...and there's good reason for that. Summer months left me blissed and busy, spending every weekend waist deep in some crazy event, working more jobs that one person reasonably should, preparing for (and going to) Burning Man, etc. The process of cleaning my house revealed a collection of event tickets the size of a healthy plate of spaghetti, not to mention the many camping excursions, trips to the coast, hikes, and daylong adventures. I've learned to maximize my summers, to use every minute, and truthfully, I loved every second.

Then, winter began, and I fended off threatening doldrums, depression, and borderline psychosis with the presence of a new ally. I entered the deepest trance state I've ever entered on November 1, and while under I grabbed the hand of an ally to enter the Well of the Wyrd. I walked along the bottom of those green waters, while barnacles and other seas creatures affixed themselves to my back. After my ally assisted me (with a sword) in prying them off, she gave me three things to prevent their reattachment:
1.) A sword.
2.) Two Runic symbols to be tattooed onto my back. Money woes have prevented me from actually getting them inked into my skin, but I've made their application a top priority.
3.) An owl. This is slightly awkward: owl offered her services. I was told to make a hooting sound, like an owl, when I felt like something was attaching itself to me. The owl has manifested in my mind as both a barn owl and a horned owl, though more frequently the horned owl.

The hooting, in particular, has been tremendously valuable, especially with dealing with anxiety. There are times when I feel almost crippled by the hand wringing fury that washes over me from fear of what *could* happen, and the hooting seems to beat it back towards something like reason. This use of a sound - I can't emphasize enough its usefulness.

In spite of this strong, positive start, I can feel myself fading and folding, nursing what resembles a perpetually broken heart. I'm surrounded by similarly afflicted folks, who pass hours doing things that make the seasonal downshift worse, like playing Nintendo and watching movies and television, being nasty to others or pouting about inconsequential things. My strongest supporter/best friend is currently spending a majority of his free time with his girlfriend, which leaves me more or less fending for myself. In a way, this is good; I feel like I've depended upon others too much lately. Having to move without the luxury of a car meant many phone calls to friends and boyfriends, asking for use of vehicles - which is also an anxiety inducing event. Using a vehicle that is not yours means you operate on their schedule, and must work quickly enough so no one loses patience with the process or feels compelled to make biting comments. I've found that most people who offer help do so with a price tag.

It reminds me of being sixteen, and driving for the first time. I had no where in particular to go, I couldn’t see very well (this was before I had glasses) and I managed to get lost and tap a vehicle my first night on the road. I was terrified and unsure that I even wanted this responsibility, until the first time I went to the drug store to pick up a prescription on my own. I stood in line. It wasn’t ready yet. I said, “That’s okay. I’ll wait.” It took 40 minutes, and I didn’t care. I read magazines. I walked around the store. No one complained. No one got pissy. It was a peaceful, blissful, 40 minutes of waiting.

I managed to continue to enjoy this newfound freedom without a car (initially) as all my friends cycled exclusively. When I began to befriend drivers, that impatience and anxiety returned…must hurry up, or we’ll get caught in rush hour…must hurry, stores make him impatient, he wants to go…must hurry up, he doesn’t want to be here…must hurry, he doesn’t want to wait…

This happens over and over again.

Sitting in a bar today, feeling like a prisoner because I can’t leave, I’m not driving and I don’t have the keys, and for some terrible reason my bike isn’t parked right outside. At the same time: I spent an hour at the gym today, running myself raw, getting back in shape for the summer months of ten miles a day of bike riding, minimum. I got some bus passes from work for days when I have to go to the chiropractor. I’m taking back transportation.

I write this, because this is one action, one of what will probably be many to keep my life active, to move through winter into summer. This is just recording, just to tell you.

Year of death comes to a close, and so begins the year of water.

The theme for the year came to me on Dia de los Muertos, and it fits...and not just for obvious foot-after-death reasonings. One of my greatest ongoing battlefields has been emotions and all things emotional. I had a squishy center once, and the ability to express the thoughts and motivations of that center. Somewhere along the line (and medication didn't help with this endeavor) the primary objective became: shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

In a sense, this was a useful tact to take - since a lot of what the emotional center was saying wasn't especially logical anyway. It will be an amazing experience to learn this self from a grounded place.

