Alive

I talked with my psychiatrist about the ineffectiveness of the medications I've been taking. How where I am today is not where I was a year ago, nor a year and a half ago, or even two years ago. Things have changed. I'm no longer so anxiety ridden that every sound and noise outside sets me into a panic. I don't think about walking from my car to my house or vice versa and wonder if I'm going to be attacked. The hypervigilance simply isn't there to such an extreme anymore.

So I am titrating off of Cymbalta as it never really did much good for me. The list of side effects of withdrawal are numerous and I've experienced at least half of them. I was on 80 mg; now on 60mg until Saturday. Then 40, 30, 20mg for 2 weeks each. It's a slow process. And if 60 to 40 is too much, I was given enough meds to do 50mg for 2 weeks to ease the process.

After that, I will be slowly coming down from 2mg of klonopin a day. We're not really sure where that's going to go. Maybe I only need 1mg, split into half mg in the morning and night. Maybe I need something more like Ativan, which I've taken before. It's on an as needed basis.

I'm also more recently on Tegretol. 200mg left me a complete zombie. 100mg seems okay. I don't think it's the solution we're looking for, but it's really too soon to know how it's affecting my system. I've only been taking it for about a month now. And coming off of Cymbalta actually opens a lot more doors to try other meds. Cymbalta interacts severely with almost everything.

The game plan is to see what my new baseline is in the present. Everyone thinks this is a good idea. I also don't do well on long term medications. By long term, I mean something that I need to take for a few weeks. My body tends to reject whatever I'm taking after a while. I'm not surprised by the increased muscle aches, pulled muscles, migraines, hypersomnia, mood swings. My brain was going, "NO"

Even with all the current side effects, I can think again. I watched a comedy special. Fluffy! I haven't laughed that hard in...I honestly do not know when. It was a completely free and open laughter. I may have been a child the last time I laughed like that. I was startling myself, let alone freaking out my cats lol!

I can feel again. It's like breathing after drowning. My emotions had been so regulated for me that I'm relearning how to do that. It's like a dam broke inside of me and everything that had been trying to spill out, I can finally FEEL.

There's a lot to that. Not all of it good. There's a lot I never held people accountable for, and I have to decide whether it's worth bringing up now with the arguments, or letting it go as I did in the past. But that's a story for another time.

For now, it's enough to be closer to who I was/am before people and depression tried to destroy me.