What Is This and What Do I Do With It?

i hate it that i even have to vent nowadays. i feel ridiculously awful. bwuh. my venting steam is gone. i’m just going to go to bed and cry it out a little bit.

my life needs meaning. i’m going looking for some tomorrow. i’ve got a pack of smokes and a some books and a few jobs to do, that’s how you find meaning, right?

Being a slave to these fucking pills is already getting tedious; my grandma has been giving me advice about living pinned down by these bastards. She’s been doing it for thirty years, but she can’t help me.

At the beginning of the year, the insurance company decided that they would begin only covering one pill a day of my duloxetine. Which is a problem, because I take three. We’ve been negotiating since the first of the year, while I’ve been coasting along on samples. They’re out of samples. I’m out of duloxetine.

I’ve got a couple days before I start suffering from this wonderful little thing called SSRI discontinuation syndrome. So I’m facing withdrawals beginning pretty soon if I can’t get my meds and I really don’t know what to do and I want to cry and I just want to get the things I need to be successful and get on with my life.

Did I mention that I have an enormous fucking musical in a week in a half? Yeah, that too. Fuck everything.

i wonder why

oh yeah

my meds are fucked in the ass.

i wish i could get scripts when i needed them and i could get my meds when i needed them.

do i look like i’m running a meth lab?

where would i even keep it

Jesus H. Christ this has been a bad two days.

I have ADD, as you guys have probably picked up by now, and as a product of this, I have a lot of trouble getting in routines and staying organised. So, because of this, when my routine is screwed up, it means that my entire world goes completely to shit. And that’s where I’m at right now.

During the winter break, things have gotten really difficult, because my psych told me that she’d like it if I stopped taking my Concerta (an ADD drug) over the break, because its the kind of drug that won’t leave you suffering withdrawals or have any negative effects if you don’t take it; the other reason is a good one. I’m at the highest legal dose, which means that if I need more help, I’m going to need to move to another drug. So, moral of the story, it’s a good thing for me to take a break from  ’er.

The problem, though, is that it’s thrown my routine to hell. I’m having trouble taking my other drugs, which has left me with withdrawals and encroaching depression as the Cymbalta leaves my system. Sometimes it really sucks being a slave to these substances. I wish I could just be a normal person. I wish I could just wake up every morning and get down to business.

This blog was intended to give me a place to advocate mental health awareness and whatnot, but now it’s just becoming a mopey personal journal. Oh well. I really don’t give a fuck, just don’t read on, because there’s really not going to be anything good posted today.

I don’t really know what happened. Nothing changed. There’s really no reason for me to feel so bad right now. But I feel particularly terrible. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been able to see my therapist for nearly a year? Maybe it’s because I’m so painfully poor that I can’t even afford clothes to keep me warm? Maybe it’s because, no matter how hard I try, I’ve managed to land myself in mediocrity or just straight up failure.

I think it’s the last one. Despite my efforts, I’ve been left lately basically failing every goal that I’ve set up for myself. I just want to be able to be good at something. Anything. It’s this depressing mediocrity that I can’t take.

it’s amazing how crying your eyes out and throwing things at the wall and screaming at a god you know doesn’t exist and generally expressing all your anger and rage and sadness doesn’t make you feel any better.

It just makes me realize how pathetic and lonely I am.

I am not in a good place right now. Not at all. At least there’s nothing sharp around. That’s a gift at least.

Don’t read this. It’s fucking garbage.

I can’t fucking do anything right. My work is worthless. Why do I do anything or try anything?

I feel like my hands are tied right now. Everything has gone to fucking shit. I hate everything. It’s like, no matter how hard I try, I really don’t get anything out of any of my endeavors. Everyone’s seen it; my mom reminds me all the time. The things I try really aren’t worth my time. I move slowly, slower than everyone around me, but I feel like I work harder. Maybe it’s because I’m flighty and no one can trust me. I’ve tried working on it a lot, but there’s really not much I can do. I really try, and I feel like I always get my work done, but it’s just not good enough. Nothing I do is good enough.

Maybe my standards are too high. Maybe I don’t work hard enough at anything. Well, I mean, I know I don’t work hard enough at anything. And I know I do too many things. I guess it’s a Jack of all trades, master of none kind of thing. I dunno.

I always feel like this. I feel like I’ve come so far, but it’s not far enough, and I haven’t done enough. I don’t know why I get my hopes up about anything. There’s really no point in getting excited about anything, because I know I’m not going anywhere. I’m nothing and I know I am. I mean, believe me, everyone tells me. Everyone fucking reminds me.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck fucking everything. I’m hopping off. I’ve made a mess of myself. I’m all sweaty and covered in tears and dirt and awful.

I’ve been asked so many times why I post of tumblr or facebook or whatever when I’m feeling really terrible. I’ve come up with tons of excuses, but the real reason is that I’m reaching out. I’m stuck at home. There’s no where I can go to be alone. There’s no where I can go where anyone wants to listen or even gives a fuck. I’m so fucking angsty and lonely and I hate everything.