And...

...this will be the last year of things being all about me, or visions and dreams only offering insight as to how I can better myself. Thank God for a broader narrative.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1025061pauley1.html?link=rssfeed

Jane Pauley says that the New York Times contacted her to conduct an interview discussing mental health issues, with the understanding that it was to appear in a special informational section. What happened (in actuality) is that it appeared in an advertising supplement for psychopharmaceuticals. Jane Pauley is pissed, and is suing the NY Times.

Of course, the question is: was the intent always to place the article in such a place, or was it just so biased that it ended up there? Was Pauley supposed to lend credibility to a particular drug, or drugs in general?

I think one of the positive results of the Tom Cruise phenomena is that a lot more people started looking at psychopharmacology and asking why fistfuls of pills were being distributed by people who didn't know what they were prescribing. *And* there have been a lot more articles like this one, asking the WTF question:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060806/ap_on_he_me/stuck_on_meds

I hissed at a dog today. It got too close when I was walking to the busstop, and it just happened. The person walking the dog probably thinks I'm insane. Further proof that I'm Issy's familiar.

Drama in the neighborhood. Screaming fight going on across the street. Somebody fucked somebody. This is how I know how my television my neighbors watch: when they fight, it's acting. You can tell. No one cares who fucked who. They've been waiting for the opportunity to be this angry for years. Now they can yell the f-word in the street and threaten and vow to call the police, just like in that episode of every cop show ever. It's boring and sad. No one will rest until someone is in tears. That will be the climax of our show. No one will applaud. People will talk about it for minutes. The F-word peppers the air, again.

Myspace is running a memoir contest. I entered for the sake of amusing myself , meeting new folks (it was quite effective in this capacity), networking with more established writer types, and potentially resusitating a book I've been working on for a long, long time. They are now conducting the voting portion of the show. If anyone feels like voting for me (or anyone else, for that matter) check it out here:

www.pacificperspectives.com/memoir/

I'm Coyote Red (duh) and my memoir is "9 Dreams of Prison"

get to burning man. How will I accomplish this? I haven't the foggiest idea. I'm comforted by the fact that it seems roughly half of the people who end up there begin with the mission impossible theme in the background.

I'm doing well. Just uninspired, bored, restless, wondering why the hell I'm spending another rotation around the sun slaving away in an office which hopes to create natural light with prettier overhead light. Either way, my eyes are bleeding.

I turn to the pages and pages I've filled over the years, and I try to polish and prefect and finally finish. It seems there should be a stronger injection of something in all of this though, some higher note to eventually reach to set everything around me humming.

I stare at my hands, I stare out the window, I stare at websites. I boost seratonin with high dosages of vitamin b, I regulate my hormones with Chaste Tree Berry, I spare myself allergic meltdown with vitamin c with bioflavonoids, I salve my stomach with l.acidopholis. I reduce my intake of poisons for the sake of long life, I ride a bike everywhere, I work out at the gym. Then, I periodically drink hard cider because it's hot, work is stupid, and I have nothing better to do. Life is interesting inside my head, and in bursts outside my head. I need a long stretch of head on a kite string.

So: I've applied for scholarship admission. I haven't heard back yet. I've been trolling various message boards, and I think with some careful planning I can manage to get there, with everything I need, for as little as $150. This includes purchasing a pair of goggles, food, and gas contribution for travel. If car rental becomes a necessity, there's a significant increase to wrestle with. I'm considering going to SOAK, Portland's mini-Burning Man, but folks seem fairly catatonic on PDX-based sites and boards. Hmmm...

Any readers of this fair journal planning to attend?

