And when my friend and I were done
We went to rest upon the sun
Cause life takes from us the things we love
And it robs us of the special ones
And it puts them high where we can't climb
And we only miss them all the time.
--"Life is Shit" Dead Milkmen
I haven't blogged in a while because I don't see the point in sharing misery if I can't find the funny in it. Things haven't been easy emotionally--I've still been trying to get used to my new prescription of Wellbutrin. My shrink added that to the Celexa I've been on, just to give my brain a little bit more juice. You need to get the little guy up there going. I think it's working, a bunch of possibilities and hopes that I never thought I had started to pop up. I've stopped taking midday naps, but I still have the crushing urge just to lie in bed. Of course, when the hope starts cutting through the numbness, I've had to deal with the opposite--grappling with the reality that I am not happy where I am in life. That has been kicking my ass. Before and after work, I've started to have panic episodes. I guess when the pills peeled away the numbness, there's a deep well of fear. I'm terrified and I don't know where it's coming from.
I remember when I was working on my senior thesis at Bard and one of my advisors told me that "We need to know which level of reality you're working on." Days later, he told me, and I forget the context, "You are going to go crazy, and it would be a real loss if you do". After college, I got addicted to Philip K. Dick. In an interview, he said that he thought he was too sensitive to authority, that he folds automatically out of fear, and that he doesn't feel equipped with the tools to fight it. I think that's why I fell in love with his books--I feel the same way, buddy. Thinking about PKD's books, I wonder if my years of depression and anxiety, which I now know goes way back past my adult life and into my teenage years, warped my reality. I simply don't see things the way people in my life see them, including my family. It's like a weird parallel self-centered reality. Life is going on somewhere else at a different pace. Up in my head, it's going on at a snail's pace and life is some villain that's fucking me over. Economically, I'm in the best place I can possibly be, well-off parents, living at home, a lot of money saved up. I can't get it to translate emotionally. I think my emotional intelligence is about five or six years behind where it should be. Over the past few weeks, I've been in countless arguments with them about my mental health. I don't blame them, I guess, if you have a kid with messed up wiring, it must be insulting to know you programmed it wrong. But sometimes wiring gets jostled or soldering falls away, or the cord gets frayed, and for the life of me, I can't get them to see that.
So that brings me to more recent news. Without going into morbid detail, I lost a friend and nearly lost another. The death was ruled a suicide. I'm still trying to process it, but that Dead Milkmen song above is where I stand on it now.
I'm not sure if my comment got posted or I accidentally deleted it. Basically, I had panic attacks about every other day since I was pretty young up until a few years ago and I developed some methods for dealing with them. They're probably not new or revolutionary, but I'd be happy to tell you about them if you want to give them a try.
ReplyDeleteMy depression eventually was an inseparable part of myself, I think I get what you're going through to some degree. So just wanted to say, you're not entirely alone or unrelatable. I agree with your professor somewhat, that if you were gone, even though we're not close (which is okay), it would leave a noticeable hole. I say that, because I believe it, not out of some sense of sympathy.
Oh, I'm also having major dejavu that I've written a similar post like this a long time ago. If I had, which is possible, because my memory is shit, no worries about responding. I guess no worries about responding if I haven't posted something like this before either. Basically, I'm okay with this post going into the void of the internet.
Thanks, Jack! I haven't been keeping up with this blog, but I still get email about it so fear not. Blogspot just ate a previous reply to you, so I can you might actually be correct in thinking you posted something. I would love to hear how you're coping with it. Depression wise, I have gotten better at coping since this last blog entry, but I'm still struggling with the panic. I've gotten a sense of how it manifests itself, though, which is a step forward.
ReplyDeleteI think I did it again and it ate my response. I had a long one written out, but it might have been too long.
ReplyDeleteSo, there were a few things I did to either deal with the panics attacks then and there or to lessen when they happened. The more concrete things were in the "then and there" category.
The first one was identifying what things would lead to panic attacks. Some of it had to do with time of day, the context of where I was, but most of the time it was just actual topics and though processes. As an example I would sometimes have panic attacks in Skalinder's class, because the size and endlessness of space set me off when he'd talk about that kind of stuff. The classroom would zoom out, sounds would fade, start to sweat, hands would clench, and my mind would just spiral into this feeling of total fear, but I'd be arrested between fight and flight. Luckily, while i'd usually have a few a day, they were pretty short. Still messed up my daily biz though. It's hard to just think/feel in constructive/normal ways if you're dealing with that kind of stuff, so it's really worth pursuing methods to effectively deal with them.
Anyways, from there, once I could tell when a panic attack would be incoming, I developed conditioned knee jerk mental responses. I've had people say to me things like, "don't think about polar bears", then you can't NOT think about polar bears. I worked on being able to do just that (not think about polar bears, but in this case it was not thinking the thought patterns that would lead to panic attacks).
I started doing meditation to start. Not for some spiritual mumbojumbo, but specifically for the controlled breathing and learning to be able to focus on a single thing to the exclusion of all else. This helped me develop the ability to exercise control over what I was thinking about and break out of those thought patterns that led to panic. Desperation was really what gave me the ability to stick with it though.
There's other stuff I did or figured out that helped me with the panic attacks and depression, but they might not be relatable or applicable, because I don't know how specific they are to my own depression.