Been a bad 6 months. So much so that I couldn't even type here. Started Cymbalta and am starting to see over the lid of abyss. Also Started journalling again as part of this latest stab at surviving, and decided to put some of it in my blog (
www.donthearishoutyou.com/blog/index.php). (PS: FYI the server hosting my blog is down as of 10PM Eastern time.)
I was spiralling downward this evening pretty hard so tried just rambling via my keyboard. Some of it even makes sense, though it's pretty abstract, even abstruse. But after putting all that verbiage into words I did have a sense of control. So...thought I'd share it here and see if anyone else knows what the hell I was trying to say to myself...
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Feb.1, 2008:
Don’t really like it there much, sitting in my sadness. Seems a tad self-indulgent. So, drank a lot of coffee today and took some choline (brain food, said to help with my severe acetylcholine deficiency -- & ergo immediate & short-term memory). Am clearer and more focused in the daytime --but edgy -- while those neurotransmitters are doing their thing. Ah, but now as evening turns to night, a dampened shadow returns to me, much like the sound of rain and wind outside my window…. Can’t help but think that so much of this is we CP’ers are at the mercy of the cocktails of brain chemicals (and whatever other chemicals we put in there to get by); Maybe the CP experience is just us at the mercy of what’s creating and stirring our little bit of biochemical elixir( neurotransmitters) and how they produce – and react to—our own thoughts & behaviors.
The causal loops between pain & depression are hard to discern. Maybe the answer rests in the question, or questions I raise to myself: Does the pain cause the depression, or the depression cause the pain? No… does the pain create perceptions or merely filter them? Is the pain genuinely there (in objective physical reality) and if so, does the awareness of it make the pain worse? Better? gone?
But yet, If I can somehow alter my awareness in-the-moment to acknowledge and accept the very real physical pain at my nerves’ endings(all that damaged tissue & nerve bundles) – can that tweaked perception in ipso(in and of itself) enable the pain to be felt differently? But more questions arise before I can answer …it just seems that the loop of depression to pain, and back to depression again, seems different than the loop between cognition & pain perception: I know that I have learned how to reframe pain and do more now with worse pain than I did 20years ago (the hardwiring and damage now is far worse than then, yet somehow now I can live with it better, do more). As the youngen’s say, “Whassup with that?!”
So…if I can sit inside my damaged organism, looking out through the clouded cockpit of my mind and somehow tweak my perception of this thing called “pain”-- so that it stops being “suffering” and is instead, just “tolerable pain” -- is the same true of this sadness and dark depression I experience?
Well, so far, not for this Bozo. The difference seems to be that the biochemical mixture at work in my brain when truly depressed may not let me ‘tweak’ the depression experience so that it is no longer ‘suffering’. But…maybe I haven’t tried hard enough…
But still, as I take this twisted syllogism to absurd ends the penseur in me won’t shut up: Of course you idiot, your questions are all wrong, for there is no singular mechanical causation, no clear-cut syllogism nor binary algorithms for the reality you live in, your ‘pain-depression-sadness’ is a seamless reality. You may sometimes manage different aspects of it better than others, but it cannot be dissected, cannot be reduced to a formula or equation. That’s what makes living in CP so very difficult – your perception process is a filter and a valve all at once.
So, sometimes the only thing left to do is to get some relief, some respite from the burden of this ‘loop’ by sleeping, preferably a sleep made easier by chemistry, or at least a bunch of L-Tryptophan…. What say you all you right-brainers out there? Has the man finally lost it?Is he counting angels on the head of a pin? Tossing bones to augur the freezing temperature of water when all he needs is a thermometer? Probably, but such rambling helps him when he takes it outside of his head. When left inside, it works against him, ever so slowly, but strongly, tugging him down the vortex until his syllogisms become word salad and none of it makes sense.
So…prithee indulge this lapsed monk as he rambles, for you can take the monk out of the monastery but you can’t take…you know the rest.