In the past few months, I’ve made a concerted effort to keep the most personal parts of my private life off the Internet. I’m trying to have something that’s just mine. It’s worked well, generally, and Operation Private Life has seen its intended results. I don’t have any overwhelming desire to start talking about meds on here again.
But something interesting’s happened. They finally tapered me off the Seroquel, which makes me tired and fat and apathetic about everything, and put me on a drug called Trileptal, which is indicated for epilepsy but it’s seen good results in bipolar patients with minimal side effects.
In the past, when I’ve gone off the Seroquel, I’ve gone pretty much straight into manic episodes. Thus far, with the Trileptal, I haven’t had any manic episodes, really (although my sleep has been weak at best). What’s happened, instead, is that I’ve become totally OCD. Things about the way my closet is organized, dirt on my car floor, my refrigerator, my laundry pile suddenly bother me. Everything needs to be clean and organized and it has to happen now. I’m frantic. I’ve done more cleaning in the past week than I have in the rest of my life combined. But it’s cool, though, because I get to understand how other people think. I get to understand what people are thinking when they’re like, “No, you absolutely must take off your shoes at the door.” It’s a cool experience and, once I grow into it, I don’t think I’ll mind this side effect. Everything’s getting all organized and I don’t even mind! My mother would be so proud.
I’ve stopped being angry at the meds. I’ve stopped being angry at the doctors who fuck around with them, who spent the better part of my life prescribing medicine that made me sicker. The cool thing about having been on a billion different psych meds that effect you in a billion different ways is that you really get to appreciate the way other people think. You get to understand a lot of different mindsets. And it’s awesome — in the literal sense — how a simple change in brain chemistry can so completely affect the way one believes one must interact with the world.
I’ve started thinking of it as a beautiful experiment. I get to be a lot of different brains in this life! And I get to appreciate how truly separate our brains are from ourselves. There’s an observer — there’s a me — watching this brain interact inconsistently with the world, as me. I am not my brain. There is a separate me, watching. That observer is consistent.
Anyway.
My apartment’s on its way to being very, very organized.
