Been a month. I think I am stabilizing now. It was a rough time,
but also I think progress was made and some locks were undone.
In the beginning it was like a ball of three meter diameter was
hanging over my head. It's made of all the connections I could
bring up. None of the connections made sense in the big picture.
A lot of them were questions. I don't think there were any answers
that didn't lead to more questions.
Some of the connections were leading to these wormholes that
pushed material into social spaces where I would have rather not
pushed it. Things like "what does so and so know about what
someone else said to a third person".
My mind was not looking at the ball from any stable point of view.
I could see it from here or there and these perspectives would
not come together in any meaningful way. I felt like I could
collapse or explode at any moment. I was haunted by the unknowns.
At that point I contacted the health services. In the chat someone
asked if I could wait until tomorrow morning. Yes. I still had
two benzos from the last time I dealt with anxiety. On the morning
I got more of them and a sick leave for a couple of weeks.
At the same time I was conscious of the fact that I do not trust
the employer's health system since last time they mishandled my
personal information, so I decided to find a therapist on my own.
I wrote a rather paranoid sounding mail to one, and was lucky that
she had time for me.
The therapist is a really big investment of money from my part,
but what I need is to not fill in some forms to my employer or
the government or whoever to ask if I am allowed to keep seeing
a therapist or not. It's the dehumanising tone to it all.
I felt a similar tone when I went to see the doctor after the
two weeks sick leave was over. She gave me some single page
questionaires to assess if I have anxiety and or depression.
The statistical method. One day I will write about when I almost
went to psychology school but decided against it based on the
fact that they measured their applicants only on statistical
math. Like there is no logic at all, only the mass of data.
The doctor gave me a bunch of options. There's the SSRIs, there's
workplace therapy, there's partial sick leave. I could see her
wince behind her facemask when I said that I want to talk to my
therapist first to ask about if SSRIs can mess up with an ongoing
therapy process.
I was really exhausted when I got back from there and just went
to bed in the middle of the day. At least she gave me more sick
leave.
After talking to my therapist I decided to try the SSRIs this
time. Last time I had not used them and it took a long time to
recover. But also, I was aware that with anxiety and depression
there are cycles that can get activated by having repeated bouts.
Usually they would be same time of the year, for example, and
the chemistry gets locked in to these loops. (Thanks, Robert
Sapolsky. I watched his lecture on depression years ago and it
really stayed with me. Find it on youtube, if interested.) So
I thought it does make sense to be prepared for such repetition
and see if these meds work or not.
Another thing that kept me from using them last time was that I
found it suspicious to use a medication that starts working only
in a couple of weeks. I thought that it would be sort of hard
to know if it is working or not. Or (in this case) is it the
therapy that is working instead of the meds? Well, I guess now
I was deep enough in the mud of the unknowns that I just decided
to throw everything at it.
It isn't like I thought it would be. It does not fade in like
a gradient. Or maybe it does but there are several harder bumps
on the way. The side effects are coming about 40 hours after
starting or upping the dosage. I got nauseous and it did seem to
make me more anxious on the days after I changed the dose.
I think the positive effects started only yesterday, or maybe
the day before. That's about a week after starting it. Now I am
feeling almost normal. Yesterday I had a moment of slight
euphoria while walking in a snow storm.
Meanwhile, I did get back to work with reduced work hours. It
wasn't great, but I think the meds didn't have time to kick in.
The problem is when I get information that can be branched off
into possibilities. I feel the gravity to spiral down into those
branches.
At the same time I think the routine is good. During my time off
there were a couple activities that I found rather soothing. I
was learning to cook sauces from scratch. The simplicity, the long
cooking time and the superior results are pleasing to me. I also
got back to books. Bought a bunch of them from a second hand.
Trying to find some fiction writers that are in stock at the
second hand. Read "Sharp Objects" by Gillian Flynn. Not sure if
this is a good book for a person with active anxieties, but it
seemed to pull me in. I saw the series some time ago and found
the main character fascinating.
My therapist is sort of old school. She's mainly jungian. I find
this perspective the closest to how I see the issues that are
haunting me. The CBT seems to shy away from the unconscious, the
DBT seems to think that you can calm an ocean by brushing away
the waves. I saw it very clearly during the past year that I
can't just be mindful and let things appear and dissolve into
pink clouds on the horizon. They just appear, collect above my
head and stay. I need to go deeper. The jungian perspective is
as close to religious or spiritual as I can manage without
having a too loud whisper of "woo" in the back of my head...
