Northward Midget

Tag: depression

  • Lest I Forget

    I refilled my Provigil and Clonazepam (AKA Klonopin) scripts today over lunch.  After a trip to Subway, pulling into the office lot, shutting off the car, I shook two Provigil tablets into my hand and went inside, then slugged them down with a shot of Pepsi Max.

    I felt better that afternoon than I have in a long while.  My boss (the bestest one on Earth) had been looking for me in the interim, and when I asked, he had a new project for me.  It’s the usual maddeningly vague request, but I’m happy to get something concrete to work on.  Yeah, that’s it, I was actually happy to have that thrown on my lap.

    I love working.  I need to work.  So much of the time, I can’t decide what to do, so I sit there.  Sometimes I sit on the couch at home and stare off into the middle distance.  I’ve mentioned that before, like Puddy on Seinfeld.  Well, it drives my wife crazy and I can’t blame her.

    Anyway, it’s because I can’t decide what to do.  The girls’ rooms need cleaned, the laundry needs done, there are chores I should be doing around the house.  What to do?  Which to do?  I’m crippled with indecision.

    The work problem is similar but opposite.  Often, there is nothing specific to do.  I chase bugs and squash ’em right and fine.  Sometimes I’ll latch onto a technology (“NoSQL” lately) and whittle together something vaguely practical.  But there’s no real direction.  No projects for me.

    Well, now I got one, but this is getting way off topic.  Suffice it to say I’m glad I got it.

    What I’m meaning to say tonight is that that 400MG of Provigil made me into the man I’m supposed to be.  I’m quick-witted, generally happy, and good to be around.  So much so, in fact, that when I came home the wife was angry with me.  She thought I was foolin’ at it, and said it was cruel of me to play “happy” with her, that it fucks with her head, and if I want to do it, do it with the children.

    Well, I was doing it with the children, but I also tried to make conversation with her.  Anyway, I understand why she’d be pissed.  For all she knows, for all she’s been through with me, I’ll slip back into a zombie again tomorrow.

    And I might at that.

    On the downside, the Provigil seems to have increased my anxiety.  I’m considering downing a couple of the Clonazepam to get me to sleep, but my logical mind is doing well enough warding off the bogeymen for now.  It’s the typical stuff: how to pay the bills, worry of getting deeper in debt, of paying for what the kids need and what I want to give everyone.  Why am I, in a pretty good-paying professional job, not able to make ends meet?  Why are we living paycheck-to-paycheck?

    Heh.  I’m not helping myself by writing about it, am I?  Maybe I am.  I know we’re a fuck of a lot better off than most of the country is right now, that I’ve got a great boss (and friend) and a great job at a company that really seems to care about its employees.

    Our holiday party is this week.  We do a “Secret Santa” schtick.  Last year, my contribution was a Kiss Snuggie.  A Kiss Snuggie.  Perhaps the most brilliantly ironic brainchild of the Gene Simmons licensing empire.  How am I gonna top that?  So, I was close to opting out.

    Then, in my Provigil-induced euphoria, I remembered the gift I got last year.  It was a Jack Daniel’s gift box — accompanied by a framed portrait of one of my co-workers.  We’re pretty sure it was proffered to the pile by the president and founder of the company, who’s also one hell of a guy.

    So, this year, my gift will be a Jameson gift box accompanied by that same picture.

    Which reminds me: I was supposed to wrap it tonight.  Maybe I’ll just buy a gift bag from Wegman’s and tape it closed to protect the gag.

    It’s no Kiss Snuggie, but I think it’ll go over pretty well.

    So here I am typing up a storm, the primary purpose of which is to be able to go back to this entry when my next psychiatrist appointment comes due, and know what worked for this one day.  Tomorrow I’ll maybe try a Provigil in the morning and another at noon, to thin out the hyper.

    So many times, I go into that office (after waiting a half hour past my appointment time), and everything goes blank.  I forget how I’ve felt for the past month.  I can’t come up with a number from one to ten, ten being feeling pretty good.  I remember last time it was four.  I was gonna go with three on the next visit, and it’s been at best a three this month, but if I can ride this Provigil for the rest, it might up to a six.  I just need to remember to tell him why, or why I think it is, which is the Provigil, and not the Seroquel, which I’ve ramped up to 400MG each night.  That’s making me tired, and its introduction coincided with feeling slightly better last time, but I was also taking two Clonazepams before leaving work each night.  I think it was those tranquilizers that were helping me — not the Seroquel.

    Pristiq does seem to be a good foundation drug for me, but I may want to go back on the Abilify booster instead of continuing with the Seroquel.  I’ve had a lot of trouble waking up since starting it.

    Alrighty then, almost a thousand words that nobody but the spam-bots are gonna read, but they’ll be typed, and I’ll have reference to them when I see the shrink again next month.

    The bigger girl was a rascal tonight.  She wanted to play, and I couldn’t get her to calm down.  Finally I took both her hands and told her to breathe with me.  Deep breaths.  Well, of course that boloney didn’t work worth a pig’s ass.  However, she did entertain herself trying to kick me in the nuts for a few minutes, and eventually forgot her playthings and crawled up into bed.

    Lights were out and we’d started the drift off to sleep at 8PM sharp.  Little girl went to bed within a half hour.  It was another hour after that before I lifted myself up out of bed, leaving both sleeping.  She was just so danged full of energy tonight.

