I feel like shit right now. In just about every possible way. I've been having a really good time recently though. It's possible that writing a 'my life is crap' post, and getting that all out of my system might mean I can write about some of the fab things that have happened to me recently. Watch this space!
The reason I feel like shit is because I'm in deep withdrawal from my medication (my fat teaspoon medication). I've been on it non-stop for about eighteen months, which is about as long as I ever take it, and I've been slowly reducing the dose. I've come down from 40mg to 20mg over the past three months or so, which is pretty slow. I do it that way because I have plenty of experience with how horrible the withdrawal is (even though supposedly there is none!). Last weekend I was having such a good time that I forgot to take any for three or four days in a row. Which is long enough for me to think that I might as well just carry on not taking it. In an ideal world, I would have gone down to 10mg first, but I was feeling impatient, as I often am!
Two days later, I got the physical signs. Nausea, shivering and intense dizziness. You know that feeling that you get when you've just come off a rollercoaster, where you move your head, and the world doesn't quite keep up? Imagine it non-stop for five days and counting. I was sort of hoping that I could skip the emotional withdrawal. It basically means returning to a world where I live in technicolour - experience sadness and joy like anyone else, rather than an unrelenting ambivalence towards everything and everyone. While I'm re-adjusting to the non-grey world, I tend to have slightly more extreme emotional responses - tears for little or no reason, intense euphoria over small things, even more impulsive decision making than usual.
This has been happening a lot this week, but sadly, because I've been working 12 hour days, there's been very little to be euphoric about! I had a playdate on Tuesday (possibly more on this later), which made me cry. I'm not sure, but I don't think I would have cried last week, when I was still a teaspoon. Although the tears were good, so it's ok.
This morning was horrendous. I woke up to discover that my laptop, which has been moaning and groaning for a few days, wouldn't start. So at about half past ten I toddled down to PC World with it, hopefully to get it fixed, or at least recover my files. The aforementioned files include around 10Gb of music and films, photos dating back five years, and the novel I wrote last summer. None of them are backed up, because my hard drive is at work. Lo and behold, once at PC World the stupid thing started fine. So in theory, end of issue. Bring hard drive home from work, back up files, delete some stuff, defrag, processor has room to go again. But, of course, I was feeling impulsive. And I'm geeky about technology. So I started looking at netbooks, which I love. The idea was that my laptop is reasonably likely to keel over in the next few weeks anyway. So I might as well get something new, and have it all sorted out before the dreadful day arrives.
The only problem was that I can't really afford food at the moment, never mind a heap of expensive technology. Because of course, getting a netbook would also require a big external hard drive, a decent pair of speakers, an external DVD drive and a pretty new bag to keep it all in! Nevertheless, I wandered around happily choosing pretty geeky things. I even happily sat down to pay for it all. Disaster struck when, 40 minutes into the payment process, it transpired that the nice young man from PC World had mistranscribed one number from the Sim card for my mobile broadband dongle (which I was contracting into because you get the netbook for free, and of course I'd ended up choosing the expensive ultra mobile laptop). Apparently this isn't a simple 'go back and change it' problem. It's a 'half an hour on the phone to a call centre' problem. So I sat there, and sat there, and sat there.
Eventually, my friend rang me up to say 'where are you? We're leaving for Cheltenham in twenty minutes.' I was supposed to be at a house party in Cheltenham tonight, which I was catching a lift to, to save petrol, and to save me driving while under the influence of lack of drugs. I explained my predicament, and promised to be there soon. Soon turned into a while, and a while turned into a really long time. I was consoling myself with the thought of how happy I'd be when we were finally done, and distracting myself with my iphone. I zoned out for a lot of the techno-babble, but eventually was informed that I could not, in fact, have my nice shiny laptop, with my nice shiny mobile broadband, because the PC World computer system wasn't working. (Yes, irony, where art thou?)
And it was precisely at that moment that I got another call from my friend. 'We couldn't wait any longer, so we've left. You can drive yourself, right?' One of the quirks of being me is that although I whinge and whine and moan, I feel terribly guilty when I ask somebody else to endure the annoyances and inconveniences that go with my illness. So despite knowing that I was too dizzy to drive any more than a few miles I said that it was fine. And anyway, it wasn't like they'd have turned around and come back.
So, to sum up, I spent three hours of my life in PC World this morning, I didn't end up with a shiny laptop to show for it, and I missed my lift to seeing all of my uni friends. I barely made it out of the shop before I burst into noisy tears. I drove home crying behind my sunglasses and crawled into bed. This is not a rational response. But it's the kind of response I'm having to the small things at the moment.
There are some silver linings. When I got around to doing banking and paying bills this afternoon, I realised that I really had been doing impulsive shopping. There is no way I can afford new hardware right now. And it's very probable that had I gone to the house party I would have been drunk, teary and embarrassing.
Hopefully, before too long my physical and emotional states will both be stable. I seem to remember that it took a couple of weeks and a couple of months respectively last time, so I'm not holding out too much hope for *soon*. But I do at least know what's happening to me, and to some extent am able to rationalise, and remind myself that it's not real emotion, and will go away.
This too shall pass.
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