"Almost Normal-->But Only When Drugged Up"

I have not written any posts lately.

I have nothing to say.

Or rather, I have no desire at the moment to show the general public just how psychologically damaged I really am. My true friend, my ex-boyfriend, the only male I returned to, died. I am shattered. Mourning takes its toll on my listless body and mind. I gained 3 pounds since my last psychiatrist visit. She noted that point on her paperwork when I showed up at her office a few days ago.

"I  need anti-anxiety medicine," I said. I do. Apparently, she is not willing to prescribe medicinal marijuana so instead I got a non-addictive pill to take twice a day. Good enough. If only it could erase the knowledge of my precarious mortality and replace it with the drive and passion I once had.

I might have taken a dose of strong anti-anxiety drugs while listening to Nine Inch Nails album, "With_Teeth" and now I am feeling irrational, strung out, relatively relaxed, but jittery all at the same time.

I slept with this guy from my past. I spontaneously texted him and he asked me to come over. I slid past my parent's room and did a silent exit from home. I drove to his apartment. I slept with him. Then I left. He complained that I was leaving so soon. I patted him on the back and said I didn't want to get caught. I might get into trouble if my mom found out I took off in the middle of the night. He seemed irritated. I left.

I have issues with men. That is not my musing, apparently that is what the professionals say. I submit to their decision. I have an electra's complex from never having a father in my life, from all the damage I acquired from various damaged men, from needing, always needing, love or a reasonable facsimile.

I need my friend, my ex-boyfriend. My true love that I never told how much he meant to me, how I needed him. I miss him.

The cup of diet coke is empty. I slurp air instead. It feels like my life, an empty cup, a hollow space that I cannot stop trying to get substance from. Emptiness. Man, this turned out to be a heady entry.

I will post a pleasant entry later. Thanks for reading!

Grad School Finals Week and my 30th birthday

Dear public, online diary,

today I woke up and realized I am about to turn 30 this week. I woke up and thought, "why am I still in school? Why have I only had cashier and customer service jobs? Why am I still living with my family? Why aren't I married?" I guess I had an early mid-life crisis this morning.

Here is the answer to most of the questions above: I have a major mental illness and it is very difficult to get the medication to treat my symptoms. My mental illness froze my progress. I spent so many weeks lying in bed, in a catatonic depression. I spent more weeks huddled in the kitchen, in my "safe spot" by the fridge, hearing voices and trying to breathe through my fear.

I parted ways with my former outpatient treatment center. I am now back with the county's main outpatient center. My former treatment center released me because I have had no major symptoms the past 2-3 years and they are intended for people who are fairly non-functional. Now, I am with the more lax system that treats people who are not on the verge of total self-destruction. It is less "intensive" as my former therapist put it. Sadly, it is also more apathetic. If I miss an appointment I have to wait another 3 months to see a doctor, without medication. Thankfully, I have a cell phone app to remind me what my schedule is like.

Thirty years old and I still feel like that 18 year old girl starting college for the first time. One year later, at age 19, I became floridly psychotic, my life spiraled up and down, jobs came and went, I dropped out of school, then returned again, and now here I am, 30, with my head kind of screwed on straight and about 35 years left for working full-time.

It is finals week. For me, that means a last ditch effort to get a C in my math and programming classes. I started so promising, but then I slipped into a depression and started sleeping through the night and half the day, missing my classes and falling behind. Still, I have hope that I will not crumble into another depression. My new doctor at the county is putting me on Prozac and taking me off Zoloft. I told him I had totally built up a tolerance to the Zoloft the past half a decade and he agreed it had lost its efficacy. I am being weaned off Zoloft this week, taking half my dose with the other half being Prozac. I have felt a difference in that I am awake before noon. That is usually the sign that my depression is receding. Luckily, I saw my doctor before finals week, so I have been patched up the past few weeks and now I am prepared to study hard, study long, and write programs like my life depends on it.

