// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

I ended up working all night long to finish work due today. I’m still expected to get the comments on a previous version of this tomorrow morning and have a meeting about it all in the early afternoon. It also takes me a two-hour commute to get to work.

I accidentally skipped my meds after staying out all night friday. My drug schedule is all screwed up, not to mention the 15mg of Ritalin I took along the last 12 hours.

So I can either take the 8:40 bus and get there at about 10PM (and risk my colleague not being there with the comments) or take the 10:30 bus and get there about 12PM. I’m supposed to maximize for un-sleepiness and information digested and processed by the time of the meeting.

Should I just skip my antipsychotic again? All reason points to no — I need to counter all the craziness and be sane by tomorrow. On the other hand, if I take my antipsychotic and my benzodiazepines I might not be able to wake up at all, no matter how loud the alarms. And I skip the benzos I might be sleepy and get that kind of “hidden anxiety” that gets me deep into the DR/DP twilight zone.

Oh fuck, I’ll just take all my meds as prescribed this time. Work be damned.

(Edit: I just took twice the antipsychotic “to make up” for the one I missed, for an “extra unscrambling factor” and just for the heck of it, to knock me out reeeeal good. ‘Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony that’s life)

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.

Stream of consciousness today — I apologize for the bad style. I fucked up big time when I  tried 10mg ritalin knowing I had skipped one dose of anticonvulsant. I had just run out and thought Seroquel was strong enough everything else was just an add-on. I think it’s a full hypomanic flip-out. I do know Ritalin competes with Seroquel for receptors. I’ve already taken six miligrams of clonazepam — which sure did chill me out — and two susie-Qs, and I’m still insomniac. Usually one 100mg seroquel will knock me out for 10-12 hours. 

I do hope the extra antipsychotic stops this on its tracks. If it doesn’t  I’m upping the anticonvulsant. But I don’t have the time for that, I’m supposed to function as a normal human being or get fired. 

On a second thought, I should up the anticonvulsant right now.  Maybe a Depakote, but if I’m depressed tomorrow I won’t be able to function. Lamictal has that antidepressant effect which could get in the way of stopping mania in its tracks. Maybe Risperdal?

Jesus, self-medicating is hard. I should have gotten an algorithm in case of a manic flip-out, but I wanted the Ritalin enough that I downplayed the pro-manic effects of it at my last season. 

What’s worse, as soon as I feel stabilized — no chaos attracting my brain even if ultrafocused on ritalin — I’ll still take ritalin, though in much more moderated amounts.

If the pre-psychotic “chaos attracting my brain” is the problem, I think I might do half a 2mg Risperdal. Seroquel is way too expensive to keep one-upping it in hopes of getting okay. OTOH a full 2mg Risperdal steals my entire soul. But hey, 1mg Risperdal plus 200mg Seroquel might be way too much antipsychotic and might numb my soul far worse than 2mg Risperdal did — even though Seroquel is much smarter.

What if Van Gogh was a mapmaker?

I bet he could put real art into those maps, but it wouldn’t really matter.

No, really, this was way unexpected. And I’ve had no stinkin’ antidepressants either, just old’ school anticonvulsants; this week I took my first non-anticonvulsant med and it was an antipsychotic. I’ve been depressed all my life, mostly the dysthimic, “soft” kind of depressed comparable to the chinese torture where they tie you down and let a tiny droplet of water fall on your head every ten seconds.

But with some random lashes of the real stuff too. And then, when the last straw broke, maybe a year ago, a psychiatrist (whom I shall refer as my shrink) diagnosed a case of “soft” bipolar II and gave me anticonvulsants with a soft, very soft antidepressant edge. Then I fliped out. Not like now, anyway. They never expected the spanish inquisition that even though I’d get better from the depression and have longer and longer periods of stability and an improving overall functioning (a better social life, an actual job), I’d be getting these progressively higher crises of [hypomania.

Thinking back, I've had a couple of [hypo]manias before treatment. Guess I am bipolar after all. I shall refer to them all as manias; apparently you only get to call them manias if you spontaneously self-combust from the sheer self-destructive behaviour, and as long as you have a shred of consciousness you don’t get to be manic.

I have a shred of consciousness. I’m here at work, where everyone’s wearing a suit and I’m supposed to be preparing for an important meeting in two hours, and I’m in my “KILL YOUR POP STARS” t-shirt setting up the blog journal for the book I’ve been writing for a few weeks now. But I noticed that. I’ve not gone psychotic, I’m just having fun.  Because contrary to what jaggerian though proposes, I can always get what I want.