Oh Fuckit. I'm unstable.

[hunter]

5. The usual awful...

...extreme nightmares. Clear voices telling me people I love are dead. Hearing voices of people I know who ARE dead. But even at my worst, I recognize the voices aren't real, which means I'm not entirely crazy.

Deep sigh.

The disturbances seem to be fading, especially the zaps and invisible Elmo's fire electricity stuff which is always a distraction.

I've always wondered why my dreams are without voices and I think it's because I trained myself to extinguish the "audio track" of dreams entirely when I was young and my mind still plastic. I didn't want to hear them.

The meds I just quit were okay so far as preventing nightmares, voices, and those sorts of things, and I wasn't depressed. But my libido was gone, as in ZERO, I didn't miss it at all, and I felt sort of dull and uncreative.

Not to mention those 809 wins at Freecell out of 814. WTF?

That's not at all like "normal me" to obsess about games like that. And worse, I lost 5 times????!!!! I don't even remember losing five times. I can kick most Freecell hands in three minutes or less, and difficult hands in six.

Another sign of recovery (or relapse???) is that beer seems to be an attractive adult beverage again. On the previous meds I was supposed to avoid alcohol, which was easy because alcohol seemed too yucky to drink anyways. I could maybe get away with an occasional glass of red wine at dinner, I missed red wine, but even that was sometimes too much. It made me feel gross.

I think I know what "normal" feels like. When I have to take oral steroids I feel great once the symptoms of whatever I was prescribed them for fade. My joints don't hurt, my allergies and asthma go away, and I feel like my mind is clear (which may be an illusion, but that's how I feel.) I imagine that's how ordinary healthy people feel most of the time. Of course I can't take steroids for long because after a few days of feeling great, I go bat-shit crazy. When I was young and asthma meds were primitive, oral steroids were sometimes the only way I could breathe. So I was crazy, sometimes for months.

Too much of my life I've been trying to find drugs that keep me near enough to normal. Sadly I'll find something be good for a few years, and then the stabilizing effects fade or the side effects become too unpleasant. Then it's a few more turns on the merry-go-round until I can grab the next golden ring.

Today seems pretty good and getting better... Thanks.