I've been house-sitting since Saturday: far removed from my comfort zone. I brought my own sweet angel baby mouse and my computer but home is way more than just those two things, although they are definitely its infrastructure. it's too cold and there's no light in this apartment, despite the mammoth and heat-sucking windows. one of the cats i am watching is apparently in heat and won't be silent. my cat talks a LOT but not like this. there's something so penetrating and alarming about her yowling. it makes it hard to sleep, and my heart starts pounding every time she starts. my own sweet baby sings along, though, and their opera faces are pretty dang cute.


the brain zaps are almost all gone. very very faint. still very moody. I've had a rough couple of weeks dealing with friends. I think being off meds has made me less forgiving, which is actually positive. I don't make as many excuses for people anymore. when I was stuck in bed all winter I was starved for human contact and didn't take very good care of my emotional needs. now I feel like I am separating wheat from chaff.



this is still very hard, and very lonely, and very scary. I hate applying for jobs, I am terrified of the holes in my resume, I seem to have lost a lot of confidence. and I still feel weak as hell.

I wish I could get paid to ride my bike.

no need to worry about everything I've done

doing laundry listening to top 40 r&b, singing along at the top of my lungs, doing the handclaps during the breakdown. crying my eyes out.


still emo as hell. brain zaps are almost all gone. stomach is still sour but no more puking.

and also

The way I feel today sent me digging through my bookshelves to reread Hemingway's A Day's Wait.

I identify so strongly with the small boy who has spent the day thinking he is going to die because he mixed up Fahrenheit and Celsius. Poor Schatz. being sick sucks so damn much. at least you got a nice Papa to take care of you.

About what time do you think I'm going to die?' he asked.
'What?'
'About how long will it be before I die?'
'You aren't going to die. What's the matter with you?'
Oh, yes, I am. I heard him say a hundred and two.'
'People don't die with a fever of one hundred and two. That's a silly way to talk.'
'I know they do. At school in France the boys told me you can't live with forty-four degrees. I've got a hundred and two.'
He had been waiting to die all day, ever since nine o'clock in the morning.
'You poor Schatz,' I said. 'Poor old Schatz. It's like miles and kilometers. You aren't going to die. That's a different thermometer. On that thermometer thirty-seven is normal. On this kind it's ninety-eight.'
'Are you sure?'
'Absolutely,' I said. 'It's like miles and kilometers. You know, like how many kilometers we make when we do seventy in the car?'
'Oh,' he said.
But his gaze at the foot of his bed relaxed slowly. The hold over himself relaxed too, finally, and the next day it was very slack and he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance.

I know I am out of the red here, but my god, I wish I could stop crying. it just bubbles out of me to where I can't barely even speak. I feel fine, the tears don't really seem to have much emotional content, they just choke me up and irritate my face with the damn salt.

time passes. tick tick tick.

day 5 off Cymbalta

As far as my current emotional state goes, I'm reminded of a Ginsberg poem I posted several years ago in my old blog:

Tears




by Allen Ginsberg


I’m crying all the time now.
I cried all over the street when I left the Seattle Wobbly Hall.
I cried listening to Bach.
I cried looking at the happy flowers in my backyard,
I cried at the sadness of the middle-aged trees.



Happiness exists I feel it.


I cried for my soul, I cried for the world’s soul.
The world has a beautiful soul.
God appearing to be seen and cried over. Overflowing
heart of Patterson.

but you're gonna have to hold on

it's not that I am hearing voices, it's that my thoughts are not my own. I don't want to cut myself, to beat myself with flails and scourges. I don't want to jump from high buildings or throw myself in front of a car.

These things will pass. I will not be evicted, nor will the lights be shut off, neither will I starve, or die in my sleep. My cat will not have to eat me.

"I feel alright, and I cried so hard..."

cymbalta/effexor (SNRI) withdrawals

personal accounts:

self-nonmedication

cymbalta: the withdrawal symptoms from hell

what winners do: cymbalta withdrawal symptoms suck (thousands of comments on this one)


a message board:
cymbalta withdrawal

a wiki article:
SSRI discontinuation syndrome: discontinuation of duloxetine

and that's about all the steam I have for now.

I've been horrible to many of my friends. yesterday at dinner I found myself looking around the table and feeling loathing, revulsion, resentment, anger, abject hatred. all emotions that are not part of my life. things I never feel. this is like a bad acid trip. this is all the Loathing and none of the fear. just endless miles of Bat Country.

Last night, after hours of Neil Gaiman's American Gods on headphones, I was finally able to fall asleep. I thought the dizziness would kill me. I have a terrible fear of going out, Janis-style, choking on my own vomit in my sleep. I feel possessed, terrified, things under my skin, ups and downs and nothing tastes good.

oh god oh god oh god.

and I need a job.
and I need a life.
and I need a family, friends, a new body, a monkey butler with a jetpack, a brain upgrade, to transfer my data to the nets and live there unhindered by body.

everything falls apart. what do we do. there's no loss of energy or matter, just endless back and forthing.

I've been channeling Bruce Banner all day, I tell him.

Rage, incessant and crackling. The fuck you talking to me for, I snarl as some dude who tries to holla. I am electric with anger, striding down Western, almost invincible. I wish I could bottle this feeling, evaporate its water and make it into pill form. Such energy. I haven't felt it in years.

I am tired of your shit. I am tired of carrying it for you. I am annoyed by your shit. Nothing tastes good. Everything is too loud and it catches on a skip and shudders. I feel like the evening after an allnight acid trip. My norepinephrine is being fucked with. Whirr-bzzt. Dzzzrrr. Hhhbbbbzzbbtt.

Am I dying? How much longer.

Tiny wee purple spots all over my face and my eyelids. Are they broken blood vessels?


is this intolerable?

nothing says happy sunday morning like puking up your vitamins.

I'm starting to really resent neurotypicals. I don't want to play nice. your charity breaks me. I'm sick of sitting in bed. the tulips are too excitable.


re-reading through the old blog, waiting for lunch plans to coalesce.

The mental health industry is sick. The information packets at MMHI refer to the patients as mental health consumers. makes me picture rows and rows of blank eyed shoelace-less men and women lined up at picnic tables eating spaghetti. the sin that eats away at the industry is that the providers think they are superior to the consumers.

we've fetished mental health to such a point that we refer to it as a commodity. can one buy mental health? should one have to? does it really come in multicolored gelatin capsules? is there a surplus of mental health rotting away in a warehouse somewhere? does EliLilly offer producers money to burn their excess mental health to keep the price steady or do we flood the market of our neighboring countries with genetically modified mental health, causing their collectively farmed mental health to be worth less, forcing them to immigrate to the border to work in our mental health sweatshops?

the tulips are far, far too red.

and just maybe I'm to blame for all I've heard

I remember sitting in my room in front of my dad's beatup old speakers, listening to this song over and over. before all this shit started. before the endless pills and pried-open jaws and the throat-stroking and the puking and shaking and complete and utter lack of privacy. before the mono or the fatigue that never lifted or the sleeping through classes or the insomnia or the inability to keep a job or the fear of rejection. the blood testing, the needles and steroids, the hypotheses, the ignorance, you have what now, how do you spell that, why i have never even heard of that.

it's warming outside, a white-skied first of march, and I'm stoned on the couch after a restless night. the brain zaps kicked in last night. the only thing that relieves the headache is biking, mouth open to swallow the damp air, headphones keeping my ears warm, free of gravity, invincible, but I'm puking up vitamin-flavored bile in the sink first thing upon waking, so it's sofal orbit.


brain zaps make it hard to think.