To a point, there is a difficult loop of loops powering each other. A tipping point is approaching where we're going to have to make major decisions that I keep kicking down the road. I am completely torn between whether to go the prescribed medication route or not. There isn't a right answer. Most roads seem to lead to an early death and its kind of funny.
You pop the medication and wait for weeks to see if anything is going to happen. If nothing happens then you take some more. I guess "pop" is much too flippant. You rearrange all of your life routines to take the prescribed medications and present as stable as possible a body environment to present affects. If, with your new forced sleep patterns and dietary intake, there is no effect then you go back to consult and raise the dosage and wait a few more weeks and on and on until it clicks. Or never completely does. All the while, physical affects may manifest. Weight gains, weight losses, tics, shakes, nausea, fatigue, it varies from prescription to prescription. If it doesn't quite click, a new prescription is introduced to help. You may be weaned off of what you are already taking, you may not. Weeks upon weeks, months, of consultations and examinations and examinations and consultations and dealing with and juggling body changes and it may click. The changes may stick. And that is your new life. X pill at this hour, every single day, without fail, until you stop breathing, because your head will shatter if you stop taking it. In the mean time, enjoy the side effects, which will probably contain an assortment of shadows and echos in the corners of your consciousness that will follow you to your death.
Obviously, not a great answer. If you can't cope with the body changes, you're not going to be able to keep up with any sort of regimen. You're going to take the prescriptions inconsistently and exacerbate the already difficult process of ascertaining what, if any, affects are becoming present in your psychological make up from week to week. If you do manage to make it a few months and falter later down the road and start to slip into an inconsistent pattern of medicating you may be torn apart by the reawakening of whatever it was you are trying to lock away, squash, and overcome. If you do stick with the regimen, that pill is a constant reminder of the incomplete you. The you that is only "complete" if you swallow this spot. And if you can get past all of that and wear and break yourself into this life permanently linked to this pill and make your examinations and deal with the side effects that can be life threatening on their own, you still can and likely will experience periods where it doesn't work anyway.
Sooo we come to drinking. Alcohol. Good old alcohol. I already drink some on and off to manage pain. Between psychological scars and body scars, it kind of gets the job done. It gets the job done well enough, I should say. You don't focus on history and you don't feel the sharpest highs of the pain inside your body and it's easy enough to turn the dial up or down as necessary. If what you are suffering mentally has stabilized itself momentarily or at least is not on an offensive within your being and your mind you can simply not drink until you reach a point where it begins to slip beyond that edge of your ability to cope and manage. Of course, you do become more and more accustomed as your tolerance steadily and inevitably climbs. It takes more and more alcohol to achieve the same affects. It takes more and more alcohol to blunt the storms and voices inside your head and still more to numb the body and still more to blunt the cuts of history. The side effects, by themselves are all horrible. Shakes, shortened tempers, hangovers, appetite problems, light sensitivity, insomnia, deep depressions and apathy, fatigue, wanting to smoke cigarettes constantly, hot flashes, low and acute withdrawals depending on how much you had to do to get to a place where you could finally sleep.
The good news is, on the days and weeks when you don't need to turn the dial at all, nothing horrible happens beyond 24-72 hours of physical withdrawal. The very bad news is the damage is done. Your liver is hardening drink by drink and will eventually fail, your brain is losing its functions even as the psychological scars are faded and erased. If you weren't careful you've probably injured or bruised yourself in some way you didn't notice from the overall body numb and even if you were careful you've probably bruised or injured yourself in some way from the body numb and coordination problems that come with consuming alcohol. The depression will linger well beyond physical withdrawal even if everything else inside your head is muted and been flattened backward so you can finally hear yourself think again and you may wind up drinking just to escape that lingering depression. The packs of smokes you breathed are a part of your lungs forever. You are extending the depth of the foundation of your bodies alcohol dependence in small ways in that it will take at least the last peak dosage to get the effects you need to feel normal the next time your mind begins to crumble and pull itself apart. And, oh yeah, you can overdose and die.
I'm not going to bother with a faith/religion approach. For reasons I've laid out through the years, faith and religion is an enormous vacuum to. As a way to see, cope with, reckon with, understand the world and understand people and oneself, I get its value to some. I'm an atheist. Moving on.
Taking the problem head on, no chemical enhancements with alcohol or pills, is a terrifying proposition, but it could work. I can often easily go one to two weeks without a drink if my spine feels okay and I'm able to get out and play. I don't take prescriptions. Head on, however, there is no where to run and nowhere to hide when your head starts to come apart. The best you can do is try to distract yourself and try to surround yourself with as many safe spaces to sit and do nothing as possible if you can't get outside. You have to be able to position yourself within the larger fabric of life in a way that will insulate you and that presents major problems in itself in that life tends to be pretty damn inflexible. You also have to understand that you cannot control when you will experience a major break and that unpredictability will also cause direct conflict with your ability to plan anything and everything from a phone call to making yourself lunch to being at work; with that in mind, understand that you will not know when the most violent spells will end either.