    And get this: she had a bloody lip and was painting herself with the blood.  Little smears all over her bare chest and around her mouth.  She climbed up on the dresser and cooed, “I look like a zombie!”

    She let me wipe off her mouth (which I suspect she re-smeared after lights-out), but insisted on keeping her chest marked up.  I’m trying now to catch the wife to warn her about it before she goes to bed, so she doesn’t find our eldest covered in blood tomorrow morning and freak out.

    I think I’ll close with that.  Goodnight, friends.

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  • Existential Depression

    How do I write about something when that very something saps me of the will to do anything?  Really, I should stop bitching about this and do something about it, right?  Just snap the hell out of it and be a man, live life.  Sure, you’ve got problems, but we’ve all got them, and you’re better off than most.  You’ve got two beautiful girls, a good job, a roof over your head…

    …

    I just don’t care.  Apparently, our toilet leaks.  I didn’t realize it.  Hell, I’m looking at the damn thing and it doesn’t seem leaky.  Our yard is overgrown.  But I mow it!  Everything in our house is from someone else.  Why didn’t I buy us more stuff?

    Sometimes I sit on the couch and stare, like Puddy from Seinfeld.  I’m not particularly sad, in an active way.  I’m just sitting there.  Maybe a mild catatonia.  I could be doing any number of things, but I can’t decide on any of them.  There’s a philosophical paradox called “Buridan’s Donkey.”  A donkey is standing between two bales of hay.  They’re both exactly the same, but he has to decide which to eat.  He can’t, so he starves to death.

    I am Buridan’s Ass.

    Also, my mind works against me.  I can’t finish thoughts.  Maybe I’m just getting old.  When I was a teenager I had a book on how to be “psychic.”  One of the exercises involved just asking yourself something and it’ll come to you later, even if the mind blocks it from you right then.  I don’t have time to wait for the answers.  I have all the time in the world, but not for that.  Maybe the Internet is to blame.  Why remember anything, why bother storing (or moreso, recalling) the minutia of life when you can just Google it?

    But, it’s always been that way.  Before my joints started creaking, before I got online almost twenty years ago.  That kind of thing used to be blamed on TV.  Did TV do it?  I watched a lot of it.  I have loads of old movies and TV shows in my head.  I know the professor on Gilligan’s Island is named Roy something.  I recall it sounding like a serial killer’s name.

    MTV had a VJ named Tabitha Soren.  I used to wonder if it was Tabitha from Bewitched, all growed up.

    Am I digressing?  My whole life is a digression.  Existential depression, in my terms, is a lack of desire to live.  I do have a desire to have a desire to live, but that’s one step removed from actually wanting to live, and more trouble than it’s worth, apparently.  There’s always laundry to do, things to pick up, dishes to wash, chores and worries.  Where’s the payoff?  Where’s the fun in life?  The closest I come to being happy is when I’m working on something, in that blissful zone of creating or troubleshooting.

    Or when I’m drunk, and all the arguments in my head are dampened down to a soggy warmth.

    Or there’s sex, but I won’t go there other than to label it what it is — a brief vacation to the primal.  It’s how animals must feel.

    Anyway, here I am.  Living.  Many believe suicide is a cowardly act.  I’ve always considered it the bravest thing you can do.  You’re acting against the urge of every cell in your body to keep going.  You’re silencing a billion little fellers who selfishly want you to keep breathing, walking, talking, working, washing that laundry every goddamned week.  You’re telling them to shut the fuck up and you’re pulling that trigger.

    Me, I’m a coward.  They’ve got me by the balls.  When I was in the hospital, I was asked a half-dozen times if I’d ever attempted suicide.  What qualifies as an attempt?  When I was in college, I downed a bunch of over-the-counter sleeping pills.  I don’t think I even went to sleep.

    I also pissed in a jar.  In college, not during my stay in the mental hospital.  I lived in a dorm room and hated/feared going down the hall to use the bathroom, so I pissed in a Mason jar.  I’d dump it out at 4AM when nobody else was around.  I wore a trucker hat and a military surplus trench coat that was a bit too short, and had long hair, and wondered if I’d ever have a girlfriend.  I didn’t know alcohol until my second year, when I was out of the dorms.  If I’d drank and smoked earlier, my life would have been entirely different.  Better?  I don’t know, but certainly different.  Maybe I’d have married someone down in West Virginia.  Maybe I’d have finished college.  As it was, I just couldn’t make it.  I was crippled by a fear of everyone else.

    Digressing again.  Where was I?  Suicide.  When life is a net negative, when you’re at -1 or less on that line, then the zero of death is an improvement, is it not?  And really, honestly, who can say their life is a net positive?  Is it worth all the work we have to do to keep going?

    But again, let me reiterate that I’m a coward.  I won’t pull that trigger, jump that cliff, or sleep in that exhaust.  I don’t even have the motivation to turn myself off.  It’s like watching infomercials until the wee hours because you’re too lazy to get up and fetch the remote.

    Currently, I’m taking Pristiq and Abilify for depression, and Provigil for weariness associated with sleep apnea.  While I was in the hospital, I tried Xanax and got a script for Klonopin.  Today, my psychiatrist decided to add Symbyax to the mix.  What a name!  It’s a combination of an antipsychotic and Prozac.  There appear to be some good reviews online, but I’m not counting the ones where it turned people fat and suicidal.

    If it does what the dozens of others in my pharmacological cavalcade have failed to do, then I’ll be sure to post about it.  I don’t have a lot of hope, but then again, I just don’t care.