an out of shell experience

I’m slowly resuming blogging after a long hiatus from just about everything.

I’ve spent my entire life perfecting the art of being outwardly “fine” and putting one foot in front of the other.  I have a “good job”,  graduated with my BA highest honours, volunteer, am nearly done my MA (ABDT – all but damned thesis).  I’m in a happy forever relationship with a wonderful man, and we have two poodles instead of kids. Our spice drawer is alphabetized.  Basically, the ducks are in a row.

But reality is so messy.  I’ve been riding the mental health rollercoaster my entire life…slowly and laboriously climbing up the hill, and suddenly dropping back down.  I work hard at sanity.  Enough therapy to buy a degree at an Ivy League.  Vitamins and diet tweaks of every description.  Yoga and new age stuff.  Enough books to keep the self-help and psychology publishing business going strong.  I even studied psychology as my minor in school.  Always searching for understanding.  I’m a figurative mechanic.  If I can understand it, I can fix it.

Despite my inherent distrust of the pharmaceutical industry, I’ve tried that too.  I’ve tried many medications without much luck, and have mostly just struggled along on my own until recently.  Two summers ago I had a bad relapse and went back on medication, and at long last it seemed like I had found one that was a good fit.

Fast forward to this summer.  The meds lost their effectiveness over a period of two or three months, so gradually that by the time I realized what had happened I was having an awful relapse.  I changed meds, which just made things worse, turning me into a zombie.  I couldn’t function, so I took a month away from work to find the right meds and get stable.  I felt fairly mortified to be going on mental health leave, feeling certain my bosses and colleagues would think I was pathetic and lazy and weak…I know, quite uncharitable, and I’m sure it says more about what I think about myself than what others think about me.  But at this point I had become so paranoid that I actually believed that my own family despised me, even my dad, with whom I’ve always had a great relationship.  I even thought my poodles hated me!  Clearly I was not in a rational state of mind.

I think I must have changed my meds 5 times in as many weeks.  When I was losing hope of ever finding something that would work, it seemed I had found the right combo of drugs, just in time to return to work.  What a relief that was.  As much as I don’t relish the cubicle life, I missed my coworkers and the normalcy of routine.  In hindsight, I think I was in a rush to get back to avoiding the problem.

I returned to work, but soon realized I wasn’t as well as I had hoped…I was having terrible mood swings, bursting into tears in my cubicle, looking out the window at the river and having intrusive thoughts of “going for a swim”.  On top of that I was exhausted, and having headaches, dizziness and nausea from my medication, and would sometimes close my cubicle door and curl up under my desk waiting for a wave of sickness to pass.  It was awful.

When I described this to my doctor, he said it sounded like I wasn’t stable yet, and we talked more medication options.  I ended up switching from an SSRI to an SNRI (even though the last SNRI I tried was horrendous), in hopes that it would perk me up a bit during the day.  So far I’m on day 6 of the new meds and they seem to be working okay…knock on wood…I know it’s still too soon to know, but I’m really hoping that this one will get me “back to normal” – whatever that is.