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

All the drugs I’ve taken for most of my psychiatric life — except for that brief contact with bupropion — have been anticonvulsants. And I’ve actually been okay, oscillating between mild hypomania and no hypomania at all. Remember, I started psychiatric drugs because of depression, which hasn’t happened for more than a night or two since I started treatment.

Then somehow I got into the (hypo)mania that wouldn’t stop. I’d take 6 or 8mg of clonazepam and still be awake all night. Spending massive amounts of money in luxury stuff like $250 headphones or a 160gb iPod. So we finally entered the strange world of atypical antipsychotics. I had learned a lot about anticonvulsants, but this is brave new world to me.

For a while I though they were horrible drugs that silence the chatter inside your head. 1.5mg o risperidone made me smart — as in shutting out all other stimuli that made it difficult to concentrate on the smarter stuff. 2mg made me a bot.

We’re phasing risperidone now and introducing Seroquel. Like with risperidone I’m quite liking the effect — which is very different — but I’m not at the final dose yet. OTOH, I’m still on risperidone, so I might be on the right track regarding antipsychotics.

I’m getting pleasure waves around 6PM everyday, and my first theory was that that could just be the Seroquel (which has a half-life of 7 hours only) wearing off and leaving the 4mg clonazepam that’s still on my daily cocktail. But, hey, I’m on minimal doses of Seroque, and that’s supposed to hit your H1 receptors first, which could mean I’m only getting a sedative — or maybe it’s enough for the antipsychotic effect to kick in — and no one in the world can tell. And I’m on risperidone as well.

I haven’t been really-really down for quite a while, and it’s all a matter of whipping up the energy to do what you’ve been planning for the day -– update the blog journal or write the section of the book about anonymity and coming out of the closet.

Yeah, well, just plain whipping up the energy isn’t always plain whipping up the energy, and while there’d sure be energy for running three miles if I needed the money or was in need, keeping the motivation for a longer-term goal can be complicated to say the least -– and remember this is no darn book of poems; I’m trying to tackle complexity here.If I just had put that hypomania to optimal use…

And yes, much of the problem comes from never getting to learn how to use your human skills because in hypomania you don’t need them and often everything that needs to get done gets done gets done in hypomania anyway.

But hey, I’m trying to start a marketing campaign, which can’t just mean post-once-and-run. I should blog journal more often. And this is prime time for the section about coming out of the closet because the number of people who know about my manic-depressive illness is reaching critical scale.

Mostly it’s the marketing campaign timing. I should really stick to good marketing timing or I’ll never leave one-post-three-hidden-chapters. And the very fact that I am worrying about marketing timing shows that I am not that depressed. I just have no fucking idea of how to go about things not being hypo.