I Lied

 To my one possible reader: you probably shouldn't read this.  I don't think it will be in any way helpful, and could be harmful.  You know who you are.

We are now apparently beyond what had been the foreseeable future of my previous blog entry. I have an appointment with my psychiatrist within the next couple of weeks.  My pretense here is to practice talking to myself about what I need to talk about with my psychiatrist.

My experience with Zoloft has been a net improvement over my state before I began taking it, yet it is not an improvement over my state when I first, years ago, became desperate enough to submit myself to pharmaceutical treatment.   That is actually saying a lot, because before the Zoloft I was, as I had put it, "done".  I can't think of any better way to put it.  I think that may be how some people feel before they turn to suicide.  My other way of describing my experience was the conviction that I had turned some kind of corner and was living a "post hope" existence.

The truth of my existence as I see it has not changed due to Zoloft.  What has changed is that I spend less time thinking about it, less often, and with less severity.  Before, I could not break out of almost constantly obsessing about hopelessness, failure, regret and shame. Now, those feelings are more like familiar companions, rather than a violent insurgency.  They are always there, but they don't make as much noise.

In considering a Zoloft dosage increase, I am very concerned about maintaining realistic expectations of what good or harm could come of it.  The good news is that I am presently at pretty much the minimum common dosage, and there is a lot of headroom between that and the maximum safe dosage allowed.  This is pretty much the opposite of my situation with Clonazepam, which I have been taking at the maximum recommended dosage for several years.

What do I hope to accomplish with this, or any other, treatment?  That's a tricky question.  To my mind, hope is a dangerous idea.  Hope is just self pity holding hands with self delusion and skipping down the path to disillusionment. (That image courtesy of watching The Wizard of OZ twice while babysitting last Sunday.)  For someone such as myself in possession of  all of the fundamental requirements for survival, and then some, hope is simply greed.

I guess, however shamefully, I hope for hope.  I wish for the courage to be foolish, to want to do things and to do them with little concern about whether I am even good at doing things.   Most of all, I want to sing, and I want to feel that transcendent feeling that music, and especially singing, had once given me.

This is absurd and selfish and wrong.  Can a drug change that?  Can anything? Should it?

I won't manage to say a fraction of this when I speak with my psychiatrist, and I have yet to meet one who likes written communication, but that's probably a HIPAA thing.

Honk If You Love Retro-Blogs.

I don't hear any honking.

All blogging by Michael "Mookie" Kepler (born James Milton Wood [Jr.]), is suspended for the foreseeable future.  Brief reports on family events and such will continue to be posted on Facebook, probably.

Thanks to Zoloft I no longer feel a frequent urgent desire to die, nor do I spend extended periods of time obsessing about how worthless and meaningless my existence is.  I had not addressed these states of mind in previous writing, or speaking, because I felt it was somehow inappropriate.  I'm not sure why I think it is OK now.

For some years now, Clonazepam has kept my mind out of truly horrifying places which had haunted me, often to the point of intolerable anguish, since I was three years old.  So, that's old news, but it seemed related.

I guess the message is "Better tolerance of living through chemicals, hooray!"

Your results will almost certainly vary, and finding the right chemicals to tolerate your life, if needed, is a matter between you and your Psychiatrist, if any.  Finding what seem to be the right chemicals for me took literally years of very unpleasant, and possibly dangerous at times, trial and error.

I suspect the ideal dosage of Zoloft for me is yet to be found.  The darkness no longer overtakes me, but I feel it trying.  I do not feel safe yet, but I am grateful for the improvements that have come.

Just so you know, I know that "tolerance" and "safe" are pretty much meaningless ideas, if you really apply any amount of critical logic to them.

This adequately demonstrates why I will no longer be writing into the void.

Goodbye, Imaginary Audience.