It’s time to spin the wheel!
(spins Wheel of Maladies, it stops on “sleepiness”)
And it’s sleepiness! Yes, today you will be incredibly sleepy for no apparent reason, making getting anything at all done extremely tricky!
That’s what today’s been like so far. I guess my extra exertions yesterday, with the eye doctor appointment and everything, took more out of me than I thought.
And/or I am fighting off an infection of some sort. Maybe the same one that seems to constantly lurking in the background lately.
I say that because I also feel a by now all too familiar soreness in my ears, nose, throat, and lungs, and my nose is running.
But the main thing is Mister Sandman parking a dump truck of sand on my chest then dumping it straight onto my eyes.
If this is malaise, it’s an extra strong dose of it.
Of course, that’s making writing these words for you wonderful people all the more difficult. Just getting my thoughts together enough to write them down is proving to be a challenge, My mind keeps drifting away.
This is when all the mental muscle I have developed over millions of words added to this blog o’ mine comes in handy. I can make the words come out even when my energy is being drained away by something.
Plus I am feeling a little perkier now that I’ve gotten a can o’ carbonated beverage (fizzy lemonade, yum!) on the go.
Jesus, could this all just be dehydration?
If so, my hydration game is getting really out of hand. It’s not like I have gone all day up till this point without drinking any water. I’ve had a couple of glasses.
Then again, the sleep I’ve been getting has been heavy and troubled and therefore pretty sweaty. Maybe I’ve been sweating it out as fast as it’s been going in.
Once more I contemplate just sticking a hose in my mouth and inserting a catheter so that the fluids can pass through me unhindered.
I am but a bend in the river.
On the psychological front. I suddenly realized this morning that I have been feeling quite anxious lately and that my lowered Paxil dose is the probable cause.
Hence my getting super stressed about the bug people coming over , and my continued stressing about not having ordered any gifts for my roomies yet let alone being able to get cards to my family.
These things are genuine issues but my mental illness has blown them way out of proportion and made me panic over fairly trivial things.
And this is, in a strange way, progress.
Because it means my emotions have been sufficiently thawed out for me to start getting old symptoms back, only this time I can meet them head on and try to learn to handle them on my own, without the Paxil, permanently.
I sure am glad I never gave in to the wild temptation to quit Paxil cold turkey, though, because if this is what a 25 percent reduction twice a week feels like, a 100 percent reduction would have sent me to the ER in a very bad mental state.
It does bother me that due to the blister packing of my meds, I no longer have the option to go back to my previous dosage of 40 mg a day instead of 30 mg twice a week.
I am seriously considering telling my pharmacist to dispense my meds normally once this batch of blister packs wears out.
There’s so many little annoyances with them. Like not even knowing what I am taking any more. If the West Coast Retina people had asked me for a list of medications yesterday, I might have been able to name three or four but the rest are a black box to me now, I don’t remember their names at all.
Where in the pill bottle era, I knew them all because I saw them every day.
I will think it over, because the blister packing IS convenient.
But also irritating.
We will see.
More after the break.
More on anxiety
As opposed to moron anxiety, which I think we all have these days.
I must admit to experiencing a highly perverse form of nostalgia. This anxiety I am experiencing really brings me back to the days when I had first moved to this area and all my enthusiasm for job searching was gone and I had sunk into a nightmare world where I peed out the window because I was too scared of bumping into other residents to use the shared bathroom on my floor of bachelor suites.
Are they also bachelorette suites?
Of course, those were not good times. Even after I got onto the Paxil and gained some distance from the anxiety = enough to handle it some of the time anyhow = my life was very difficult because even when I was alone in my apartment, even little noises from my fellow residents just living their lives could set me off.
But nostalgia is funny like that. You can even miss the bad times. Kinda.
Come to think of it, I dug myself out of that hole too, and I did it by starting and running the local furry community. Through it, I was able to do a heck of a lot of social healing.
I’ll never forget that moment just after me and the local fluffies had just got out of seeing The Faculty at The Hollywood and I was looking out over Broadway and it suddenly hit me just how good it felt to be actually out and sharing and connecting with people.
And in that same moment I also felt an enormous sadness because now I knew what I had been missing for so long. Now I had something to contrast my loneliness against.
It was a very emotional moment.
And now I hope to have more of those. Yes, because anxious again sucks, but I am so much stronger and saner now. And now that I know that it’s just that old beast anxiety rearing its big dumb head again, I am confident that I can overcome it.
I just need more things to DO.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.