I\’m still in the process of weaning myself off Cymbalta to go back on Effexor, which means right now I\’m not on the full dose that I need of either, and the combination of the two doesn\’t seem to alleviate the issues. This means that I am crying about ten times a day or more, but at silly, seemingly trivial things. While resting from two nights in a row of working at the bar (of which, Saturday night\’s shift had me getting home at 6am) and three nights of little sleep, I watched \’Watership Down\’ — and cried the entire time. I cried when I heard a commercial on the radio for a cat at the local rescue league (it was in association with Petfinder.com). I cried at three different points when I read the stupid Wikipedia entry on LiveAid while looking for a list of the so-called \”selfish\” acts who had turned Geldoff down. And when I\’ve been laughing, I\’ve been laughing so hard that tears come to my eyes and my throat starts to hurt. I feel like I\’m in emotional quicksand, constantly getting pulled into various triggers that are making me overly emote.
My boyfriend, several exes, and various friends say they prefer me like this (I also get like this in the first few days when off my medication) to how I am when on my medication. On my medication, I\’m apparently not as much fun. They think my crying at kittens is cute, and that my laughter indicates I\’m boisterously happy. They say they even encourage me to be hypomanic from time to time, because I stop being stressed out and just seem so happy. What they don\’t realize is that I\’m getting trapped inside each experience and emotion it brings, and then have a hell of a time letting go: I can\’t stop crying because I can\’t stop thinking about the animals who need homes (\”I have to go adopt them ALL!\”) or the funny sex innuendos (\”Oh my god, I can\’t believe Fox aired that during primetime — I have to remember that line!\” but of course, I\’ve now forgotten the line). And while I\’m busily emoting, I\’m losing control of my body — an intense laughing or crying jag while not medicated (or not medicated well) causes me to lose muscular control: if I\’m not already sitting down, I fall down and stay there, until I manage to shake it. This can take several seconds or many minutes, depending on how severe the spell is. It was only last year, when diagnosed with narcolepsy, that I learned that this reaction is cataplexy — a narcoleptic seizure. The medication I\’ve been on for most of the past few years keeps the cataplexy from occurring about 98% (my guess) of the time.
I admit, however, that on the medication, nothing seems to really touch me. Feeling emotions while off medication while hypomanic, manic, or depressed, as a person with bipolar, is a totally different experience than feeling them while on the medication. Yes, it\’s like the volume or the levels have been turned down by more than half. A lot of the times, it\’s like living life with a mute button on; feeling like I\’m missing out on a seventh sense or something that everyone else seems to have. But these are all analogies that have been used in the psychiatric community for decades; popularized by people like Kay Redfield Jamison, the metaphors are now in the common vernacular. But as a person with bipolar who also has narcolepsy with cataplexy (not to mention other illnesses of the central nervous system), the analogy is more complex.
Life on medication versus life off medication reminds me of the differences between an elevator ride and an escalator ride, and the differences between the two if each are malfunctioning. Life on meds is the escalator — a slow-moving incline, where a malfunction can cause a temporary jam or a jerky ride, but it remains a manageable situation without insult or injury. Life off meds is the elevator, where a malfunction can suddenly cause a blood-curdling ride straight to the top, only to whiplash me at the top and leave me precariously danging in mid-air, or it can surprise me with a free-falling crash that ends with me experiencing a literal temporary physical paralysis.
Fuck my friends\’ preferences; I prefer to be on pills.