1.
I've begun seeing a Jungian Analyst. For those unfamiliar, Jung and Freud were buttbuddies until Jung decided that he disagreed with Freud with regards to understanding deviance as "illness" and the need to apply diagnostic language to intelligent people Jung considered to be on to something. Dreams are an integral aspect of the work. Jungian analysts help you understand yourself better, and understand what you (as an individual) have constructed to block your own happiness. You can read more about it here:

http://www.jungnewyork.com/whatisit.shtml

I found someone who trained at the official institute in Zurich, and my first assignment was to have a dream and tell her about it. That dream was the starting point of my self-reflection, and I ended that session exhausted and relieved and peaceful. My analyst says almost nothing; she simply coaches me in distinct directions through very precise questioning. She's also in tune to things I don't want to talk about, and pays attention to my disinterest to note whether its a situational disinterest or overall therapeutic disinterest. My second assignment was to draw a picture of the Lady of the Lake, who has come to occupy my spiritual subconscious quite actively. I was once told I had a past life as a nun. I think I believe it.

2.
I had a soul retrieval and extraction. The person who conducted it was about as magical as a box of antacids. However, like a trust roll of Tums, sometimes when you're in utter stomach agony it just works. All the semi-psychic channels she attempted to tune into were completely off; her observations of my situation and what was needed to resolve it could have just as easily been someone else. However: I felt different afterwards. Better. I have a new totem to work with. I think its important to remember spirituality and symbolism, and I think this is especially true with detoxing from psych meds. After all, up until this point, many of us have been characterized as unreliable narrators in our own lives, told to distrust our perceptions, observations, and visualizations as hallucinations, "Wrong-thinking," and poor socialization. I can't think of anything better than re-embracement of the fantastic as part of mind reclamation.

3.
Reading the Bhagavad Gita and lots of other beautiful epic poems is great for centering, especially when reading them aloud. I was reading the Gita aloud with Pan for awhile, and now its more something I do on my own. It's a terribly repetitive poem, so I have to mix it up with other things, but after a certain number of lines my voice takes on this trancie-monotone I hypnotize myself with. Lovely.

4.
Alone and quiet can be good friends. In spite of the length of this entry, a lot of the time I've been speaking less, speaking more carefully, and removing myself from social situations as needed. My work environment blows, but I've been keeping my mouth shut for the sake of walking away with a reference, and on my own terms. I got pissed at a friend this past weekend, and temporarily forgot her own discomfort with her situation (compassion deficiency) to focus exclusively on the shitty way she was interacting with me. I remained alone for awhile, and once I returned to her company I felt solid and safe.

5.
Forcible breaking of patterns. I had a 40 page paper due, and like every other project, I approached it with a stream of excuses and foot-shuffling to avoid getting it done on time. A fire granted me an extra day off work (go ahead and laugh. I did.) so I spent the whole day completing the project. I finished something. Holy shit.

6.
Turn the computer off and eat things that haven't been cooked to death. I haven't updated in awhile because I decided my computer can go fuck itself. Too many tabs gives me attention deficit, which leads to aggravation, which leads to nothing getting done. Computers make me tired, and TVs don't fare much better. This was easier to accomplish, of course, during the two week period of time it managed to be beautiful in Portland. With a return of deeply sucky weather and indoor life, well...

It's also easier to write when not hopped up on caffeine and sugar. Viva la fresh anything. Oh: no booze. Drinking is really bad for my unmedicated mind. The occasional beer = okay. Champagne? Bad.

7.
Writing.

Impatience.

1.) There are ways to tell your employer you're about to snap without using diagnostic language. Things like, "I'm having a hard time right now," and "A lot of stress and anxiety" are good places to start. This, of course, doesn't necessarily mean that people won't look at you like they smell gunpowder. Adding, "I'd appreciate a high level of confidentiality," might help.

2.) Taking time off means contacting company life insurance, and if I'd like to, making a request for counselor information. I would not like a counselor, but I would like a support group. Calling these individuals means answering questions like, "when is the last time you had therapy?" and "What was your diagnosis?" The (long) answer to the first question would be: "I was hit by a car. A woman waved her finger in front of my face for a few months, and nothing happened. I told her I wanted to stop taking medication, and she responded, 'Then I think that's a sign that you need to take more!' As a psychiatrist would say, I then 'terminated' therapy. After that, my entire life was exposed via subpeona, and lawyers got to question whether or not I was a reliable witness to my own life. That was the last time I had therapy." What I said was: "About two years ago. Car accident." When she pressed, I said, "I don't use diagnostic language." She didn't press any further. This, of course, doesn't mean that I wasn't reminded of every verbal spell cast against me.

