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Haven’t posted here in a while… have been keeping myself busy and I have started reducing my medication. There are still lots of issues to deal with, though, and I have an appointment with a new therapist next week.
The last one didn’t quite work out for me, and this one has been recommended by my psychiatrist, so fingers crossed.
A person I follow on Tumblr wrote about her experiences on anti-depressants and it got me thinking about actually sharing this with people I know. Talking about it would probably be better than fretting on my own!
Plus it’s beyondblue Anxiety and Depression Awareness Month so really, what better time than now?
I walked into therapy the other day with a horrible black cloud over my head. I’d had yet another shitty day at my should-be-great-but-is-really-shitty job, I’d missed the turn on a one-way street getting there, my shoulders were all tight and very sore, blah blah blah. I was just feeling really foul. I wanted this to be my last appointment because I knew I’d get there and she’d say “so, what’s on your agenda today?” and I knew I’d have nothing to say and I knew I’d have wasted an hour of my life, and $170.
The session started out slowly, and I was expecting it to head where I had expected it to head, but gah, you know what? It got better.
She talked me through my gloomy thoughts and I ended up leaving feeling lighter and bouncier and happier about the thing that, 50 minutes earlier, made me want to smash a pot-plant at the wall of her rooms (I didn’t, it’s ok).
I hate that I am dependant on my therapist to talk through the shitness of the things in my life that shit me and cause me to be shitty. Urgh. How horrible is that?
Shit. Despite all the online soul-searching I’ve been doing this year… despite the fact half the comments on this post are from bloggers I’ve been reading in order to figure out what I want to do with my life (eg here and here) and all that jazz… why has it taken so long for me to find this…???
In order to jump-start passionate living again you might have to…
- Stop being an (unnecessarily) “responsible” person
- Quit projects that are no longer relevant
- Be happy with a less than permanently clean home
In order to come alive, you might have to…
- Pursue an occupation that doesn’t put your insanely expensive degree to use
- Move back in with your parents
- Work a low-status, low-paying job in order to make time for your new endeavor
- Come to terms with your messy home
- Completely and utterly ignore your parent’s and friend’s expectations of you
If you really want to live passionately, you’ll need to consider leaving nearly everything you’re not passionate about. To live passionately you may have to quit your job, sell your home, rent a small apartment, and live simply for a while.
To get off the treadmill you’ll have to realize that your high IQ does not obligate you to work 80-hour weeks in high-status professional career. Your high IQ also doesn’t obligate you to get a Ph.D., or to put on any other golden handcuffs.
Fark. I might just not have to go back to fricking “Therapy” anymore.
And maybe I need to sit down for a while sometime soon and start thinking about WHY I need apply for the Rhodes Scholarship before I start filling out the application form that is sitting on my desk right now. (Although, the whole “push the pause button” thing was what I “learned” in “Therapy” last week so maybe I should keep going.)
In a way, I want to go to Oxford to study something that I’m passionate about, that probably definitely won’t lead me into a high-status, high-paying career… but on the other hand, do I really want to go through yet another cattle-show of an interview process and another two years of brain-straining graduate studies? What if the path I’m on right now is my life’s calling?
Gawd it would be nice to be less neurotic, wouldn’t it?
Aw!! I was rather hesitant about writing to Bossy, because she usually gives “no-holds-bared” responses that is “the sort of advice friends and relatives are too polite to give”. I was a bit worried I’d end up on “Fruitcake Friday” so in a way, I was, in a way, glad when her response to my email didn’t show up on those days.
Even her profile photo make her look kinda scary!
But then, when she did respond, she was really nice to me!!!
So were (most) of the commenters. I had the urge to reply back to every single one, because they took the time to write to me, but there are over 100!! So I might write straight to Bossy with an update and thank everyone in that.
