20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0% packet loss
Oh, cool, that means I have internet access. You wouldn’t believe how much downtime I get, specially on, wow, weekend nights, when I really need it.

My meds. Many people think medications are like drugs you take to help you cope instead of addressing the actual problem. The actual problem, of course, is the actual problem they have, because everyone seems to think every existential search is the same. Heck, dr. Freud thought every existential search was the same, and that’s why I was always distrustful of psychologists, even though my parents tried to force me into one (and managed to, for one consult) — they’d tell me what my existential search was. I was in my tweens, I had no friends, and that was the obvious guesstimate about what my existential search was, and they’d try to help me cope with something that was never really the problem. I’m just beginning to see what the problem is, and that’s because all the fucked up nonlinearity in my head is being sorted through — not the old nonlinearity that forms my memories, my personality and the fears I’m trying to address, but the new nonlinearities so I myself can keep up with my thinking and both search through my past and the problem, but also try and build a life from now on.

I’m currently taking an antipsychotic, an anticonvulsant, a benzodiazepine (which is actually a mild anticonvulsant whose side-effects everyone seeks) and a stimulant. First there’s Seroquel, which is quetiapine fumarate, but mentioning the generic name is pointless because it’s still patented. Then there’s lamotrigine, best known abroad for its original brand name before it went generic, Lamictal but I’ve really taking made-in-india Lamitor and made-in-Brazil Neural. Neural is such a stupid name for a med.

Then there are the two medications that are actually drugs. Clonazepam, which is sold as Rivotril pretty much anywhere in the world except in the US, where they call it Klonopin. I know there’s generic clonazepam in the US, but the drug is really so cheap there’s no economic point in there being a generic version in Brazil. Clonazepam is a benzodiazepine, which means it’s the mellow-out drug. I often take part of my Rivotril “budget” on the bus home while listening to Zero 7’s “In the waiting line” or pretty much anything from Goldfrapp’s “Felt mountain”. It used to be that half of a 2mg clonazepam pill would knock me out but now I take two pills a day and I still need Seroquel for the knock-out sleep. Clonazepam is one of those drugs your system creates tolerance to (which is why it’s one of those black-box “this-is-addictive” drugs. Indeed I’ve become tolerant to the sedative effect after the hugest manic episode I ever had where I’d take these things like candy to see if I’d mellow out and still didn’t. The good thing is that the anxiolytic effect of the pills is either persistant or slow to create tolerance so I can know pop in a pill at any time of the day and not fall asleep, just be all nice and mellow and velvet-ish.

I often can and do fall asleep without the drugs and have to make the effort of standing up and preparing my night drug cocktail and going to the kitchen to chase it down with something. I pretty much can swallow dry any pill that isn’t “spongy” and big enough, and that’s how I take a clonazepam while on the street. Sometimes I think there’s something depressing about being such a med junkie that I can swallow a pill as big as 100mg Seroquel dry. The old brand of lamotrigine I used to take was coated, but my doc thinks it’s better that I take Neural because it’s locally made and he trusts its quality control best. It’s also marginally cheaper.

The other drug I’ve started taking recently is Ritalin. Ritalin is particularly controlled because it’s supposed to be (and chemically close enough to) crystal meth with a PG rating. It was basically a work emergency so my doc gave me and said “this is like cocaine and particularly dangerous for bipolar people because it might be enough to flip you out so take just half a pill and you’re good to go for three or four hours”. Because I got really focused instead of flipping out and didn’t find it really entertaining at all my doc said maybe I did have DDA (we had suspected it before) and instructed me to take half a pill everyday.

What I like about having clonazepam and ritalin is the control aspect of it. Because these are almost instant acting drugs I can actually modulate between being mellowed-out and strung-up according to real-world needs, provided that I take care not to push too far either way. In the ideal world people take just one med like Depakote and are done with it, but real-life pressures are erratic enough that it’s really nice to have some control over my energy state.

Med history.I’ve taken other drugs before: Depakote (actually an extend-release generic version of sodium divalproex), Wellbutrin (again actually a generic version of bupropion, Zetron) and Topamax (actually generic topiramate just labelled topiramte). I do miss them (except for Wellbutrin, which just made me crazy) like old girlfriends with whom you can’t be anymore.

Depakote is the ultimate mellow-out drug; I took it for a month and was in Planet Velvet. I also have little memory of what happened that month, and it was making me so mellow and passive I wasn’t make any progress anymore in tackling my issues. My base treatment was always lamotrigine, and I only stopped taking lamotrigine for two weeks. Depakote was added onto that, and when we decided it was no longer a good idea, we switched to Topamax. Boy, do I miss Topamax. I have these idiopathic (which means no one knows why yet) strong derealization/depersonalization issues. But on Topamax, when I looked into the mirror I did know it was myself. Topamax made me feel aware of my body, my hands, my feet, and the more Topamax I took the more I felt like my body was my own. We did suspect temporal lobe epilepsy, but the EEG failed to show one.

