kadathinthecoldwaste:

nostalgebraist:

When I say “jittery mood” I mean that for the past three days or so I’ve felt so needlessly keyed up that I only feel normal at the end of the day when I’ve had a few drinks

I don’t mean that in a jokey “doesn’t alcohol make you feel good and right” way, I really mean that (this state) + (2 drinks) = (normal baseline)

This might have to do with decreasing my Ativan dosage now that I have less to do, though I’m still taking a fair amount of Ativan since I want to taper slowly, so I dunno

Between this and the extent to which Ativan helped me with work last week, I’m starting to take the role of anxiety in my life more seriously.  I should probably seek out an SSRI (or another long-term anxiety fix if one exists) next time, because I can’t take Ativan all the time.  (My psychiatrist brought up this idea last spring but then never did it because he thought I could just take Ativan when needed — but the anxiety is always a problem and I just happen to define “needed” as “when the spiral has progressed so far that I realize I can’t just do it by willpower alone,” and an ideal intervention would take place earlier than than, or just continuously)

SSRIs are among the most common treatments for anxiety. SNRIs are another common treatment; I’m currently on Effexor, and it’s the only thing besides benzos that has actually helped. People also occasionally get put on milder, longer-term benzodiazepines like Klonopin. There are also various more obscure medications, like Buspirone, and Tricyclic and Tetracyclic antidepressants, but the aforementioned seem to be the most prevalent.

Honestly, Ativan seems like kind of a weird prescription for what you have. From your description, you seem to have more in the way of severe generalized anxiety, whereas Ativan is usually indicated in the treatment of panic attacks, mania, psychosis, and seizures. It’s much more a rescue medication than the sort of thing that doctors generally prescribe for chronic anxiety.

Ativan was originally prescribed to me when I came in complaining of anxiety that was preventing me from studying for my oral qualifying exams, which at that point were four weeks away.  My psychiatrist seemed very interested in using an SSRI later on, but starting up with one didn’t seem like a good idea because of the short timeframe.

Ativan worked extremely well for me at that time, and when I mentioned SSRIs to him later on he dismissed the idea as probably unnecessary because I could just come in and get Ativan during intense stress periods.  At the time I had framed things as “anxiety isn’t a problem for me except when associated with major tests, deadlines, etc.”, which I suppose is true, but what I’m now realizing is that there is always another such beast ahead of you in academia, and that I’m still experiencing anxiety when these things are far off, it just isn’t as much of an obvious practical problem.

Part of the worry here is that I’m almost too good at turning “daily functioning” into a kind of Pyrrhic victory: I ignore how difficult everyday tasks can be, because ultimately I can do them, and it’s only when some extraordinary duty arrives that I admit to myself what I burden I was carrying all along.  (At which point I am given Ativan to solve the problem temporarily, after which the cycle begins again.)  Metaphorically, if you have a very heavy weight tied to your leg, you may feel proud of yourself for being able to hobble to the bathroom (“just like normal people can!”), but you should maybe still look into getting the weight removed if possble.

(via dagny-hashtaggart)

When I say “jittery mood” I mean that for the past three days or so I’ve felt so needlessly keyed up that I only feel normal at the end of the day when I’ve had a few drinks

I don’t mean that in a jokey “doesn’t alcohol make you feel good and right” way, I really mean that (this state) + (2 drinks) = (normal baseline)

This might have to do with decreasing my Ativan dosage now that I have less to do, though I’m still taking a fair amount of Ativan since I want to taper slowly, so I dunno

Between this and the extent to which Ativan helped me with work last week, I’m starting to take the role of anxiety in my life more seriously.  I should probably seek out an SSRI (or another long-term anxiety fix if one exists) next time, because I can’t take Ativan all the time.  (My psychiatrist brought up this idea last spring but then never did it because he thought I could just take Ativan when needed – but the anxiety is always a problem and I just happen to define “needed” as “when the spiral has progressed so far that I realize I can’t just do it by willpower alone,” and an ideal intervention would take place earlier than than, or just continuously)

My mind presents to me a very sharp boundary between what is interesting and what is uninteresting.  Since the distinctions I’m presented with align at least somewhat with the canons of ordinary taste, it’s always tempting to see this as a kind of refined taste.  Yes, I like this author, yet this similar one does nothing for me – well, this looks almost like the kind of thing a very cultured person, an aesthete, a snob, would say –

– except there are differences here that can’t be ignored forever.  To be cultured you have to, for the most part, like culture.  There needs to be some wide, broad background on which your negative judgments play themselves out.  When I comes down to it, I couldn’t ever be a real snob – even if I wanted to – because I simply don’t like enough things; really I’m just grading things on how well they intersect with my own personal quirks, and my quirks are quirky enough that fairly few things make the cut.  The resulting judgments might sometimes have the appearance of an almost parodic refinement, a discernment beyond discernment, but it’s an optical illusion.

