Tag Archives: depression and socializing

Adjusting My Habits After A Med Change

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I am now three weeks into a medications change.  I have been completely cycled off one of my old medications and onto another.  And of course different medications have different side effects and issues.  One issue with my new meds set up is that I don’t fall asleep as quickly.  My old set up used to make me sleepy quite fast.  Not so with this new set up.  So it’s no longer like I can drink caffeine in the evenings and still fall asleep at a reasonable time.  So I am adjusting to no caffeine after about five p.m. or I’ll be awake all night.

Another change to my habits is that I now actually get frustrated by the lack of opportunities to socialize in my apartment complex.  I used to just exercise in the late mornings and then spend the rest of the day often not socializing at all.  I found a lot of socializing in the past boring because many people just aren’t that interesting.  How much can you seriously discuss the weather or the problems with your neighbors and job before you’ve said it all before?  I miss the older and interesting friends I had who were able to talk about things I was interested in.  Now many people in my complex are just old, irritable, and uninteresting.  I would love to socialize more but where am I going to get the social interaction humans need?  I can’t really work anymore because of the mental illness.  I really can’t volunteer because who really takes on single men in their thirties as volunteers?  Seems to me most volunteers are retirees in their seventies and housewives.  People already look at me like I’m a freak.  I simply won’t go back to church.  The churches I’ve been involved in don’t take kindly to singles over twenty five.  Besides I do not believe that God (if there is one) is interested in human affairs or at all concerned about human suffering.  I can’t take part in anything I don’t believe in just to make friends and look good.  Really, what are good options for single men to socialize outside of work?  Does anyone even care?

Not being able to fall asleep quickly and the frustrations I face because I want to socialize now are the two biggest drawbacks to my having switched medications.  I imagine others may crop up eventually.  But so far most things are looking alright.

 

Relapses and Lonely Friday Nights

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The last several months haven’t been the most stable for my mental illness.  I had a “small” psychotic relapse yesterday afternoon.  Unfortunately this was at least my fifth breakdown since last summer and the second just in the last six weeks.  Things haven’t been stable and what I’m doing to minimize these relapses is no longer working.  I called my psych doctor and I’m now on the waiting list for an open appointment session.  I think I’m going to probably go back to my old medications.  They worked much better than what I’m on right now.  On the old medications I was on for at least six years I probably had only one or two relapses in an entire year, usually in late August or early September.  And even then the relapses weren’t as vicious as they are now.

I am afraid that changing medications could sink my attempts to lose weight.  I’ve lost over forty pounds in the last two years with these newer medications.  But these relapses are getting too frequent.  And even when I’m not relapsing I am more paranoid, more easily irritated, and more delusional than I have been in previous years.  One of my delusions now is that most people are stupid and malicious.  I’ve even gotten to where I don’t socialize in person unless it’s absolutely necessary.  But there’s only so much youtube, online articles, and computer games even a mentally ill man can do before such things become detrimental and unhealthy.

I can tell other aspects of my life are suffering.  I haven’t shaved in weeks and I don’t grow good beards.  I also haven’t showered every day like I normally do.  I haven’t been doing laundry as often as I should.  Things like my personal habits have been slowly deteriorating for the last few months.  I haven’t even gone to the park for over a week.  I normally go to the park three to four times per week.  Driving has become an irritable chore.  I drive so little now I usually go three weeks between refuels.  It’s been this way since mid October.  Besides a few snowstorms and one major blizzard, we didn’t have a bad winter.  Another delusion I have developed lately is an irrational fear that I’m going to get into another car wreck.  My social life and entertainment activities have been completely curtailed for months now because of the irrational fears that I’ll get into a wreck and that people are stupid and violent.  This is no way to live.  Changes are needed.

It’s a Sane, Sane World

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Over the years of trying to learn what makes average people act the ways they do, the only absolute I have come to is this; the biggest difference between being diagnosed as insane or sane is the number of people involved. It is considered insane to have crippling paranoia or depression. It is considered sane to complain about your shortcomings but do nothing to address said shortcomings. Over the course of the almost three years I have done this alifeofmentalillness blog I have stated on several occasions I would do just about anything to be sane and normal again.  I should be more specific and revise this.  I would give anything to not suffer delusions of persecution, hallucinations, crippling bouts of anger and depression, and the general isolation that comes along with it.  But I do not want to become what most people would consider normal.  By that I mean I do not want to lose my ability for empathy.  From what I have seen out of normals over the years, they seem to have a general lack of empathy or ability to see things from others people’s viewpoints.  I do not want to be uncaring.  It causes a great deal of pain that I sometimes have to be mean and even borderline abusive to people just to get a point across.  I hate being angry and mean to people.  I’m not a natural jerk.  Never have been and never will be.  I don’t know how much of that is the illness and how much of that is my natural personality.  But I absolutely hate being mean and combative to people. If I can’t be pleasant with someone and have them be pleasant to me, I try to avoid that person. To paraphrase Lee Marvin from the classic ‘Paint Your Wagon’ “you don’t have to love thy neighbor if you just leave the poor fool alone.”  But too seldom have I seen anyone, mentally ill or not, just leave other people alone.

