February 06, 2006

For me, the primary of effect of anti-depressant medication was a great leveling. No lows, but no highs, either...everything became a sort of washed-out sepia, which was neither alarming nor comforting. It also turned off my emotional response to music, so that it no longer served as my audio madeline, and I was no longer transported into reverie.

The medication served its purpose. I've been off it for quite awhile, now, and I'm better able to manage my emotional state, mostly because I can usually recognize when it is my body, rather than my mind or spirit, that is driving that state. I no longer worry that something is wrong! just because my adrenals have kicked in and there's a leaden ball in my chest. I'm able to analyze my current circumstances, compare them to my physiological activity, and decide that my body is simply mistaken.

Lately, my corpus has been doing its damndest to panic me. The thought of coming in to work will cause an elevator-drop in my gut, and I will soothe myself: You're there for three months, hired gun. In and out, no sweat, with a bundle of cash. Confronted with emptying out and cleaning my home office in advance of visits by prospective buyers, I will become suffused with an annoyance that thinly masks the overwhelming fear that I just can't get it all done, and I will tell myself: one shelf at a time, one bag of trash, and soon it will be done. I have to carefully limit myself to one or two ales at the most on weeknights, lest I slip back into the habit of soothing my bodyfear with the anesthesia of alcohol.

In the morning, when the alarm goes off, my chest instantly constricts and tightens, and I lay there trying to snooze for fifteen or twenty minutes, to push off the terrible experience of being awake and aware of the pressures and demands of my life.

Then, I realize: you are leaving all of this. In two months, three weeks, and four days, you will be embarking on a long journey, where the greatest pressures you face will be finding a place to camp and deciding if you want to detour and see the World's Largest Ball of Twine. This is your body panicking, not you.

That helps. But, as Pea said last night, the fact that potential buyers are finally coming to see the house next Saturday makes all of this real.

We're really selling this place, really parting ways.

Everything will change.

Maybe my body is on to something, here!

The fear! The fear is upon me! I claw my own eyes out to spare them from the horror of of its tentacled visage, its glistening maw, its baleful eye, its keening banshee cries! What madness was it that drove me to surrender my morphine syringe for this: hated, crawling reality! Agh! Yuargh! Blauugh!!!

And so on.

I am fully aware: in the category of "sources of stress in life," getting out of bed to get to a well-paying job and making my house ready for sale at a not-insubstantial tax-free profit so I that can galavant across the country on an expensive imported three-wheeled toy doesn't really rank up there with, say, folks who walk ten miles each way for drinking water full of guinea worm larvae that eventually exit as fettucine-looking adults through excruciatingly bloody holes in their legs and feet. Believe me: whenever I come up for air from the navel pool, I thank Whomever that I am where I am and able to do what I do.