Aphrodisiax

I didn't get to do any work on my journey over the weekend, because I spent it under sedation. My new medication apparently does that for the first few days, weeks, or months of treatment, depending on the patient.

But let me back up. Many of my readers right now already know this, but I've struggled with anxiety issues all my life and depression since college. I've been in and out of psychiatric treatment since my second year of college -- longer, if you count the spells of therapy in elementary and middle school. By my count I've taken ten medications in the last six years, and none of them has yet done a thing for me in the long term beyond sedating me or possibly making me bipolar. You might call my continued attempts to find a medication that works faulty pattern recognition, and I admit it sounds like grasping at straws at this point, but any hope is better than no hope. It's not like you can treat the causes of these things. Mental illness, at least for me, seems to have no etiology. Like consciousness, it's just an emergent phenomenon proceeding from a particular configuration of neurons. You can change those, but that requires electroconvulsive therapy or lobotomy, which seem to be off the table. So all I have to treat are symptoms -- and we haven't even been successful in treating those.

My depression in particular bears on Lover's Lanes in several ways. One, the depression tends to make me pessimistic about the whole project -- which however is just one more obstacle to fight through, like having to buy a car or figure out how to approach people. Two, and ironically, Lover's Lanes is in part a way to escape from various things that I perceive as depressing me for a few months -- and if everything goes perfectly and the book is salable, maybe longer. Three, and correspondingly, the journey is a way to fight depression; I'm less depressed when I'm distracted, and nothing un-depresses me like being in the middle of succeeding at something cool. Four, and conversely, it's possible that my depression will be more pronounced during the trip, which will take me away from my support network, present me with lots of stressors, and give me copious opportunity to fail or be disappointed. Five, and proceeding from the last point, I have to find a way to be stable if I'm going to take the trip responsibly (which does not necessarily rule out taking it irresponsibly).

Which brings me back to medication. Starting tomorrow I'm on three different pills, two of which are strong tranquilizers. The most recent one in particular, Seroquel, seems to cause sedation universally; it even gets prescribed off-label for patients with sleep disorders. It seems I've passed some kind of threshold where making me feel normally is no longer on the table; now the game is one of tradeoffs, looking for drugs that relieve more problems than they cause. My impression is that you don't generally prescribe Seroquel to a patient you think has a chance of ever feeling 100%, because Seroquel knocks percentage points off the patient's ceiling. Fortunately, some people become acclimatized to the roofie aspect of the medication over time and are no longer affected that way. Others apparently never normalize.

We go through a lot to give ourselves hope. Hope is a lot like love that way. It isn't enough by itself, but it's better than nothing.