, change can be seen as an unpleasant but temporary sacrificing of stability and predictability in order to achieve a better level of comfort and security.

Thus, you don’t have to climb the whole mountain all at once. You just have to make it to the next base camp. And you can spend as long as you like at each camp gathering your strength for the next climb.

(See? Metaphors. I have so many of them!)

That rethinking allows you to break the cognitive pattern of viewing everything as an all or nothing break for freedom (which totally programs you for failure) and instead allows for seeing things as being made up of whatever size stages you can handle, with no loss if you have to rest for a bit.

That said, I am not claiming that this represents some magical mental mantra that you can just internalize and be free. I am all too keenly aware that the cognitive breakthrough simply cannot happen until the emotional work has been done.

And that is a lesson a lot of us depressed intellectuals need to learn and embrace. We waste years of our lives trying to find a way to solve our emotional problems via intellectual means simply because we are not comfortable with emotions and prefer to intellectualize everything.

But there is no intellectual shortcut around your emotional being. It can seem like there might be, especially if you are delusional enough to confuse the joy of revelation for true emotional growth.

Sure, a brand new intellectual understanding of something can make you feel a lot better for a while. But that is merely chemical, a shot in the pleasure center like one might get from cocaine or an orgasm.

And don’t get me wrong, that is fantastic. Pleasure is very important to life. But it is not a cute for the disease, it merely masks the symptoms for a while, like any form of self-medication.

This one just fools you into thinking it is more important than it is because revelation stimulates your pre-frontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that decides if something is “real” or not, and which plays a role in assigning importance to experiences.

So sure, a philosophical or otherwise intellectual revelation feels great, and gives you a great feeling of insight. Finally, everything makes sense and you understand so much more now! It’s all so clear!

But do not mistake the relief of intellectual tension for the relief of your much more serious emotional burden. At best, it just clears up some room in your skull and makes things a little less crowded in there for a little while.

And sure, that’s very nice. But it is not curing your disease, it is only alleviating the symptoms for a little while. There is only one cure for depression, in my opinion.

Feeling things. Things you really do not want to feel. Things from your past, things you buried deep a long time ago and never thought you would have to deal with again.

Well, guess what. There is no statute of limitations on emotion. They do not just disappear if you ignore them long enough. And the more you suppress them, the greater the weight of them you are dragging around with you all the time.

And when they get heavy enough to practically immobilize you… that is called depression, and it means it is time to stop fucking around and do all that emotional homework you have let pile up.

Only when you face the fire and feel the feelings you need to feel can you ever be free.

But first, you have to be ready to stop being depressed.

And you are…. right?