My graduate program is going well and I'm 90% finished with my graduate class term papers. I just need to pass my elective classes, which have nothing to do with my field, but I am enrolled in them and the grades still count on my GPA. After next week, I will be done with finals. I will be thirty years old. I will be healthy for a solid 4 years.A toast to you, dear reader! A toast to you and to good mental health and a strong GPA!!

Between Mind Medicine and Mind-Control: Forbidden Emotions of a Bipolar

I am highly irritable this week. Everything ignites irritability. I know it is because I am a schizophrenic-bipolar woman who is currently stressed out and broke. Knowing the underlying cause for this feeling does not help the irritability. It fact, it makes it worse because I am forbidden from expressing this irritability.

I feel irritable. Some random person posts something fiercely ignorant about race. I keep my mouth shut because I know I will over react due to my underlying mental illness. Somebody without a mental illness would have snapped and had some psychological release.

I, being subjugated to extreme scrutiny by psychiatrists, doctors, family, mental health technicians, and therapists, cannot express normal anger anymore. I have been denied the right to feel angry or depressed. These are "mental" issues that need to be addressed. In many ways, I feel emotionally spayed. I must remain neutral in mood for the rest of my life or risk being institutionalized or put on dangerously high doses of psychotropic medications.

There is a fine line between mental health treatment and mind-control. I have had my continuum of emotions deleted through medication and hospitalization.

These are emotions that are forbidden to me:

Anger
Irritability
Expansive Mood
Exhaustion
Resentment
Fear of persecution
Fear in general
Hatred
Introversion
Sadness
A combination of these that shift from one to the other rapidly.


I understand that it is "beneficial" to me and to society to put these restraints in place. It is just a bit like mind-control, that is all. I will live under constant scrutiny, constant monitoring by mental health professionals, for the rest of my life, and that is alright with me. However, if there is a better alternative, that would be awesome.

Moody No More-More Meds

Reading the last entry made me think about what my shrink once told me:

Don't let your fear and paranoia stop you from doing what you want to do. I want to play Killzone 2 darn it. Just not online.

I mentioned my unnerving fear of being sent viruses and trojans to my psychiatrist who kindly recommended upping my dosage of almost every medicine I take. I happily obliged. I don't like feeling nervous, agitated, and paranoid.

So here I am, day one into my new regime of medicines. I feel quite at peace! I am taking a higher dose of mood stabilizers and anti-anxiety medicine. My anti-psychotic dose stayed the same but I think that was only because I confessed to spending a week off the meds due to some unknown motivation on my part (something I DO NOT recommend). The result=paranoia, fear, sleeplessness, and once I started taking the med consistently again---total sleepiness. Seriously, I slept until 2 pm today.  I feel asleep from 8 to midnight, stayed up until 1 am (only one hour), then back to sleep until 8. At 8 I managed to make some coffee in my french press, but then I wandered off and fell asleep on the couch where I remained in some zombie sleep until the late afternoon.

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I am watching the documentary on John Nash, "A Beautiful Genius." I really like it thus far. It focuses on Nash's time at the University. The film is well told and interesting.

weight loss: 20 pounds in 4 months

Being bombarded with Carl's Jr. commercials and billboards promoting the latest beer brand makes weight loss an exercise in self-discipline. Everywhere I go, drink Coke, eat meat, buy Bud light, and always, always, it's being advertised by a size 0 model with huge breast implants and a winning smile. As if! There is no way that pretty model ate that burger in her hand, or drank that calorie-laden beer she holds. She probably is underweight, according to the BMI chart, and in no position to tell me how to eat healthy, let alone tell me to eat at a fast food joint or to buy beer.

To make things worse, there is no salad bar at my University, meaning that my choices are extremely limited. After shying away from the campus Taco Bell, I went into the snack bar, passing the Panda Express and Subway along the way. Once inside the snack bar, I could choose between a chicken microwavable burrito, a brownie, a sugary muffin, or a bag of chips. I could have one of their many sodas, energy drinks, or a coffee. I settled on a bag of chips and a large coffee, trying to reason with my gurgling stomach that the coffee would sooth the hunger pangs.

