I\’ve been taking my medication like a good girl but I feel like it\’s not helping. Despite 300mg of daily Effexor XR and 75mg of daily Topomax, what I really want (think I need) are some benzodiazepines. I need some anxiolytics. I don\’t want to call my psychiatrist because that feels like failure; admitting I\’m not strong enough.
Maybe it\’s the bipolar, maybe it\’s not. Maybe it\’s my mind-body reacting to the constant change in weather, maybe it\’s not. Maybe it\’s just stress, maybe not. Maybe it\’s my period trying to start again, maybe not (I seem to be on a three week cycle now). Maybe all four. I don\’t know.
I rode into 2008 on a high — not a manic high, mind, but a feeling good high; my outlook was positive and I was hopeful. I started coming down last Friday, on the 4th. I got a packet in the mail from the Housing Opportunities Commission saying I needed to turn in my paperwork for this year\’s housing voucher renewal by the 12th of January — a one week turn around to pull together and mail in about forty pages of documents. There was something else last Friday, too, but I don\’t remember what it was anymore. And it\’s just sort of been a downward slide since. But a fast slide. So fast, that now, four days later, I don\’t want to leave the house. I feel sick to my stomach all the time and unsure about every move I make. I\’m afraid to pick up the phone or send out an e-mail or physically complete any of the other errands that need my attention, because I\’m afraid they\’re not the right choices. I\’m afraid of everything again.
I haven\’t been able to sleep well in about a week. Last night, two of the risers my bed was on broke (at 11:30 at night, really pissing off my downstairs neighbor by the noise of the bed crashing to the floor), so as I kept waking up throughout the night, I was too afraid to get up out of bed and walk into the other room because I was worried about the noise my footsteps would make. I\’m back to feeling terrible about my existence inconveniencing other people. So instead, I laid there and tried to mastermind a puzzle: how could I kill myself but make it look like a homicide? (I\’ve been exposed to far too many of those CSI shows that I loathe but everyone else seems to love.) Satisfied that I may have come up with a way unless a crackerjack autopsy could figure out that I\’m double-jointed, I fell asleep finally after 5am.
My apartment is filthy and I can\’t work up what I need to clean it. I have to be at the store to work in an hour and I\’m dreading going in; I just want to curl up in bed and hide. Going out of the house means I ought to wash my hair, which requires something in me that I just don\’t have recently.
I spent six hours at Howard University Hospital yesterday getting tests run. I got shot up with radioactive isotopes and had to drink barium sulfate. The technologists ran me through two different machines that whirled around me like… things that go around. I dunno, a maypole or something. I feel brain dead, now that I\’m writing, which is painful to me because for the past week I\’ve been composing LOTS in my head but am never in a position where I can write it down or record it. Once I get to a place where I can let the words out, I\’ve already forgotten them. The Provigil doesn\’t help with that.