The great news is there are no prescription side effects or organ destroying alcohol dependencies to fret over that will end your life early. The bad news is there is nothing between you and the teeth of the beast inside your head either. If and when there is a major break down you may end up hurting yourself or someone else far worse than the damage being done by either of the other methods. If you can't find the right person or persons to speak to in order to ground yourself or at least get you outside of yourself, you may self destruct completely and become a suicide statistic. You may lose significant friendships and jobs and intimate relationships because coping may mean that you have to spend days or weeks at a clip alone or heavily insulated and metered to bear with the voices and hallucinations inside you and the swells and shadows of visions. All of the while you will be acutely aware of these collapses and broken connections and psychological scarring, perceived (real or not) judgments and stigma, and that the expectation from the outside in is that you see a professional and "get help" for being yourself. Which kind of strikes the ear a bit strange, no? In your necessary isolated states, in attempts to avoid self destruction and free yourself from the knowledge of the poorer life outcomes, you may resort to far more dangerous chemicals than any mentioned above and/or episodes of extreme alcohol use which will likely also lead to your premature expiry too.
Here's the plan: there isn't one. Here's the funny part: you're not crazy; you are going to die early, it's really only a matter of how. You can take the pills and the side effects until you can't take them anymore or slip up and miss enough of the regimen to come apart at the seams or quit altogether and default to something else that will kill you early. You can incrementally (or quickly) drink yourself to death in an effort to manage and reign in the worst of your symptoms, essentially trading one pretty awful thing for the other. Lastly you can try to live with your symptoms as much as possible and fit in to life where you can until you or life decides you simply cannot. I'm somewhere between option three and option two. The funny thing is cannabis seems to help the most, it's just hard to keep it stocked. I'm working on it. I guess that's the fourth option. I guess there is a fourth option.
After all of this time, I'm still not ready to completely screw with my brain chemistry the way prescriptions will again. Not yet anyway. Not yet. We're not misguided enough to believe that we're fine, no matter how "normal" we feel, but if we can stay between the lines of certain death from liver failure and attendant complications, side effects, and risks in option two and certain death from succumbing to suicidal thoughts, frustrations, and life complications in option three until we can truly try out the full spectrum of what option four has to offer, we may be able to avoid option one altogether.
///Gorillaz - "O Green World"
You pop the medication and wait for weeks to see if anything is going to happen. If nothing happens then you take some more. I guess "pop" is much too flippant. You rearrange all of your life routines to take the prescribed medications and present as stable as possible a body environment to present affects. If, with your new forced sleep patterns and dietary intake, there is no effect then you go back to consult and raise the dosage and wait a few more weeks and on and on until it clicks. Or never completely does. All the while, physical affects may manifest. Weight gains, weight losses, tics, shakes, nausea, fatigue, it varies from prescription to prescription. If it doesn't quite click, a new prescription is introduced to help. You may be weaned off of what you are already taking, you may not. Weeks upon weeks, months, of consultations and examinations and examinations and consultations and dealing with and juggling body changes and it may click. The changes may stick. And that is your new life. X pill at this hour, every single day, without fail, until you stop breathing, because your head will shatter if you stop taking it. In the mean time, enjoy the side effects, which will probably contain an assortment of shadows and echos in the corners of your consciousness that will follow you to your death.
Obviously, not a great answer. If you can't cope with the body changes, you're not going to be able to keep up with any sort of regimen. You're going to take the prescriptions inconsistently and exacerbate the already difficult process of ascertaining what, if any, affects are becoming present in your psychological make up from week to week. If you do manage to make it a few months and falter later down the road and start to slip into an inconsistent pattern of medicating you may be torn apart by the reawakening of whatever it was you are trying to lock away, squash, and overcome. If you do stick with the regimen, that pill is a constant reminder of the incomplete you. The you that is only "complete" if you swallow this spot. And if you can get past all of that and wear and break yourself into this life permanently linked to this pill and make your examinations and deal with the side effects that can be life threatening on their own, you still can and likely will experience periods where it doesn't work anyway.
