Well Bottom Blues

The medication for REM sleep disorder, what leads me to occasionally smack Patrice with my left arm as I reach out to catch a baseball or assume yoga positions while asleep, foregrounds my amazing Technicolor dreamscape which I jokingly refer to as the Chase Light Calliope Fun House of Madness. It is overriding another medication which seems primarily designed to make me forget what I dreamed in the same way that drinking on valium back in the day would make you black out drunk.

Just before I woke up I realized I was AWOL from a job I haven’t held in decades without excuse while late for another appointment, desperately in need of clean clothes and trapped in an underground subway exchange that superficially looked like Metro Center in DC but was more claustrophobic like the New York subway. They were steps and escalators everywhere serving all sorts of levels with shopping and such but no trains, and no walls. I can see where I needed to go, the other side of the tracks where the correct train would stop. I just couldn’t figure out how to get there.

And then I wake up. So today will be a panic day, the sort of day that led to the misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder first as generalized anxiety disorder and then as ADHD, that ignored the days of the bleak anhedonia that is high functioning depression: I walked, I went to yoga, I read school work. I made an extra pot of coffee because more coffee is the solvent to remove the invisible lead vest and boots. 

I’m in this happy place because I spent seven years in a state of happy stupefaction on atypical antipsychotics used to treat bipolar disorder, from which I finally broke away.  I had reached a point ten years ago where I needed something like that and possibly needed that sabbatical from a full life. I quit writing, couldn’t read poetry or serious literature and kind of dropped out of society even before COVID hit. Fat, dumb, and not particularly happy. Exceedingly even keeled. Less than the person I was before, as if the part of my brain that wrote and socialized was the seat of my disorder. 

A few years ago things had stabilized. I had a normal and interesting job, was living with my partner and so under adult supervision, but recognized that an important part of me had been switched off by medication. I would pick up James Joyce because I used to read Ulysses every few years come June, or a volume of Dylan Thomas or John Berryman which had  somehow become foreign texts in a language, like a first year trying to read Don Quixote or Cotázar’s Rayuela in the original Spanish. 

I thought at times about Tennessee Williams’s lobotomized sister Rose, who I’ve read was a perfectly pleasant person to be around after her operation but was no longer Rose. When I started my happy journey into treatment by nurse practitioners I refer to as pill pushers, I reached a point where a friend said she felt like she was on a minute-limited phone plan with me: distant and not quite there. 

When I got to the point where I felt I had to titrate off of the medication I was in a healthy relationship, in a job with people I liked and generally happy but I still felt distant from myself and not quite there. I wanted the part of me that was a rising blogger/essayist and poet back without the flashes of madness. And two years later, here I am. 

Then things got weird again. The job went all pear-shaped with the hire of a couple of incompetent and unpleasant bosses. They drug their feet hiring my replacement and I refuse to just walk away and to retirement for the sake of the co-workers I really liked. I began to have some neurological symptoms regarding memory and focus that were disturbing enough to go see a doctor. And I decided to go back to school in retirement because I had lost my circle of writers  when everything went crazy, and I thought a run at the local MFA program would help me as a writer. And it has, but taking up school when I feel like my brains are a little creaky with age has been stressful. 

And then this election. I have been struggling with it for the last year, questioning if voting for the party of Dick Cheney and genocide was essential, asking myself if America was worth saving. It increasingly seemed it was not, but too many people I care about would suffer dire consequences if I didn’t pull the lever for the pseudo incumbent so I did. And then openly fascist Trump still won. 

I’ve been honest with my caregiver in psych: not a doctor, but not quite the pill pusher of the past, that over a period of time I was cycling more through mild hypo-mania and anhedonia. We upped my Prozac a little bit, but that’s it. With the return of my vivid and sometimes disturbing dreams it’s been a bit much. Mild to moderate mania that I exercised by writing or chores around the house is sort of slipping back into the panic / paralysis mode from before I was on any medication.

One thing I learned as we played pharmaceutical spin the bottle looking for a way to contain the excesses of mood and behavior is to research the medication I am being given on the sites of reputable medical organizations. Prozac was likely exacerbating my REM sleep disorder. in which I physically act out my extremely vivid dreams. So that had to go.

Trazodone. prescribed for me CPTSD nightmares can also exacerbate bi-polar mania. So we change my medication again. Ultimately it’s on me to manage hypo-mania and keep moving through anhedonia. All I really want is something to take the edge off, the anxiety that signals incoming hypo-mania, that sensation that my nervous system is crawling with electric ants. So now yet another prescription.: duloxetine.

I’m not going back to the big pills, the atypical antipsychotics indicated for bi-polar, unless I get to a point where they have to lock me up. Writing is too important to me. It’s the one legacy I hope to leave beside my two practically perfect children. I need to stick with my routine of regularly walking among the ancient live oaks or in the small arboretum/forest in City Park. Shinrin-yoku, which translates to “forest bathing,” helped save me when the wheel started to come off 10 years ago. I need to focus on taking care of the people around me as a way of taking care of myself. To paraphrase the church, love without works is not the real thing 

And I need to keep writing. I needed to write this to get through this Tuesday. I need to keep writing because it harnesses my overactive imagination and overly sympathetic empathy in a productive way. I can try to write about my bad days, about my world and its people that I care so much about, in a way that would make my poetic heroes take notice.