Documenting Befores Is Something I Always Forget Until After

Tomorrow I start my new prescriptions: an upped dose of my antidepressants to ween me onto double of my current dose, but more importantly ADHD meds (sparkle sparkle). 

So I'd like to take a moment to note how I've been doing to have a more direct before and after. 

As of the last couple of days I've been extremely tired and listless--whether that's despite eating well or because I've been eating well, I'm not sure. Focus has been as hard as ever because of that since the effort involved in doing things usually involves moving and wanting to get up. Anxiety has been weird to say the least. Only had one day in the past 2 week where getting out of bed felt Evil and scary. My appetite is good at least, which I'm savouring before it gets fucking destroyed in the next couple of weeks. 

What I'm not looking forward to is doing all of this with the audience of a lot more people than usual. I'm back in my hometown, I've got extended family staying over until Saturday, and I've already made plans to see all my hometown friends next week. So this will be Fun time trying to exist on what I'm thinking will be hard mode for the next hot minute. Less so hard mode, but like when you eat a mushroom in a videogame and the screen goes all wonky. Honestly that's what dealing with the shitty side effects of getting used to new dosages feels like to me. 

The only thing that I'm a little anxious about right now is that I've been hearing that the specific meds I'm going on has a tendency to kind of take the spark out of people. I mean generally that's what I've heard about people going onto ADHD meds. Which is interesting unto itself. I already feel like my personality has shifted a bit since going onto antidepressants, so while I'm definitely interested in seeing what happens to me on the new drug cocktail. 

I'm So Normal I Swear (Survived the Psychiatrist)

 I survived my appointment with the psychiatrist! 

He was an. Interesting man. Not in the way where he was weird. I just don't think I would be able to have a proper conversation with him outside of this context. Which doesn't bode well for someone I have to spill my issues to in order to get meds but What Ever! 

Bros working theory is that I've got ADHD, anxiety, and depression-- which yeah, that checks out. I'm getting my current antidepressants upped, which will suuuuck for the next month so here's hoping its worth it, and put onto stimulants. 

Also having that appointment made me realize a couple of things: 

1. I still have no idea what people mean when they say racing thoughts. 
    The way my head works, I have an ongoing internal monologue that is literally just my speaking voice but in my head--speaking as if I was having a conversation, but obviously inside-- and I get like images of things, like visualized concepts. So I think my closest equivalent is I'll have times where I'm taking in a lot of information from the external world, like sounds, sights, smells, but I really don't ever have much going on in my head. It feels like it's always one thing, two things happening at best. Its pretty quiet up there. I think that's part of why I have to process things externally, like speak through a whole plan or idea in order to figure out what I'm doing.

2. I don't really have aspirations. 
    I had a similar realization like 2 days earlier but the appointment cemented it for me. The realization I had 2 days ago was that I have very little anxiety about my future because I just don't think about it happening. If someone were to ask me where I see myself in 5 years, I have a guess on things I could be doing based on people tell me I'm good at, but really nothing comes to mind. Like literally nothing comes to mind, it's all blank. I don't know if I've ever thought of myself in the far future living a complex life. It was always the assumption of life. If I’m alive then, I must be doing something to have gotten me there.
    The world exists in the now for me, yesterday is gone in the tide and the future is out of mind until it happens. I think that's why recently, making plans has been really good for me. It gives me something to constantly be looking forward to, a reason to keep checking my calendar, a reminder that time is passing. 

 3. I'm either really disconnected from my emotions, or I don't entirely feel them 
    The psychiatrist was asking a lot of emotion questions and those ones are always really hard for me because I'm not super in tune with myself there. When the doc asked if I was an emotional person, I said I was dramatic but not emotional. I react largely to things, but I don't think I really feel that much when things happen. I think I only started fully fully processing my emotions in my first year of uni. So like late 2024.  
    It's weird because I'm slowly realizing that I've always had a disconnect in feeling emotions. Since I was a kid I've been conceptualizing myself as a divided body. Mind and Body. The mind was logical thought, the body was physical need and emotional reactions. So since I was a kid I'd have bouts where I'd start crying but I wouldn't be sad. And I wouldn't be rendered helpless or helpless feeling the way you do when you sad cry. I would just be crying but my brain would still be fully functional for conversation and process, and the crying felt like a weird interruption to that. And that would happen when I was getting feedback from teachers in school since I was like 8. And my poor teacher would be looking at a crying 8 year old who's going "no please continue, this just happens". 

The big down of all of this is at the end of the appointment I asked about what I'd have to do to do an pysch evaluation for autism, and then proceeded to find out that my doctor doesn't believe in non stereotypical autism. Like the first thing out of his mouth when I said I was considering an autism diagnosis was "oh I would know if you had autism because you'd have to have your mom in here with you and she'd be stopping you from touching the computer and pulling at my ear." And the banger "There's aspergers, the smart ones, and then there's autism, the ones with lower intellect." It upset me. So much to hear a fucking doctor spew all that shit. He fucking pulled The Good Doctor as an example. I was losing my fucking mind. 

So anyways. I get to look forward to adjusting to meds again, and adjusting to all of that while meeting up with a buncha friends next week. Girlfriend visit on Sunday save meeeee.