Topamax also made me feel tired as if I was carrying weight constantly and had these really ugly cognitive side-effects. Like not being able to organize sentences into paragraphs. That’s when we first suspected DDA and since my doc was afraid Ritalin was gonna flip me out, we took out lamotrigine, added Wellbutrin (which has some DDA focus-in effects according to some studies) and maxed out Topamax. I knew my feet even in my sneakers. I also really flipped out and was in the worst dysphoric mania you can imagine. That lasted for two weeks only, and then we reverted to low-dose Topamax and lamotrigine.

Topamax eventually was removed when we started using antipsychotics to counter The Mania That Wouldn’t Stop. Five drugs was too much for any psychopharmacologist to handle — the interactions, the side effects. But hey, the side effects really sucked.

I actually started taking antipsychotics to take The Mania That Wouldn’t Stop a screeching halt. I started on Risperidone. But even on Topamax, my cognitive functions improved so much we decided to keep on antipsychotics but switch to Seroquel. You see, there’s this scale of price/fine-tuned scale of antipsychotics — clozapine, risperidone, Seroquel, Geodon and then Abilify. Abilify is supposed to really rock out. It’s also very, very, very expensive.

Handling Ritalin. Anyway, I’m on Seroquel, which is a strong sedative, and I now have a Ritalin “budget” to go into super-high hypomanic-like (except I’m super-focused) mode. Sometimes when I’m really sleepy Ritalin will not fully function, so I try to take it when I’m not.

Last week I was so sleepy I decided to sleep the saturday out and take twice the Ritalin the next day to get everything that was way late done. If you’re bipolar and are on a small ritalin budget, DON’T. I sure did function excellently for six or seven hours, but as the focus effect ran out I thought I was feeing really hypomanic with some delusions of grandeur — of being pouring real art into these boring corporate reports.

I did have a six-hour marathon since then. Just take half a ritalin and take another when the effect is running out. By the end of it, take an appropriate amount of clonazepam to counter the remaining overexcitement. Maybe after all this I should ask my doctor if there’s an antipsychotic that isn’t so damn sedative, but I’m handling it just fine and the options will either have uglier side-effect profiles (like risperidone) or be really expensive (like Geodon). I feel like I’m handling it just fine, although it’s been a short time. In any case, I’d really really like to keep having a monthly Ritalin budget.

The stigma. Bipolar disorder is supposed to carry this really strong stigma that’s close to schizophrenia’s. But then the stigma algebrists also say major depression carries a stigma, although lighter than bipolar disorder’s. I mean, fuck the stigma. Lizzie Borden and the people she’s interviewed in “Detour” all seem to handle The Stigma with great respect and carefully select who they disclose their illness to. From my point f view, it’s actually getting fashionable to be bipolar. The bipolar communities at Orkut (think of it as the brazilian Facebook, minus the vampire bites) are full of people who were never diagnosed and apparently never really had issues at all. I also managed to buy a t-shirt that says “I hate being bipolar and love being bipolar” at a mainstream store. Everyone seems to want to be “bipolar”, these days.

Still, I’m slightly bothered about The Stigma as far as my professional career goes. Unless I manage to engineer myself out of the corporate treadmill, I’m gonna have to jump from one stuffy consultancy to a stuffier consultancy, and I want to tell everyone I’m bipolar as long as my boss and possible future employers don’t find out. But I’m still on the bipolar communities at Orkut, and at the community for every single drug I’ve taken, and unlike many chickens I actually use my real name and have plenty of photos on my album. dayvancowboy.org is also linked from there, and the reason I don’t mention my name here is to avoid googleability, which is the most likely way possible future employers might find out about the illness.

I can’t seem to handle The Stigma with the respect Lizzie Borden does, taking care not to step on the toes of everyone who is somehow scared of people with neurological disorder. Again, FUCK THE STIGMA. I’m 25, I’m bipolar, I’m making some money and having a productive impact on society. I also put real art on those reports our clients get; I’m a FULL CITIZEN and just because I have to take some meds to keep my brain in shape it doesn’t mean I should get treated differently. Is there a fucking stigma for congenital heart disorders? The only reasons I even give the stigma a notice is because some people of fucking respect like Lizzie Borden do, and because of the job market.

Moneystuff. The reason I didn’t finish my MSc. was that I took the present job because I wanted some money, and I was still marginally depressed enough that I couldn’t bring myself to work on the stupid research I had gotten myself into. I actually felt glad I had gotten out of the academic treadmill because the consultancy treadmill seemed more rewarding.

Anyway, I have this job that’s great because I have no clock timer to punch, I can dress casually, and the only things I have to do is be around by the early afternoon-ish in case the boss wants to talk to us and deliver the goods in time. And I have no real comparison basis on whether I’m delivering the goods on time, because my partner is one of those rare really smart people who finish a MSc. in physics by the time he’s 21. He’s actually younger than me, and has lived a better, more adventurous life and earns more than I do because he tackles more projects at once. (Well, yeah, we earn for each project we take).Apparently my performance is such that my boss only gives me one project to handle at once.