Sooo we come to drinking. Alcohol. Good old alcohol. I already drink some on and off to manage pain. Between psychological scars and body scars, it kind of gets the job done. It gets the job done well enough, I should say. You don't focus on history and you don't feel the sharpest highs of the pain inside your body and it's easy enough to turn the dial up or down as necessary. If what you are suffering mentally has stabilized itself momentarily or at least is not on an offensive within your being and your mind you can simply not drink until you reach a point where it begins to slip beyond that edge of your ability to cope and manage. Of course, you do become more and more accustomed as your tolerance steadily and inevitably climbs. It takes more and more alcohol to achieve the same affects. It takes more and more alcohol to blunt the storms and voices inside your head and still more to numb the body and still more to blunt the cuts of history. The side effects, by themselves are all horrible. Shakes, shortened tempers, hangovers, appetite problems, light sensitivity, insomnia, deep depressions and apathy, fatigue, wanting to smoke cigarettes constantly, hot flashes, low and acute withdrawals depending on how much you had to do to get to a place where you could finally sleep.
The good news is, on the days and weeks when you don't need to turn the dial at all, nothing horrible happens beyond 24-72 hours of physical withdrawal. The very bad news is the damage is done. Your liver is hardening drink by drink and will eventually fail, your brain is losing its functions even as the psychological scars are faded and erased. If you weren't careful you've probably injured or bruised yourself in some way you didn't notice from the overall body numb and even if you were careful you've probably bruised or injured yourself in some way from the body numb and coordination problems that come with consuming alcohol. The depression will linger well beyond physical withdrawal even if everything else inside your head is muted and been flattened backward so you can finally hear yourself think again and you may wind up drinking just to escape that lingering depression. The packs of smokes you breathed are a part of your lungs forever. You are extending the depth of the foundation of your bodies alcohol dependence in small ways in that it will take at least the last peak dosage to get the effects you need to feel normal the next time your mind begins to crumble and pull itself apart. And, oh yeah, you can overdose and die.
I'm not going to bother with a faith/religion approach. For reasons I've laid out through the years, faith and religion is an enormous vacuum to. As a way to see, cope with, reckon with, understand the world and understand people and oneself, I get its value to some. I'm an atheist. Moving on.
Taking the problem head on, no chemical enhancements with alcohol or pills, is a terrifying proposition, but it could work. I can often easily go one to two weeks without a drink if my spine feels okay and I'm able to get out and play. I don't take prescriptions. Head on, however, there is no where to run and nowhere to hide when your head starts to come apart. The best you can do is try to distract yourself and try to surround yourself with as many safe spaces to sit and do nothing as possible if you can't get outside. You have to be able to position yourself within the larger fabric of life in a way that will insulate you and that presents major problems in itself in that life tends to be pretty damn inflexible. You also have to understand that you cannot control when you will experience a major break and that unpredictability will also cause direct conflict with your ability to plan anything and everything from a phone call to making yourself lunch to being at work; with that in mind, understand that you will not know when the most violent spells will end either.
The great news is there are no prescription side effects or organ destroying alcohol dependencies to fret over that will end your life early. The bad news is there is nothing between you and the teeth of the beast inside your head either. If and when there is a major break down you may end up hurting yourself or someone else far worse than the damage being done by either of the other methods. If you can't find the right person or persons to speak to in order to ground yourself or at least get you outside of yourself, you may self destruct completely and become a suicide statistic. You may lose significant friendships and jobs and intimate relationships because coping may mean that you have to spend days or weeks at a clip alone or heavily insulated and metered to bear with the voices and hallucinations inside you and the swells and shadows of visions. All of the while you will be acutely aware of these collapses and broken connections and psychological scarring, perceived (real or not) judgments and stigma, and that the expectation from the outside in is that you see a professional and "get help" for being yourself. Which kind of strikes the ear a bit strange, no? In your necessary isolated states, in attempts to avoid self destruction and free yourself from the knowledge of the poorer life outcomes, you may resort to far more dangerous chemicals than any mentioned above and/or episodes of extreme alcohol use which will likely also lead to your premature expiry too.
Here's the plan: there isn't one. Here's the funny part: you're not crazy; you are going to die early, it's really only a matter of how. You can take the pills and the side effects until you can't take them anymore or slip up and miss enough of the regimen to come apart at the seams or quit altogether and default to something else that will kill you early. You can incrementally (or quickly) drink yourself to death in an effort to manage and reign in the worst of your symptoms, essentially trading one pretty awful thing for the other. Lastly you can try to live with your symptoms as much as possible and fit in to life where you can until you or life decides you simply cannot. I'm somewhere between option three and option two. The funny thing is cannabis seems to help the most, it's just hard to keep it stocked. I'm working on it. I guess that's the fourth option. I guess there is a fourth option.
After all of this time, I'm still not ready to completely screw with my brain chemistry the way prescriptions will again. Not yet anyway. Not yet. We're not misguided enough to believe that we're fine, no matter how "normal" we feel, but if we can stay between the lines of certain death from liver failure and attendant complications, side effects, and risks in option two and certain death from succumbing to suicidal thoughts, frustrations, and life complications in option three until we can truly try out the full spectrum of what option four has to offer, we may be able to avoid option one altogether.
///Gorillaz - "O Green World"