3.) Keeping the car accident thing in mind, when life insurance lady asks, "Are there any issues in your life, outside of work, causing stress and anxiety?" the answer is no. Remember this, if this phone call is ever yours to make: the answer is always, always no.

4.) Surprising: a sense of loss in not using diagnostic language. Almost a lonely feeling. Before, I was a lot of things. Now I'm just me. Echo.

5.) Remembering that a few months ago I made a point of writing a note to myself, reminding me that I needed to find a support group, that I needed to keep going to the gym, that I had to force myself to go outside and be around other people, that I had to try and maintain my sense of concentration by staying away from the internet and not watching tv, that I had to clean my room like I meant it. A few months later I've partially cleaned my room, haven't done anything else. I knew this was coming, I knew it, and I gave myself a thousand opportunities to stop it. Right back at the self-destructive point I spiral down to again and again. How do I break such old patterns?

6.) Looking for a shaman type who does soul retrieval, I realize I don't need the return of a missing piece. I need glue.

7.) I pick fleas off my cat. I walk around and fall in love with everyone. I want new friends. I want my dreams to find their growth spurt. I want someone new to listen to me. I want to remember that I am interesting. I want to know this.

For those who troll around tribe.net, I've recently created an anti-psychiatry community. Please, feel free to join:

http://tribes.tribe.net/anti_psychiatry

Feeling haunted by brain tumor dream of the night before. Seeing something the size of a golf ball on an x-ray of my own head. Can't help but wonder if there's some accuracy...but then, I'm always on the hunt for something.

made the decision early today to stay at home after things didn't start right and a headache started blooming in the center of my skull. can feel a vague cloud of something softly sad sinking in (I love alliteration) and I'm glad I'm at home.

These things make me angry: being confronted with people who stumble into strangely similar situations as the ones I myself wander into, but who make different decisions that lead to disaster (did I mention I love alliteration?). I find myself becoming really judgmental of these people: mentally (or verbally) chastising them for financial mistakes, for laziness, for absence of consideration for other people. I criticize them for over-prioritizing other people over themselves, for arrogance, for submission, for pet neglect, for incompetent bookkeeping skills. I roll my eyes at what they read, how they treat their families and friends, the respect they show themselves.

I do this (without doubt) as a means of attempting to make myself feel better by noticing people who behave (in my estimation) more foolishly than I have. I also do this as a means of establishing an internal warning system for myself, to prevent myself from sliding to a certain level of depressed laziness. Sometimes I think this house I live in breeds this kind of behavior - so many people living here have succumbed to it for short (or long) periods of time.

So: adventures in room cleaning, re-organizing, organizing in the first place. I work in 30-45 minute spurts, then I get bored and let my mind wander to something more interesting.

Superstituious: I'm sitting at home right now because I can't leave the house. Why? It's 1:00 PM, the 13 hour, and twice I've been hit by a car during this stretch of time. Apparently, 13 doesn't like me.

Paranoid: for the past several nights my ears have been tracing every single sound that slides through the windows, and I dissect it until I can name it and know it. If I can't name it, I imagine around it, give it a face and an origin.

Trigger: I've felt on a hair one of these for the past few days. I can mask this boiling sensation with my good friend silence. I've set an internal thermometer for myself, and when my self reaches a certain number of degrees, I take myself off the burner. Then: cooling...cooling... This is useful. My icky conversations are few and far between.

At night: dreams and visions of car accidents fill my head. This has been a reoccuring theme since I was a teenager. I'm not exactly asleep, but I'm closing my eyes and trying to, and then all of a sudden, pop, bang, whistle, there's an image of a car accident. I'm always watching these events, never a direct participant in them, and I try to note injuries if I can, the types of vehicles, what the street looks like, if its night or day, how old the person is who is hurt, whether or not they are dead. Someone is always hurt. When I was eighteen I used to make 'scream faces' in my sleep in response to seeing these accidents over and over and over again. At once point in time I searched headlines for matches, and frequently there was something that would connect the dream/vision from the night before with an actual occurance. Here's the thing: so what? There's no point to it, even if it is some sort of psychic phenom there's nothing I can do to stop the crash; for all intents and purposes these function as waking-nightmare, another pile of anxiety to keep me from sleep, another something I could never tell a psychologist and that I probably shouldn't tell my mother and a whole lot of other people. So what?