Despite eating only an egg at midday and getting lots of exercise through rowing and walking, I felt guilty ripping open the bag of chips. I'm way overweight. I'm 168 right now at 5'1-5'2. Every tiny choice I make inflates my fat cells and increases my risk of diabetes and fat-clogged arteries. No, I don't have any health problems. I just had a blood test and physical last week, and to my surprise, my thyroid hormone levels have raised into the normal range. My blood pressure was fine, my pulse fine. Yet I'm fat, so fat. Only part of it is the psychotropic medications my psychiatrist has me on, and only part of it is the poor decisions I made several years ago, yo-yo dieting, starvation dieting, and eating junk food. I've been a mostly healthy vegetarian for the last 4 months now, and yet I've only lost about 15-20 pounds. That's only five pounds a month. So what gives?

Unfortunately, the decision to lose weight at any cost has left severe consequences now. Starvation diets slows the metabolism, something not easily remedied, even years later. Plus, you either give in to hunger or you die, and I'm not dead. Once you start eating regularly, your body stockpiles every precious calorie on the chance that a Victoria Secret model will send you on another starvation diet sometime in the future. It's not easy to lose weight now. A non-yo-yo dieter would have lost much more than I have in the same time frame and on the same diet. But enough whining, I have lost weight, I will continue to lose weight, and I will do so eating brain and body healthy foods every day.

One trick I've learned the past four months is to use Indian spices on all my vegetables, with double the cayenne pepper. Coriander, cumin, garam masala, turmeric, and cayenne pepper are all ways to make a vegetable delicious and these spices also raise your metabolism and make you feel fuller than you really are. My favorite meal has got to be a zucchini drenched in lemon juice, sauteed in olive oil with the above spices simmering, and with a dash of black pepper ground onto the zucchini in the last stages of cooking. It's so good I have to immediately stick all but a small portion into the fridge lest I return for seconds.

Another trick I've learned is to refrain from snacking after 7:30 pm, and instead drink green tea with no sugar and just a little bit of fat-free creamer. I know, half and half is terrible for a dieter, fat-free or not. But seriously, you will have to pry that carton of half and half out of my cold dead hands. I cannot stand tea or coffee without it. And if I don't get my coffee or chai, I will start rummaging through the fridge for something to snack on. So instead I drink chai and don't snack on anything.

I watched this documentary, on fat and it was a very eye-opening experience. In this documentary, we follow several people who have either lost weight or are trying to lose weight. We also get to hear from a specialist who studies the digestive tract. The data was surprising. The specialist says there are transmitters in the gut, like neuro-transmitters in the brain, except they're gut-transmitters. He claimed that the gut was like a second brain, I am not joking or exaggerating!

Here is the title. It is available on amazon dot com. FAT: What No One Is Telling You. (2007). PBS Home video.

So anyways, what really caught my eye was the plight of a formerly morbidly obese female comedian. Over the course of a number of years, she lost all her weight, except for some extra pounds that refuse to leave. She went from being mega morbidly obese to moderately overweight! How did she do it? She began to eat small portions of healthy food with little snacking. More incredibly, she exercises for hours each day, without fail! The video showed her slipping into one of those full body work-out suits that make you sweat a lot, and using multiple exercise machines, plus cardio and weight exercises.
'All this so I can be chubby,' she dead-pans.

What is this point of my relating all this to you? Regardless of how you got to weigh what you weigh: life circumstance, medications, metabolism, poor decisions, whatever, you know have a problem you have to deal with. No, it's not fair that people laugh and harass you, make you feel unworthy of love and respect, or that clothes are hard to come by because discrimination is so rampant, but a problem is still a problem that needs to be addressed. This film made me realize that like my homework, I must work harder than the rest just to get an A.

Wish me luck, with some hard work, I can drop another 20 pounds in the following months: then I'll just be a little plump!