Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Medicine

            It is odd to go on medication and realize how long you have been unable to properly feel things.  That for so long you were hollowed out like a melon rind.  I don’t know how long I was hollow.  I don’t know how long the color was turned down on the screen of my life.  Maybe I just thought the slow decline was part of getting older.

            I remember being happy in the past.  Able to laugh to myself about some joke that came to mind for no other reason than I wanted to make myself laugh.  I have been doing that again as I pace around my apartment.  I have gotten silly songs stuck in my head and then remixed them with dirty lyrics.  I have messaged people nonsensical silly images.  I have managed to be witty or perhaps just enthusiastic.

            My sleep schedule is all over the place.  It is something to work on with exercise, which doesn’t help, and with supplements, which hopefully will help.  But even then my dreams are different.  I remembered two dreams over the last few years, and both were nightmares.  They weren’t the worst nightmares I had ever had, but they were bad.  Now I have had fun dreams about helping Dwayne Johnson run for Congress or getting into an argument with a school of fish who were in my shower.

            And when I wake up from dreams both aspirational and strange I have the strangest sensation.  I can feel so much more intensely.  My fingertips feel more.  I don’t want to describe it as tingling, but there is no other word for it.  My fingers feel so much more that they seem to be tingling.

            I let myself daydream.  My daydreams used to be a blending of frustration and grey resolve.  I used to buzz with anxiety.  That was the words I used to describe it to the doctor.  I was constantly buzzing.  Other times it felt like something alien was within me.  Drinking me.  That a vine was growing or creeping up the length of my body just beneath the skin and sapping my blood.  I don’t feel that anymore.  I am not buzzing.  I am going un drank.

            Instead, my daydreams let me think of aspirational things that will probably never happen but make me happy.  They let me reminisce about missed opportunities.  And rather than lament those misses they let me turn the event around in my hands like a crystal bobble to see all the angles to it.  I understand my past better and can envision my future better.

            I can lay in bed and feel relaxed.  I can listen to music. 

            I can daydream about silly things.  As I listen to music I can picture myself talking to the singer in a casual environment and being the 10,000 person in their life who was nice but got nowhere with them.  I can think back to the various women in my life that I felt for and learned from and how I wasn’t ready to be anything for them because I was somehow hollowed out.

            I feel more alive and awake than I have in a decade.  And let’s ignore the irony of my saying that during a global pandemic.  That was the thing that finally pushed me over to try something.  The buzzing had reached new levels and I just could not focus.  Looking into the future was a blur.  The only thing I could see looking into the past was my mistakes, that glowed like lighthouses in the haze.  Couldn’t dwell on those, the light told me to steer clear.

            Why did I let myself be sick for so long?  Why did I let this get so bad?  Maybe I was worried that what I was feeling was as good as it could be.  Could you imagine a worse diagnosis than, “That is just how things are”?  How damning would that be?  That there is nothing wrong and that is just how bad it is.  The buzzing will never stop, the vine will keep drinking, the haze will not lift, and that is as good as it will get.

            That must have been it.  The thing that kept me from trying to fix it.  I worried about hearing the words, “Nope, that’s normal”.

Kind of wish this website did a better job of labeling which images they would charge for.
This one was free.

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