Medication is My Lifejacket, My Straitjacket

It's no big deal these days to be on anti-depressants - so many people I know are or have been. I've been on them myself now for a number of years and they help me stay afloat. This fact was brought home to me yet again over the last few days as I went without them from about Thursday to Sunday morning and everything came crashing down.

I'm probably exaggerating here for emphasis, but basically I fell in a heap yesterday morning. I think a combination of no anti-depressants, alcohol consumption the night before, PMS, lack of sleep and recent events conspired to bring me down in a pile of gushing tears. Everything that happened or that I thought about was coloured by the fact that I had gone without the anti-depressants. I started seeing things in grayscale and black instead of the usual spectrum.

Initially my solution was to try to sleep it off. However, one of the pervading emotions I feel in this state is loneliness and in trying to go to sleep the focus changed from external to internal and I started to feel worse. Thankfully, I received an sms from a friend about meeting in the city to take some photos (something we had arranged a couple of weeks ago) and it was exactly what I needed to get out of that headspace.

Prior to going out I did manage to get a laugh out of a visit to a chatroom on PsychCentral. I don't usually like chatrooms for the crap that goes on and the level of conversation which is generally in the gutter (so far as I've seen), but have found the PsychCentral chats to be warm and welcoming, and somewhat intellectual insofar as topics that get discussed. This morning I was chatting with a few people and somehow the conversation turned to the topic of orgies and we were joking about how inappropriate that was for the PsychCentral site. It was right at that point that a user with the handle 'amIintherightplace' entered the room and got us all in fits of "LMAO". Guess you had to be there. It lightened my mood temporarily at least.

So why am I telling all this to cyberspace? Because this site is becoming my outlet, a space I've created for personal expression and so far it's possible I haven't really been honest. Sure, I share some intimate details about my life which give an impression of who I am as a person, but so far I haven't written much about my emotions and feelings. So this is a first for me. The internet is my friend. Thanks for listening.

Took my usual dose of anti-depressants yesterday morning and will again come breakfast this morning... I think they're kicking back in.