Have you seen that show, Hoarders? Here’s a synopsis:

Each 60-minute episode profiles one or two interventions. During most of the first season, the hoarder worked with either a psychiatrist/psychologist, a professional organizer, or an “extreme cleaning specialist”, each of whom specialized in some aspect involving the treatment of obsessive/compulsive disorders, anxiety disorders, and/or hoarding. The psychologist-plus-organizer/cleaning specialist combination leads a group of cleaning professionals, family, friends, and relatives of the hoarder in conducting a two- to three-day decluttering session to attempt to get as much of the hoarder’s mess under control as possible. In most instances, the intervention is prompted by a crisis, such as the threat of eviction or the removal of minor children from the home.

I’ve been watching this show extensively. I’ve been thinking a lot about my house and my clutter. Anyone who’s been to visit will agree that my house is cluttery. I wouldn’t say that we’re hoarders, or that we’re in an unhealthy environment, but we’re just not neat. I think it came around because, as a kid, my mom had a lot of trouble balancing running her own business and being a single mom, so keeping things clean fell by the wayside.

Partially as a symptom of my ADHD, I have a lot of trouble keeping things organized and in order. Disorder is tied really closely to my depression, and so as I become less organized and less in order, I just get more and more depressed. Because of this, I’ve been working really hard on finding coping skills to act as a safety net, to keep me from losing control.

The style of ‘freak-show reality television’ has become really popular in the USA. People with disorders and problems are put out for everyone to see and paraded about in a modern day freak-show. Hoarders has been condemned as this kind of thing. But I think there’s more to it.

We can’t be the only family that struggles with clutter and disorder. By watching these therapists work with individuals’ problems, I myself have learned coping mechanisms for cleaning and keeping myself from getting out of order. I think it serves a valid purpose.

Honestly, I don’t know what this post was for. I was just thinking about it, and decided to post something. Meh. What a mess I am.

So, I’m subscribed to this great chick on Youtube, thedanizblog. And on her vlog, she posted a video about her use of meds and trouble people have given her for it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfhklz-TVQg&feature=channel_video_title This made me think. Psych meds get a bad rap from individual society and people as a whole. There’s a pretty bad stigma associated with them, and then there are all the stereotypes that come along with taking them. So I think I’ll make a post about my experience with psych meds to help other people beginning psych therapy, and also to help dissuade some rumors. Leggo.

Right now, I’m taking two meds (but four wonderful pills a morning!): Cymbalta (90mg) for depression, and Concerta XR (56mg) for ADHD. I’ve had some bad experiences with meds, but compared to a lot of people, I think that my experience has been relatively easy. The problem with psychiatry, in general, is that, frankly, we don’t understand the mind and how it works. We don’t know what causes bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia or depression. We just know that when we give (most) people certain drugs, they suddenly get better. Obviously, we’d like to learn how to cure psychiatric disorders, but we haven’t gotten that far yet. Because of this, psychiatric treatment is basically trying you out on different meds and seeing what happens. It’s tough and it can cause a lot of trouble, but in the long run, once you figure out the right cocktail for yourself, your quality of life improves dramatically.

I started off being prescribed an anti-depressant by my GP. Don’t let that happen to you. He gave me a random anti-depressant that he thought might work, but it pretty much failed miserably and made everything worse, so I visited a psychiatrist. There’s a reason he’s a general doctor and not a psychiatrist; he had no idea what he was doing.

Anyway, back to my meds. With my cymbalta, I started off at the starting dose of 30mg, which did absolutely nothing, and we progressively cranked it up to 120mg, which worked for me, but caused some pretty crazy side effects and was tremendously expensive. We decided to come down to 90mg, and it has been working alright (I struggle more with depression than I did at 120, but I think I’m okay with that). With the concerta, I tried four or five different ADHD medications and finally settled on concerta. It’s somewhat new, so I haven’t quite figured out what my ideal dosage is, but we’re working on that.

I always like to mention side-effects, because with psych meds, they can be weird and pretty strong. The most common side effect with cymbalta is nausea (my mom took it at one time a long time ago for chronic pain, and the nausea was so severe that she couldn’t handle the medicine—and this was at 30mg). Surprisingly, I’ve never had a problem with nausea, but I have had some weird side-effects with it. The side-effect that I’ve struggled with the most is dry mouth and dry eyes, along with hyperhydrosis (basically I just fucking sweat all over the place). I’ve basically realized, now, that it’s much easier to deal with these problems than it is to deal with debilitating depression, ya know? So, to compensate, I carry water around with me wherever I go (and I carry gum, because dry mouth makes your breath smell bad and can be bad for your teeth) and use a lot of eye drops. I do sweat a lot, and people do ask, but I usually weasel out of it. It’s kind of awkward to tell everyone, “I’M SWEATY BECAUSE I TAKE PILLS THAT, WHILE KEEP ME FROM HANGING MYSELF, SCREW WITH MY BODY’S ABILITY TO REGULATE WATER.”

With the concerta, I’ve yet to have any particularly problematic side-effects. The only thing it has caused is a lack of appetite. I don’t really much, but, then again, when I started taking lithium a long time ago, I gained a ton of weight, so I guess this is the universe letting me lose it easily. I like to believe that there’s some kind of divine justice.

Stay classy.