(If you have read my phlog, you know I have a rather ambivalent
stance when it comes to epistemics.) It seems my questions are
on existential level compared to the more practical levels that
I felt I was on when I was subject to the other types of therapy
a couple of times in the past.
The therapy has not really gone to work on anything yet. I don't
feel like we are actively doing anything. I am just outlining my
story. What it has done indirectly is that it has loosened
something and created a time in which I can focus on these
things, so they don't haunt me with such strong force when I am
not in that time and space. With the "not doing much" there is
also this lack of urgency, which I find creates a frame around
the ball of anxiety. Without the frame, the ball demands urgency.
Something has to be done immediately. But with the stability of
the frame, there is time to look at some part of the system
without a need to follow the connections to one way or another.
The cynic will of course point out that this is a very good
business model for the therapist. Hah!, I say.
Maybe there is also something about me investing a large amount
of money in it that is necessary for me? I feel disempowered
when I am administered these treatment options from the
emploeyer's doctor's menu. It is something in me. These systems
are linked to the benefit systems that were there when I was
unemployed, and I don't want to feel the paternal vibes of the
system and somehow stain my mental health with the bowing down
to it. So, in that sense it is a lot "cleaner", sanity wise,
to just pay money to a person who is not connected to these
machines of obligations.
Fun fact, once I started going to therapy, I started dreaming.
A lot. Like I maybe never have had so many dreams in so short
time. I think it may also be sort of a reciprocal relationship:
When I write the dreams down or talk about them with the
therapist, I am respecting the dream world more than before.
So maybe it responds? I am sure I have also learned to listen
a bit better. Some days I woke up and say to myself "Oh I didn't
have a dream" then I think again and realise that something I had
filed as "Not a dream" was actually miscategorized and I can grab
hold of some half sentence in it and open it up and find that it
was only half a sentence but it was happening in certain space
with certain types of people in there. I have also been drawing
these dreams and it helps a lot with pulling out some details
such as size relationships between different entities.
Again, I feel someone inside me say that this is ridiculous;
the cynic. But there is a very strong feeling in me that this
is a lot closer to the scale of investigation I have to encage
in than any of the mechanical, solution centered approaches.
Compared even to things like artistic inspiration, I feel that
this is bigger. I would rather call it midlife crisis, but that
term has also been trivialised, so I would have to rename it.
It would be something like the gravity of the grave. You are
launched at birth and fly up seeing the sky and the stars ahead
of you, but then the ground pulls you down and you see the grave
in front of you. There are still plenty of somersaults and flips
you can pull off, but it's not against the blue of the stars
anymore. Midsummer's eve with the cannonball prometheus.
Strangely, it all happens all the time. At the same time as I was
doing all this preparation for a different sort of internal
journey than I am used to, my ex contacted me out of the blue and
seemed to have come to a different place in her life. I met her
and we had a pleasant conversation without going to some deep
places. She had had a rough year as well and been diagnosed with
something that rearranges some pieces of my view on our history.
I don't really want to get into it now, but let's say that a
mental health diagnosis doesn't change my intuitive perceptions
of someone's personality or their actions, so it's not like it
gives a free pass or anything like that. If anything it makes
space for a more understanding future communication.
In any case, it was nice to see her and it helped shrink a part
of the tangle of connections hanging over my head. I think it
works something like this: When I meet people, I make a benchmark
of the state of the relationship with that person. If I don't
meet them, I have the branching connections opening up to how
that person could influence me or things I care about. When I am
healthy, this tangle is not in my face at all. It's some
background process.
The meeting made me feel like the pieces came together. I could
at the same time feel anxious of her description of what sort of
new stuff she had invested in (several renovations and a car)
but appreciate her quick intelligence and the inside jokes we
have. I think this recombination of her image in my mind was
actually impossible without meeting her again, and that was a
big part of the possiblity tangle. There was no way to actually
know how the pieces fit just by thinking about it.
I also had the dog visit me for a few days, and we had a very
fine time. I showed him all the walking paths around the
neighborhood and he was very interested smelling what sort of
mutts go around here. He doesn't care that much to meet them,
he just wants to smell. The rest of the time we were cuddling
in bed, with me reading my thrillers, and he lying on his back.
So, all in all it seems like a month of many different new
beginnings and transformations of old patterns, with the monster
of repetition mid-stage but diminishing.