During the day: perpetually torn between wanting to play outside and wanting to sleep. I convince myself it's cold outside. I wear as many sweaters as I did when it was actually cold. I come up with reasons why now is a good time for napping. I point out that there will be more sunshine later, anyway. I do everything I can to keep me indoors, insulated, isolated, miserable. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just bored, if that's really what's driving this need to fight myself; if I was convinced there was something bigger to struggle against, maybe I would fight that instead. Perhaps deep down I'm not that interesting, and this is the discovery I've been avoiding. Americans seem to set their lives up to be stupid, to be filled with cell phone calls and power walks and the on-time paying of bills and overmaxing of credit cards. I set my life up to be stupid with 9 to 5 work, with debt, with heavy financial burdens preventing anything resembling "settling." Maybe I'm not supposed to settle.

Somewhere between these lines are concrete answers.

I've considered the following options:
1.) I'm possessed by demons
2.) Forget about demons. All this time, the faeries have been playing pranks on me.
3.) There's a succubus attached to the back of my neck, vacuuming my life force away.

I'm not considering anything that would normally be filed in the "logical" slot at this point in time. A wonderful stint of productive mania has faded into a horrible stint of oversleeping, pouting, angry depression. I even woke up pissed yesterday, which was impressive, seeing as though it was a weekend day and nothing like an alarm disturbed me.

Reading the New York Times, I came across a "Modern Love" column that mentioned one woman's zoloft use, and how she felt her options were basically crippling depression or medication. She was embarassed at being dependent on a medication, but had developed her addiction all the same. She mentioned nothing about a desire to stop taking the medication. Here's where it gets slightly more fascinating: she's a stripper and is actively working on a sex-worker memoir. She didn't seem to consider that working in an industry where exchange of good was directly connected to sex might impact her away-from-work sex drive. Instead, she focused on the medication aspect.

I think it's impossible to focus on life as an actuality when looking through the lens of medication. Now that I'm unmedicated, I'm finding it hard to avoid the aspects of my life I find utterly miserable: work, finances, my own ability to give and receive love...In confronting myself, I saw myself beginning to take an easy approach, ie: "what I really need to do is break up with my boyfriend, move to a new location, find some new friends...or better yet, what I need is to get a new boyfriend, move to wherever he's located, and get some new friends. Hell, maybe I'll join a cult!"

Only now does it strike me how incredibly easy and reductionist this tactic is. It doesn't matter if I have a *new* boyfriend if the issue is an inability to comfortably give and receive love. It doesn't matter if I live someplace else, if I end up in the same shitty, uninspired job situation I'm presently wrangling with. I don't want to take care of other people right now, I don't want to interact with men who behave like children, I don't want to even coddle myself.

The general appeal of medication is still a part of my psyche. Depression almost commands chemical influence. Yesterday: did absolutely nothing the first 1/2 of the day, then went to a fun event with lots of people and I couldn't even muster the most base conversation with people. I turned away from people I recognized. There's this ancient insecurity and shame rotting in my belly and I have no idea what its name is. I've plotted a map of my mental breakdown history, I've flagged all the landmark events that left my eyes looking old, I've connected the dots from one event to the next, and still there's apparently something I'm forgetting. When I think about the things I'm doing, I have a hard time convincing myself that I'm capable of completing them. There was apparently some crisis of confidence that I chose to be absent for. No one else apparently witnessed it, either - if they had, wouldn't it have been brought to my attention? What will it take it enliven me?

talking to me must feel similar to witnessing repeated implosions. I feel bad for anyone not wearing goggles.

Observation: whenever I mutter anything anti-psychiatry (in the first person) in a matter of minutes the facial expression of the person I'm speaking with morphs from interest into utter horror. I think to myself: I don't look crazy...at least, not according to my own mirror inventory. My carefully designed series of filters alerts me: guess what genius? You've still got another ten years before most begin to openly question what's been obvious for two decades. This is a society where most people think it's perfectly reasonable to get a surgery without a second opinion, and yet it's unreasonable to consume an herbal supplement in addition to chemotherapy. It's unreasonable to think a ghost is harassing you from a middle-world state, but reasonable to go blow up thousands of people because Jesus Christ told you to do it. I've been missing something for a long time. Why should this be any different?

