In the Year of our Lord of COVID: Issue #4 A Human's Guide to My Brain
Days in quarantine: 170
Brain status: Manic
Here we are again, mania my old friend.
For the last week, I’ve been feeling pretty good! My mood tracker tells me that since last Saturday night, I’ve been feeling normal. And by normal, I mean no head buzzing, no twitching, no word salad. Sleeping good. Eating fine. I did some not so great spending, but I rectified that pretty quickly.
I am thinking, “Latuda, you bitch! Thank you for working!”
Maybe the hope was too soon?
After eight days of clear headedness, Latuda has kicked me to the curb.
APRN started me at 20mg of Latuda on which I started on August 14. On the 18th, and then my brain started to equalize and I had the last manic episode on August 22.
This cycle with Latuda is how it started with Zoloft. Start at 12.5mg, feel okay. Go up to 25mg, have mania for a few weeks. Mania eventually subsides so go up to 50mg. Terrible mania kicks in again so back down to 25mg. No mania, so wait a few weeks and up to 50mg where I’ve been stable ever since.
The last week has been glorious. I had some serious concentration kicking in, so I started walking two miles at lunch time every day listening to audiobooks. Doing 15 minutes of yoga at night. I was also throwing in some meditation before bed using Headspace’s Sleep Casts (the narrator for the Loch Dormant episode is Scottish and I just ooooze into sleep). I kept up with my accountability tracker and knock shit off my list. I kept up with my daily morning shower, often twice a day if I was sweaty after my walk. I was doing good work at work.
Everything felt fine.
Until it isn’t and I’m back to square one.
Fuck.
The process of finding the right drug combo is fucking awful. You never know how you’re going to feel, act, or react from one minute to the next. You’re hypervigilant because on one hand, your trust circle needs to know but at the same time, you need to be mindful of who in the public knows. You can literally not fall apart because bad things happen when you do and that could ruin everything. I am going to be quite serious that I’m surprised I have not been reprimanded for some of the shit that comes out of my mouth at work.
I keep the mood tracker on a shared calendar with TEH so he knows what I’m feeling that moment and when I start new drugs, he has at least a base understanding of where I’m at. He said to me today it’s so hard to find the “real” Lisa because he doesn’t know if he’s talking to “pandemic Lisa,” “crazy Lisa,” or “hormonal Lisa.” Or I am all of these at the same time. He said he often feels exhausted trying to keep up with my brain and he acknowledged that I must feel twice as frustrated as him because this is in my brain while he just gets peeks.
And to be honest, it never really hit me until that moment how much I’ve been treading on water trying to keep myself afloat all these years, and even with it being amplified all these months.
When you are mentally ill, so much of your life is so curated to function in a way to give you some quality of life and what you define as something regular in your life to make that happen may seem really fucking odd or bizarre to someone not you. My therapists have all said how awesome I am for being so self-aware about my illness. I had to be since there was a long stretch of time, I was making very little money, had shitty life insurance, and could not afford drugs or therapy so I had to manage on my own strong will. I also had no financial support system so I did everything I could to not fall apart. Of course, more therapy down the road and drug combos gave me the “Ooh, that’s why I did that!” explanation of past behaviours but nevertheless, it was hard and exhausting and frustrating all the same.
It still is.
We had an early dinner tonight as we skipped lunch and right before we ate, I informed TEH the mania was creeping in. He asked me what I was going to do about it and I said it was hard to come up with something because I have already used all my tricks today and look where I’m at. When I finish this newsletter, I do not know what I’m going to do for the rest of the evening, but hopefully something that will turn my brain down a few notches.
(I am not in crisis. Just manic.)
I’ve read this newsletter over a dozen times for the last few hours making corrections and clarifications. I’m dropping words, putting them out of order, and writing half sentences. I’m going to close for now and I want to end with thanking all of you for listening to me. Screaming into the void does a lot to not feel so alone because you know at least one person, out there, knows what you’re going through.
Appurtenances:
My blue hair got refreshed last weekend. This is what the first shampoo looks like
Corey turned me onto Universal Yums. We've had UK and Egypt so far. A++. Would recommend
I bought a ticket to see Caitlin Moran live on Thursday, September 3
I ALSO bought a ticket to see Neil Oliver on September 15. Neil is a Scottish historian / archeologist and his docs of the ancient British world, primarily on Scotland, are fabulous. Plus, he always wears a jaunty scarf.
My favorite coffee place, confirmed by millions of friends who are from NYC, is Porto Rico coffee. They have a HUGE selection of decaf coffees and their candies are amazing.
Don't be an ass. Wear a damned mask.
lisa x
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Image depicting the black death in a book by French chronicler
and poet, Gilles Li Muisis (1272 - 1352). Artist unknown