So I don’t feel I’m earning enough for my vastly above-average academic credentials, and I can either keep going with this career path I’m somewhat unhappy with (enough that I have to take Ritalin so my mind doesn’t stray) and jump onto the real-real corporate treadmill (which means no more t-shirts, no more freedom, a lot more politics) or find a way out.

I need money. I feel the money I’m earning right now is not enough and the “alternative means of living” bandwagon generally earns less. On the other hand, maybe I’m not getting a good enough “stress premium” and I might as well get rid of the stress and lose the premium. The thing is, I’m actually proficient at a lot of things, (and I mean a lot), though not really great at the ones that pay, and being out at the freelance market means a lot more stress on handling politics and building a reputation than a real-real corporate treadmill career would mean.

Lizzie Simon had a grant while writing her book and Andy Behrman was just crazy manic, though I feel I could be crazy manic if I dropped all meds. But this isn’t New York, and in Rio the fat of the land is actually really scarce. The good news is that my current job situation is flexible enough that I can start taking freelance gigs and keep doing this, and I really don’t want to lose that semi-stable stream of income while I don’t know what to do with my life. The bad news is, I’m either (or both) really inefficient as far as the deadlines I’m supposed to meet go (particularly at boring work, which means 95% of everything), and I spend a lot of time daydreaming about, say, modal logic or Deleuzian metaphysics so I have these crunch times where I have to cram a lot of work, to the point I’m taking amphetamines to cope.

But anyway, since I have flexible hours and all, I should be able to slowly take freelance gigs (I do have loads of free time, but I’m at a loss about where to start and anyway right now is a crunch time where I should be spending time finishing the due-yesterday work instead of writing this. But it does help me cope, it does help me relax.

Freetime I do have a lot of free time, both during day hours and on weekends. This is the point where having few friends gets to both hurt and interfere with the actual existential search. On weekend nights, everyone seems to be out there having some fun. This itch was less strong when I had a steady girlfriend that would sleep over and we’d have some sex and all, but it never stopped bothering me that I should be out there somehow. My few friends either never leave the house, usually do stuff with their girlfriends or people I couldnever relate to, or just never ask me out to do anything. But that’s been slowly improving and though I don’t have any plans for tonight the chance that something will come up is a lot less slimmer than it was in the past. And I never really cry myself to sleep — I have the drugs to mellow out and sleep it out or I can hit the nightclubs by my own, which is sometimes embarassing — when you find people you know and wouldn’t like to know you’re that lonely, but that’s rare — sometimes just weird but sometimes fun, specially when people drink themselves out of their hipster poseurism and mange to relate to outsiders.

The thing is, there are two things to the nightclub scene — one is losing yourself in the music, and that’s strongly random with me, and hitting on women, which I usually don’t, because I really don’t know how to do it (I’m not shy, I just don’t find myself talking to strangers for no reason) and because it looks really pathetic when I see other guys do it. Last time I did go to a club — basically the only place I’ll go because the music is better there on saturday nights — I found myself accidentally hitting on a girl (I was actually making a comment on something) and ended up kissing her until her hipster friend interrupted her. I later found out she really was one of them, which is kinda despicable and spoils a good portion of the fun.

Anyway, just going out and hitting the nightclub scene by my own isn’t really guaranteed to give you an exhilarating feeling of aliveness, and the friends I go with sometimes are really dry and won’t really improve on the fun, except for removing the strangeness of being out there, alone.

Of course, that’s taking a narrow view of things you can actually do with you free time on a saturday night, specially since I have this specific place in mind, but somehow that became a symbol of all my frailness in relating to people. Maybe I should start taking a broader view of it, but this is something I need available friends to sort out, and everyone I’ve confided about it wasn’t specially helpful, maybe because there’s basically no way to be helpful.

Human There are two things to being bipolar, often manic, and yet a loner. Once is a sense of self-consciousness that won’t go out. I’m not shy, not afraid of speaking public or doing anything that makes somehow sense. I will even go on dares if the stakes are good. But just hanging out by myself wherever it is feels weird. So sometimes I’ll arrive early on a nightclub and just hit the dancefloor as if I really loved the music, unfettered by the fact that there’s three or four people there, because hanging out doing nothing is weird as fuck.

The other part is that I’m narcissistic. Most of the time I spend talking to someone else, I’m talking about myself. There was a time when I felt like I wasn’t “human” because “humans” wouldn’t relate to me, but an honest examination of my past shows a lot of people trying to get in, but eventually being turned off by all the me-me-me. Taking care of this aspect — choosing not to be a narcissist has been slowly improving the social life front.

I’m getting really sleepy. I could write about stuff forever and I’m not doing this because there’s no one online that wouldn’t attentively listening, but there’s been a lot of context-less posting lately and all this stuff helps paint a picture with which you can imagine the random scenes described in shorter posts.

That’s all for today, folks. I should either commit to getting to work or commit to look around online if there’s something someone else would like to do with me. All blog and no play makes Macx a whiny sissy instead of a dayvan cowboy.