Another observation: I'm also shocked by the lack of curiousity in many people. If, in conversation, someone says, "I'm an Orthodox Easter Egg, and no one will ever find me!" my response would probably be: "Really? And how is that working out for you?" The general response appears to be: change the subject, and fast.

Funny: frequently the people most quick to dismiss the more eccentric aspects of my personality are the same ones finding the most benefit from them. Reading some stuff an old friend of mine wrote and subsequently got published has left me unnerved. I knew from the way our interactions generally went that a lot of the time when I was babbling he was collecting data, and therefore I shouldn't be surprised to see pieces of myself manifest in his writing. And yet: what is the line between inspiration and exploitation, and if he feels so inclined to share, why not start a blog?

Went to a conference, came back, realized all over again that working 9-5 has never been on my list of things to do. On the airplane I tried to imagine a large, annonymously sent box of cash waiting for me, along with a note letting me know that I didn't need to put in my two-weeks notice at work; that was already taken care of. At the bottom of the box of cash would be a pair of perfectly fitting red tap shoes to help me celebrate my generously gifted, under-the-table wealth. I think I spent too much time on the shoes and not enough on the box itself, because when I got home it wasn't there. Damn. Must work on powers of invocation.

Doing well, but finding an unmedicated existence surprisingly lonely. Being in a steady state of numb is not being surrounded by supportive friends, but being in the company of tiny ones that don't talk. There's a comfort in that not-caring, the pulse of everything's-fine. Now, a return of the static that keeps me up at night, pushing question after question through my internal filters, hoping they don't get overclogged with cat hair.

Two years (total) on Zoloft without insurance:
$1920.00

One year on Zoloft with insurance:
$480.00

Miscellanious other drugs that didn't work:
$300.00

Total: $2,700.00

For all my fire and sermonizing, occasionally I'm struck almost-silent, usually in moments where I feel genuine shock or deep distress that causes me to fold into hiding. Last night I was shaken by the disloyalty of a friend. Think Mercutio gossiping about Romeo to the Prince of Cats about how Romeo is totally obsessed with Juliet, oh my God. I have no problem whatsoever with friends taking issue with my actions or inactions - though I may not always respond to their requests and concerns immediately. I don't ask my friends to withhold their concerns and confusions. I like to hear about them. What I do ask is that conversation about me take place with me. If another (especially another that I'm in conflict with) approaches a friend of *mine* with the intention of having a gossipy conversation, I expect that friend to say, "I really don't want to talk about Coyote with you." Why do I expect this? Because this is what I do.

Though the intention of this journal is to talk about medication-related things, all I can say is that regardless of my mental state this kind of behavior is foul. Loyalty is a powerful, awesome, amazing thing. I love the concept of brotherhood, of oaths, of deep committed attachments based upon mutual love and respect. I make these kinds of oaths rarely, and when I do make them I take them highly seriously and develop passionate allegiance to those I pledge my loyalty to. I consider it an honor to be loyal to another person, and an honor to receive their loyalty in return.

I am picky, I am careful, I am cautious with my loyalties. When I first suspected this person of disloyalty, I honestly thought I'd heard wrong, and I waited patiently for the right moment to ask if my ears betrayed me. I know the problems that come with gossipy conversations, the confusions, the wondering who is a true friend to who, and I look to avoid these situations by being able to count those I consider loyal on one hand. When he confessed my suspicions were true, something in me snapped. Since then, I've had nothing to say.

This process is learning alchemy. I keep making glop and not gold.

Last night ended broken. After a couple of weeks of attempting to arrange proper protection for myself, to prepare for the inevitable seratonin-free nightmare, I still crashed. Was doing okay (if a little weepy) but I'm finding I have to watch the people I surround myself with a bit more closely. While companionship in general seems to work wonders, if I get around someone who is perpetual dark and bitter and miserable it tends to automatically make me depressed. I got angry yesterday after hanging out with one of these people, because really, I was doing okay. I'm wondering if it's getting to a point where I have to sever some relationships for the sake of my head. It seems there should be an energy exchange between people, "you put your right foot in, I put my right foot out, we put both feet in, and we shake them all about." When I put one foot in and the other person spits on it, "buzz kill" is an understatement.

