Not Just Good - It’s Great Depression
I talk about my depression a lot, but that’s because depression is really the main thing that I do these days. It eats up so much of my life that it is an ever-present entity that requires my time and obedience:
When I wake up in the morning I know that I’ll feel good for a certain amount of time where my brain will function normally and so I MUST make good use of that time. Therefore, I cram as much into that time as I can, waking up as early as 4:00am to have more of it.
When I go to the gas station every morning (this is a thing that was recommended by my therapist and no I will not be answering questions) I get my morning Diet Coke knowing that I need to time the consumption of that Coke efficiently and strictly so that it lasts until
3:00pm, when I go to the gas station a second time, marking the second half of the day, knowing that I need this round of Diet Coke to last me till bedtime. Because
Then I get in bed. At like 3:10pm. And my new med routine is miraculously giving me back some productivity in these afternoon and evening hours, but that productivity is found in bed on a notebook or a laptop.
I don’t like that I am so beholden to the plague of depression, but it has me in its clutches and it is fierce. I tell ya, I have schizophrenia and I have hallucinated some scary stuff, but I will take hallucinations over depression any day. Depression is debilitating and awful.
And this is me talking at the PEAK of when depression is good! I’m currently doing better with depression than I have in the last three years.
Here’s the problem that we’ve been facing: my schizophrenia has been miraculously cured (effectively medicated) for the last five and a half years. And getting that medication balanced so perfectly as to remove all hallucinations and delusions COMPLETELY is so astoundingly unlikely that my psychiatrist has been loathe to change any of my medicines, even when my depression started getting bad.
So we turned to things like the Coke thing (which is all about establishing routines and timetables to motivate me through the day) and I’ve been in therapy for a long time getting all the brain help I can get.
But man, depression.
The current regimen changed the timing of one of my meds, splitting a large morning dose into a smaller morning and afternoon dose, with the theory that I was metabolizing it too quickly leading to my downturn in the evenings. The second change was to add a stimulant that I take both in the morning and at night, because if I can’t get non-depressed, at least I can have more energy.
And it’s bought me 2.5 - 3 hours more productivity in the day, which is AMAZING. I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.
This is still early. I’ve only been doing this less than two months. But it’s a breath of fresh air.
Seriously, I can’t even remember what it would be like to have a normal brain.
