Today I felt both energetic and utterly depressed—the kind of “want to quit my job and go home and get under the covers and never come out again” kind of depressed. But in a very calculating ADHD way. I don’t know. I don’t feel like writing much about it.
I doubt I’ll sleep much tonight.
That absurd energy is back. My eyes are wide, I keep catching myself holding my breath, and I am itching to do something.
I have to remind myself to eat. Both yesterday and today were a challenge—it’s like I don’t feel hungry in the same way I did only last week. Now I have a pit inside my stomach at all times, even after a meal, and I’m beginning to get used to it.
My mouth is still like cotton.
My anxiety is ever present, but this energy makes me a little happier, at least. This feels important.
I’ve slowed, and I have the worst cotton mouth of my life. No amount of water helps, and the postnasal drip is still there, driving me mad.
My reflexes are not very good either. Driving is almost challenging. Normally, I’m a pretty competent driver, but stop-and-go traffic during rush hour was a gigantic maze I just couldn’t figure out how to function in today.
I just feel quiet inside.
I know that Zoloft helps me once the side effects wear off (those that ever do, I mean), but when my mouth feels like this and I’m feeling so far away, a little voice in my head begins to rebel. This has happened so quickly—I’m only 4 days in this time—but already there’s the devil in my mind, whispering, “What was so wrong with reality?”
Today was a bad day, at least relative to the past two. That phantom energy I had yesterday vanished and I felt so angry to have to wake up this morning. My eyes have been dry—scratchy—and my throat has a thick nasal drip running down it. As ever, perhaps this has nothing to do with the Zoloft. I don’t know. I feel like it does.
My clients at work annoyed me; they’re annoying generally, but I usually have a much higher threshold for exasperation. My fiance annoyed me; he was antsy as we waited in line for a movie screening, but he didn’t do anything wrong. I was impatient and a little rude. Food annoyed me; I ate half a muffin, drank half a cup of tea, and then ate an entire cheeseburger in fitful bursts for dinner.
I can’t get over the dryness in my eyes. They feel like there’s never been any moisture in them. This is nothing but sand.
Maybe it was my compulsive marathon napping yesterday, but I was hit hard with insomnia last night. No matter how hard I tried to focus my thoughts and relax, my train of thought just kept leaping from one insane subject to the next. It felt like the gentlest marijuana high imaginable, or perhaps a really average unmedicated ADD day. Surreal. Regardless, I fell into a sleep in which I dreamed vivdly and woke up before my alarm feeling incredibly energetic and refreshed.
This feeling of energy persisted until about 4pm, when I left work and realized I had neglected to eat anything all day aside from two cups of hot tea. Instead of a hunger headache, I just felt squirmy and my brain was transfixed on mathematical calculations involving calories, my BMR, and fat loss. They weren’t the type of thoughts like, “I should starve myself more often to lose weight!” They were just compulsive numbers running through my head, mental math that I usually hate, decimal points and commas and hypotheticals.
The feeling of energy still hasn’t left me. My thoughts have quieted a little, but I feel like I just woke up still (in a good way). Maybe all of this is made up, just a placebo effect from a tiny barely there dosage of a totally non-psychadelic drug, but perhaps it’s real. Either way it’s all in my head.
Today marks my return to Zoloft for the first time in two years. The prescription was given to me by a doctor I’ve never seen before. She walked in, asked me what I needed to review with her, nodded when I told her about my previous experience with Zoloft in college, and wrote me a prescription for 25mg/daily to start, no questions asked. The simplicity of it stunned me. I’ll go back in 6 weeks to have the dosage upped, I guess.
After taking that first little green pill this afternoon, I called off work for a sick day and went home to nap. I remember that the last time I started Zoloft, I wanted to sleep a lot, half from fatigue and half because of the lucid dreams that begin immediately. I like the dreams when they aren’t nightmares; at this point, they’re as familiar as friends. It was the same today—sleep felt immediately right, and the dream was strange and wonderful, though I don’t remember the details this time.
I realize the drug takes 4 to 6 weeks to start “working,” but just the knowledge that I’m going back to it soon is already relieving my stress. It’s the promise of a happy numb, and tomorrow will be more bearable with this on the horizon.
