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.