Another aspect of sanity I never want to possess is the tendency for group think.  I love having a mind and using it. I hate celebrity gossip.  I hate reality tv.  I hate tabloid journalism.  I’ve even come to hate watching sports on tv because of the base nature of what is modern sports journalism.  It doesn’t bother me that a pro athlete makes more than any worker that isn’t executive management or an entrepreneur.  If I had 50,000 people pay $50 for tickets to read my blogs  or ten million subscribers like some popular youtube personalities, I’d be wealthy too.  Besides, well over half of pro athletes wind up bankrupt within five years of their retirement.  Watch the ESPN documentary ‘Broke‘ to see how true this really is. I am however bothered with how people will build up someone with talent only to knock them down later.  That is why I hope and pray I never become famous or wealthy.  “More money, more problems” as the late Biggie Smalls said.

I love learning new things, which is a skill which will become more valuable than it is now in the coming years and decades as technological and scientific advances get even faster than they are now.  For years I have listened to normals complain about their jobs.  I heard the “Oh God It’s Monday” and “Thank God It’s Friday” memes long before I had even dial up internet.  And I’ve seen and read articles on both domestic and foreign news sites about how potentially we could see job losses to automation with future unemployment rates that would make the 1930s look like a bull market on steroids.  NPR had an interactive article I’m linking to about chances of different types of jobs being taken over by machines and computers.  For example many jobs in customer service will likely be taken over, but many traditional medical and STEM jobs probably won’t be automated anytime soon.  And I bring this up because now many people are fretting over their jobs being taken over by machines.  Seriously?  First you complain about how bad you hate your job.  Now you complain that you may lose said job that you were cursing not even a couple months ago?  Make up your minds, people.  Do you think your current job sucks or do you want to do that lousy job?  Personally I don’t care if the robotics take the jobs I’ve had, providing there is some restructuring to tax laws and social safety nets.  The robots are coming, make no mistake.  They will take a lot of jobs.  Advances can be temporarily delayed but will win out.  Robots and computers will take many, if not most jobs.  How will we address a significant portion of people who identified with their work for their entire lives being unemployed and behind on their payments?  I normally don’t talk politics on this site, but regardless of your political philosophy these are issues that we need to demand our lawmakers discuss, ideally sooner rather than later.

Believe it or not I have worked before, even after I was diagnosed with a mental illness.  I have been a retail clerk, fast food cook, waiter, factory worker, teacher’s aide/graduate assistant, dish washer, janitor, construction worker, farm hand, lawn mower, and newspaper delivery boy (when I was 10 years old).  And everyone of those jobs (with the exception of teacher’s aide) was repetitive, mind numbingly boring, required no creative imagination, and didn’t really make a difference to even my small hometown.  Most of those jobs stand a good chance of being automated within the next twenty years anyway.  So those jobs were drudgery, not stimulating, and I worked mostly with people who were not very creative or intelligent. But those were the only jobs available to me, at least in my small town and rural area.  I can foresee a mass migration out of rural areas and small towns all over the world (more so than now) once automation really gets rolling.  Even I may be going to a big city if enough of my hometown dries up and or stagnates.

Creative jobs will likely become in demand soon.  I liked the teacher’s aide job because I got to interact with above average intelligence people everyday, got to use computers, got to teach a few college courses as a substitute teacher, and was actually encouraged to use my creativity.  Unfortunately that job was contingent on me being a graduate student in the Masters in Business program.  I loved the job but didn’t do well enough in the classes to keep my job.  I could have seen being a computers instructor and research rat for the next fifty  years.  But I can’t because I don’t have that piece of paper that states I am qualified for a job like that.

So here I am living on the fringes of society because of my disability.  Wasn’t my first choice but that is the current system we live under.  I don’t make the rules, I just live by them.  I never wanted to just waist my mind on disability.  But the aspects of the illness that make figuring out office politics and dealing with vicious bosses and coworkers will not allow me to function in our toxic modern work environment.  I don’t see how normals function under such systems.  Perhaps normals do it only by copious doses of reality tv, alcohol, anti depressants, tabloid news channels that don’t report anything that really makes a difference (I watch foreign news casts even more than U.S. news because I don’t care at all about celebrity gossip or what steroid pumped football god beat up his girlfriend this week).  I didn’t like the work environments I was in.  Not because I couldn’t physically or mentally do the work.  Far from it.  I just couldn’t adjust to the environment of toxic coworkers and borderline abusive bosses.

As far as people who think I am lazy and just being a leech off the good tax payers of my nation, I wish to leave you with the following thoughts.