It’s amazing how nice I felt reading about not being the only one who’s gone through periods like this. Intellectually, I know I’m not that special, duh, but sometimes when you’re in the depths of a Doona Day, the intellectual part is so battered by the traumatized emo part that it retreats to higher ground, and it feels like it’s just you on the plain.
(Where did that wanky analogy come from? Shite, I need to get out more.)
I’ve emailed the link to the post to my psychologist so that I can talk about Bossy’s suggestions in more detail at my session tomorrow.
M read the post too, and we chatted about it over the weekend. I wrote to her a while ago, the day after M and I were both in tears, and the situation has definitely calmed down since then, so that was probably a good thing — we were able to talk about it in a really rational way.
I’m really glad that I wrote to her, and started writing things in this blog. It’s great to get things off my chest and as well as get feedback from an objective viewpoint. Thank you Bossy, and Bossy Bloggers, I really appreciate your time.
Yesterday was harder than I thought it was going to be.
After all the time I’ve spent thinking about my Issues, I didn’t really have much to say actually. I even kinda didn’t want to talk to her, but maybe I was just pissed off because I had to throw my plastic down before I was allowed to do the session?
I had to do a Suicide Contract because my psychoanalysis report said I was at “High Risk”. When I tried to explain that was exaggerated cause the weekend before I did the testy thing hadn’t exactly been a high-point, she took a little while to remember the note in the report that warned some of the data might be skewed because I’m unhinged.
Which seems to kinda defeat the purpose of this test as a diagnostic tool, but whatever.
I guess I also kinda lied about how far I went with my ’suicidal thoughts’ two weekends ago. I took 3 sleeping pills cause I was totally stressed out over stuff and I wanted to do was sleep so I would stop crying and carrying on, and the regular “calming” dose (half a tablet) wasn’t working. I told her that bit. I didn’t tell her that I took the 22 pills I had left in the packet and looked at them and thought about taking all of them. Obviously I didn’t take them, cause I’m not that clichéd, but I did have the blister sheets in my hand before I eventually drifted off.
So yeah. I semi-seriously thought about it. I called M the moment I woke up and told him all about it, so it all passed blah blah blah.
Anyway, I agreed to not act on any further thoughts before my next appointment with her, to make an emergency appointment if I need to, and to get in touch with M or Little Brother.
The next part of the session was where I sat there fiddling with my hair lackies and couldn’t think of what to say.
Awkward.
It was easy with my last psychologist, Dr S, cause he treated Little Brother and he knew exactly what was up with my family and he Got me pretty quickly. So I’m struggling trying to open up with Dr H. M reminded me that since I’m in for like 2 years of counselling, it doesn’t matter that it’s going slow, and maybe he’s right.
Dr H made an interesting observation though. That my voice gets all tight and throaty when I’m talking about stuff I don’t feel like talking about, and that I get all curt and polite, and I sort of hunch up on the couch. She’s right. I could feelmy throat being all tight and constricted. I hadn’t noticed that before. But I definitely do it, I know I’m all curt when I speak to Father now. Cause I don’t want to let my guard down. And because it’s a massive struggle for me to talk about something things without bursting into tears, and I guess I try to block the crying and weeping with my throat.
Then when I was talking about something I was reasonably ok with (my academic achievements), my voice got deeper, more relaxed, less restricted, and I was more animated with hand gestures etc.
Discovery re self: I blather a lot, but I never actually say what I want or needto say. Like in this blog. I’ve been doing posts on superficial shit like organisation and sleep and money but I have yet to talk about my childhood, I didn’t even mention what happened the weekend before last when I considered suicide and nor did I comment on the weird sad/guilty/messed-up feelings I got when Father emailed me last week, trying to be helpful and it ended with me saying “Please don’t start this. I don’t have the time.”
I do want to talk about these things, I’ve hinted at the dodgy childhood thing a few times, but yeah, I find excuses to not write about them.
Homework for week: Read online therapy article on “Mindfulness” and observe the way my voice is when I’m talking and keep a note of what I’m talking about when I notice these voice changes.
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