Anyway, I cried all night last night, deflated, depressed, wanting to die, searching for a reason underneath all the external drama. I felt insecure towards the people in my life that care about me, wanting to cling to them and leave them alone at the same time. While I'd like the support of my closest friends right now, I also don't want them to identify me as this, to understand Coyote Red as, by nature, fucked up. I don't want to be the energy vampire, the dark star. I want them to focus/remember/know the solid me, the stable me, the me who cracks jokes and offers insights and has ten thousand projects going at once, delightful chaos. This isn't selective breaking of corporate windows, this is breaking all the windows. I don't want them to look at me.

And: really, I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm an unreliable narrator (again). Before going to sleep last night I soothed myself by imagining me someplace different and calling upon my allies to place hands over spiritual blood baths. When I woke, I still felt emptied.

I placed a small piece, maybe 25 mg, of Zoloft in my mouth and held it there. I wondered whether or not this would make it worse or make it better, if it would jump start the dead air in my brain or just make tomorrows sucking sound all the louder. I thought about how this is the trap you get caught up in, the starting and stopping, the one step forward and two steps back, because there's too much time spent feeling worse, there's too much wondering if it will ever get better. The fact that I don't believe in mental illness doesn't change the fact that my brain has become dependant on external sources for the production of seratonin. I swallowed. I felt dizzy. And I wonder if I can keep going like this.

I like to fool myself into believing that the "hard part" of this whole process is going through the chemical withdrawal...rewiring brain so it acts on its own instead of with bursts of chemical resusitation. Really, this is phase one. The part I almost never get to is phase 2: decoding, when the desire to say fuck this noise and start popping pills again because almost overwhelming.

No chemical influence equals: tired all the time, depressed, antisocial and paraniod, periodically completely out of it or angry or sad, life-loathing, inability to notice the sun. Paralysis. Last night, I was pissily trying to make my way into bed, which involved moving and re-moving a field of cats, all stubbornly determined to sleep with me (they won). I realized I hadn't spent much time lately just petting and loving them the way I usually do, that I was detaching myself from them, and they weren't have anything of it (or they like my bed a lot). I took a moment to pause and ask: why am I so angry?

The cop-out reason was the first thing to surface: there is no reason. Followed by the default reason: because life is much more of a mess than I ever thought it would be. Some part of me was activated and aware enough to know that both of these things are bullshit excuses. I started to let myself think slowly and mechanically, peeling back one layer after the other, asking more questions: why are you angry, no really, why are you angry, when did that begin, why did that become the response, where is the relief to that anger, what actions can you take to avoid further anger, etc. While I can't confidently say I revealed the fruit, I can say with some certainty that it can be summarized as a lack of committed spirituality, a stall in my attempts to get over a fear of death (the biggest hurdle), a desire to overcome that fear and for it to manifest as actual completion of projects so that I can start new ones. I'm bored with being in the same place, but going someplace different/further requires acceleration. I'm at a longterm yellow light.

Cults (and I never use cult as a dirty word) like Scientology (and a hundred others) use some sort of personality inventory as a means of almost-hazing, of dissecting aspects of character that are stalled or sick or misdirected and challenging you to examine them and focus. As a fan of Thoreau I'm inclined ot think that such examination requires retreat, quiet self-reflection and ohm. At the same time, it requires a supportive community, a team of similar thinkers (or perhaps more accurately, similar seekers) to push and prod and occasionally coach in exchange for some of the same from me. Not advice: that never works. Just a questioning when I can't find the questions, a poke when I can't feel anything (from the inside), an opening.

I realized last night, as I was going to sleep, that I was so folded in and folded over that I couldn't breathe. I'm so closed off, I'm starving. Realizing this didn't cure any lingering feelings of anger and hostility, but it did carve a bit of a blow-hole. The what's next is the I don't know.

