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.
This past weekend I went on a trip to visit my mom.
Up until about a year ago, she lived with undiagnosed bipolar disorder and debilitating depression that were the hallmarks of my childhood. I grew up handing her fistfuls of pain killers, hugging her desperately as she cried for hours on end for no reason at all, and mopping up her urine when she’d fall into a stupor and forget to make it to the toilet. She would self-medicate with Oxycontin, trying desperately to make herself feel normal, when all she probably ever needed was a doctor who understood mental illness. The horrible things she said and did because of the depression and bipolar disorder will never leave me, but at least I have learned a lot from them.
Thankfully, my mom is now doing a lot better. She was officially diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder, and was put on medications that actually help her. In fact, for the first time in my memory, she acts like a normal mom. She wants to talk about planning my wedding, funny things she saw on TV, and celebrity gossip. She’s engaged to a wonderful man, and unlike her relationship with my late father, and it seems like they actually love each other in a genuine, non-destructive way. When she laughs, it’s never a manic laugh anymore. She hugs me and tells me she loves me, and I know that she means it.
My mom is the perfect affirmation for why I need to be on Zoloft. I’ve complained a lot about the side effects of getting back on it (which are still persisting!), but when I think of my mother, I know that this is 100% the right thing to do.
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.