Nabokov is a kindred spirit here (see e.g. this conversation where some good-natured true snobs dissect the cracks in his facade)

It took me a very long time to overcome the ultimately harmful “I am a regular guy whose life was temporarily messed up by Risperidone” narrative and reach the much more accurate “I am an alien whose life was temporarily messed up by Risperidone” narrative

I spent a lot of time subscribing way too hard to what I guess I think of as “male nerd self-improvement,” you know, that internet creed that goes “you aren’t special, you aren’t interesting, you just think you are to compensate for your social failures; just be more outgoing and confident and stop liking weird shit and one day you might become a Cool Dude, which is the highest state achievable by mankind”

But, as you might expect, if you take away “liking weird shit” there just isn’t that much of me left, and any Cool Dude capable of being approximated by me is a thin and brittle thing

The worst is when male nerd self-improvement intersects with social justice and I start thinking that I am just too privileged to be special and that Cool Dudeness is not the highest state of mankind yet is the most I can aspire to, my own white male weirdness meanwhile occupying some special untouchable tier of uninteresting bullshit

Much of the progress I feel I’ve made in the last few years – and I do feel strongly, whatever that means, that I’ve made progress – lies in accepting that I’m strange, that's okay, I don’t need to worry about it too much, I don’t need to construct some elaborate theoretical position to prove that my way of being is not narcissistic or made to hide something else

I am actually not your average whitemale nerd, my problems are not his problems, and if you enroll me in a self-improvement campaign made for him all you will get is a pretty good fish-out-of-water comedy

In 9th grade I read The Poisonwood Bible for extra credit in a class that I was too stupid (because of RIsperidone) to get a good grade in without extra credit

Except because of Risperidone I also couldn’t read books from start to finish so my father read it to me (yes, I was 15 and I had to be read to)

There was a character in The Poisonwood Bible named Adah who was mute for most of the story and had this weird internal monologue and really liked palindromes?  (I remember this all very hazily because I must have only been paying attention for maybe 10% of the book.)  Later in the book started talking and turned out to be the “smart” member of her family.  I remember in my confused Risperidoned internal monologue thinking she was pretty cool and kind of having a crush on her

Then later I went off Risperidone and came back to the world and my self-worth got attached to my intelligence

Cool aesthetic symmetry I guess though it isn’t very subtle

It would be nice to have a better word for what it feels like for me to be interested in things than “obsession,” which is overly dramatic and also imprecise

It’s a very well-defined feeling, though, a kind of Gnostic recognition or nostalgia or something.  It’s like I’m an alien who’s been on another planet for years and sometimes the texture of a concept will remind me of what things were like back on my home world

Nabokov does a very good job of capturing it and that’s part of why I like him

stress over, begin decompression

grad school hasn’t stopped being strange but there are indications that it will be less frustratingly strange in the near future

Starting to read The Secret History, a book which my father likes, has suddenly reminded me of something I’d entirely forgotten:

When I was about to leave for college, my father, as a going-away present, gave me and several of my friends copies of the book Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates, in order to warn us about how we might meet bad people at college (as he did himself, long ago).  The publisher’s description for Beasts goes:

A young woman tumbles into a nightmare of decadent desire and corrupted innocence in a superb novella of suspense from National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates. Art and arson, the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and pulp pornography, hero-worship and sexual debasement, totems and taboos mix and mutate into a startling, suspenseful tale of how a sunny New England college campus descends into a lurid nightmare.

It was a typical gesture of my father’s, simultaneously grim and quaint, and very easy to not take seriously if one didn’t want to.  My friends and I viewed it with the amusement with which kids going off to college often see everything associated with home.  I don’t think any of us read the book.  (But now I want to.)

I’d forgotten just how useful Ativan was for getting work done.  You mean I can just do stuff?  What the fuck?  I’m taking step after cheerful step on the tightrope and I can’t see the abyss beneath or even feel it in my stomach

My anxiety isn’t especially dramatic, no sweating, no panic attacks, just unpleasant thoughts that I’m pretty good at ignoring.  Or at least I think I’m good at ignoring them.  But then I take a benzodiazepene and realize that a gigantic weight has been lifted and I didn’t even know it was there

I feel like this is probably the right time to post something saying that I am, in fact, white, cis, male, straight, American, and basically privileged in every way you can be (unless you want to count “some things are nebulously wrong with my brain and I have been prescribed various strong medications for them, some of which did other bad things to my brain”)

I never felt the need to say this because I guess I figured people would infer it and because I was just a funny quotes blog so who cares (but I’m clearly not just a funny quotes blog anymore).  But it’s definitely gotten to the point where it could seem like I’m implying something else about myself just by the sort of people I talk to, and the kind of internet dialect I use

If I follow someone on here (and if their tumblr is a personal blog), it’s probably because I feel some sense of connection to them.  And I guess I feel like it’s very personally valuable to me that I’ve been able to connect to people who are in different demographic categories from me, because in the past this has not always been true.  It’s always been the case that I feel a sense of connection with relatively few people, and the small samples I was given in the past allowed for many spurious generalizations – for instance there was a time when, because almost all of the people I had been able to relate to were men, I conceived of myself as a man who “didn’t understand women.”  Now I realize that this was not true at all, but it was easy to believe – both because it was a recognizable archetype to inhabit, and because the dominant culture makes it very easy to categorize any non-understood trait as “feminine.”

So it’s very useful for me to have examples of people who I relate to who are in other demographic categories, and maybe that goes some way to explaining why I end up in the circles I do?  But I can see why someone might not find “knowing you is useful to my journey of self-discovery” to be a very appealing sentiment.  And I don’t want to hide this possibly objectionable thing behind my appearance of being an ambiguous blue octahedron hovering in your social circles, being friendly and stating nothing explicitly.