Having lots of gorgeous dreams I'll be writing about later on tonight. For those so inclined, I tend to post them on madgirlsleeping

Having lots of horrible up and down moodswings as well. Today I had my first complete want-to-blow-my-head -off plummet, a pass the razors, maybe I'll be a cutter, crash bang boom.

The woman presently working as my supervisor of sorts is one of those people who likes to put 11,000 items on a to do list, and then move the to do list to an excel sheet, and then print the excel sheet and scribble notes around it, and then go back and insert that to do list on another form, with the end result of doing nothing. I like to isolate 4 tasks, complete them, pat myself on the back, and then select 4 more. I've found that this results in higher productivity, and super great personal satisfaction.

In the course of a meeting today, this person was desperately attempting to get me to do things her way. This cloud of misery just sunk over me, considering how akin to pacing this way of operating is, how I pulled away from the endless to do list for the sake of eliminating misery from each task, eliminating anxiety from my working life. Listening to her unload task after task after task left me hollow.

I sat at my desk and was just morose - not sad or depressed, but really morose. I tried to work on my own projects as a brief band-aid, but I was already pretty psychologically deflated. I escaped to the bathroom for a few minutes and cried, and then I knew I just had to leave. I couldn't be there knowing that my assigned task was to accomplish as little as possible while moving around piles and pages frantically. Who finds satisfaction like this? I had Fight Club urges to wander into the office and start punching myself in the face to see what kind of severence pay it would earn me.

Later: going for a walk helped, walking is better than biking because it's slow and you feel every step, and my legs were like lead. Then I was invigorated by checking out the awesome covers of Harpers and the Atlantic for this month. Who would have thought that these mainstream publications would suddenly take on a radical edge? It left me feeling something hopeful to know that even the voices who have generally been described as "rational" and that I would describe as "muted" or even "weak" have finally chosen to shout. It feels like a truly delicious time to be a radical anarchist type in America, with things being so deeply polluted politically that you can't help but notice that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

Then: had a brief dance party with XP in his too-big, too-dingy basement room. He found some old disco tracks and all the moves we attempted would have looked way cooler on roller skates. I love my friends: I love naturally being drawn out of a depression instead of being placated and pandered to, instead of being patted on the head with a "poor baby" until I feel worse. If the entire universe had periodic dance party and musical moments, well...I probably would have been singing a Tool or Nine Inch Nails song from the bathroom floor today, but that's not the point...

I haven't updated in a long time. This is what conventional psychiatrists would call "avoidance," I believe.

Completely drug free at the moment (hallelujah) and have managed to resist the moments of utter panic when I've wanted to pick up the phone and scream to the pharmacist: "Don't refill the whole thing, but just give me one more!" Major seratonin crashes left and right, I've managed to establish what I like to call a "crying sandwich." Wake up. Cry. Go to work, totally kick ass with super amazing productivity, amaze myself with my mad skill, high-five myself, gloat in the mirror (ridiculous). Cry on the bike ride home. Cry at home. Cry before sleep. Sleep.

The thing about medication is that it's designed to fool you into believing that you've somehow "solved" your problems, and that the issues that caused you to agree to medicate are no longer there. Nope: still there, ready and waiting, and in my case it seems I have some emotional catching up to do.

By some miracle I've managed to not take it out on other people (for the most part), nor have i asked too much from certain friends or family members. I've tried to "open myself" to solution - not try to come up with one, not spend hours concentrating on a solution, but letting my mind open up enough that I can just stumble upon it.

One thing I did learn, which will (hopefully) function as partial solution: there are certain things I have to tell my mother. Her knowledge of my personal history is spotty, and I know that she notices certain elephants in the living room. She knows there's a couple of semi-bonkers periods in my life, but she has no (or limited) knowledge to the events leading up to that. A lot of the stuff she does know I've expressed with shock-value flare: hey mom, I took LCD this summer! Whee! Not the most effective strategy when confronting more intense things. As I get older, she's not this intimidating god-head anymore; she's a human who has fucked up herself from time to time, who has been depressed, who has worked through some serious grief.

It seems silly to "plan" a conversation. I'm going to keep talking to her same as always - I'll just take an opportunity if it pops up. I think being honest, open, and unashamed are good first steps in the deconstruction of my cry sandwich.