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I am definitely not one of the one in ten thousand who can make the breakthrough, perhaps maybe among the one in ten who truly try to appreciate the men and women who make breakthroughs possible.  If it weren’t for brilliant scientists working on psych meds I would be in a padded room in an insane asylum as would some of the coolest people I ever met.  If it wasn’t for medical science my dear mother might be dead because of heart and thyroid problems.  If it wasn’t for scientists and engineers we wouldn’t have the internet, anti biotic drugs, sanitation, etc.  I am grateful every day for the ‘one in ten thousand.’  Everyone should be.

So Long Winter

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Winter is all but over now.  The weather has been warming up and the days have gotten longer.  It will be staying light longer since time change is this weekend in my country.  As a result I’ve been feeling better mentally and been more physically active.  I had forgotten what is was to be able to go outside all the time and not worry about the cold and snow.  These last couple months have been the longest stretch of mental stability I have had in months.  Between the increased physical activity, the better mental health, and the better weather, these last two weeks have gone remarkably well.

Made a couple road trips in the last two weeks.  Went to the family acreage for the day yesterday.  Got to relax, catch some sunshine, see some wildlife, and spend time with the family.  I rarely go to my hometown anymore except for holidays and family gatherings.  There just isn’t much holding me there anymore.  I can get and do pretty much anything I need and want in my current town.  I have a few more road trips planned for the spring.

The stabilized mental health has made it much easier to enjoy this spring.  Didn’t enjoy last fall as much as I normally enjoy fall because a few flare ups of the mental illness.  But that seems to be in the past now.  Been an enjoyable last two weeks and I’m anxiously looking forward to the rest of spring.

 

Average People and Trolls from A Mentally Ill Point Of View

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I’m probably putting myself on the line, may lose a few friends, and make myself a moving target for anyone who doesn’t understand me or mental illness, but I got to write this anyway. As a schizophrenic I have readily admitted to not knowing what makes average people tick.  Maybe the fact I don’t know how to act around average people makes me schizophrenic to begin with.  Perhaps it’s the fact I simply do not know how ‘normal’ people socialize nor do I know how to interpret why normal people act the way they do is what separates the mentally ill from the chronically normal.  Perhaps the defect in myself is not a genetic one but one in simply looking at the universe in a way that is not considered socially and culturally the norm.  I am somewhat intrigued to see that mentally ill individuals often are better adjusted in developing nations where the bounds of community and family are much stronger than in the more developed nations of Europe, North America, and eastern Asia.  But I stress again, you normals, I have been trying to figure you guys out ever since I was five years old and I found out very harshly I didn’t see the world the same way you guys go.  And trying to figure your kind out gives me more problems and headaches as does this blasted schizophrenia.

I can live with the voices that tell me I am stupid, worthless, a failure, and undeserving of life, love, liberty, the chance at happiness, and the other comforts you normals so willingly take for granted.  I’ve dealt with that nonsense for half of my life and all my adult life.  I can deal with the sometimes unexplainable bouts of depression and sadness at what I could have been.  What I can’t figure out are you normals and the unspoken rules you set up for yourselves and didn’t bother to write down for those of us who may have missed the memos.  And I sure can’t figure out why you normals feel like you have a God given responsibility to harass, annoy, and irritate those who are weaker than you or just want to be left to their own projects and lives.

I readily admit that those out there in the world, let alone those in my life, that need to read this aren’t going to read this.  You normals don’t seem to have an attention span longer than fifteen seconds nor do you seem to comprehend any concepts more advanced than any taught beyond fourth grade.  Be that as it is I’ll continue on with this post merely for the sake if this does happen to be read at some point in the future.  Will one of you normals, any of your normals, please explain to me why, why do you feel a need to gloat, troll, and generally all around be disrespectful of anyone who has a different opinion or has any difference for that matter?  If the universe or God or whatever is in charge would have meant for every object and organism to be exact replicas of each other, then you better believe we would all be the same.  There wouldn’t even be any organisms capable of being conscious of being able to distinguish other organisms from itself if we were all meant to be exactly the same.  Why don’t you normals get that and just allow for the differences to exist without antagonizing others who don’t look or act or think exactly the same way you do?  Do you normals just thrive under conflict and controversy?  I have to think that you normals do.  I have to think that having some conflict, or conquest, or mythical dragon to slay is what drives the average human, and thus mankind in general.  But I will say though, it sure makes things quite brutal for those of us you don’t readily consider normal who don’t thrive on conflict and conquest.

Perhaps the reason I myself and those like me have mental problems and don’t function well in modern civilization is because we don’t thrive on conflicts, divisions, and controversy.  Have an aggravating and conflict filled day where you can slay the demons if you are normal and have a calm and still day if you are like myself and don’t thrive and conquest and anger. Have the kind of day your soul craves.

 

P.S. Note to wordpress.com:  You new setup for where your bloggers enter their blog posts and set their key search terms doesn’t work well, is anything but user friendly, and is aggravating.  I enjoyed working with the older setup much more. I could be like a typical normal and say ‘it sucks’ etc., but like I just wrote I don’t thrive under conflict and I don’t like using hateful terms except when I am under a psychotic break.

 

 

 

Drama Free, Socializing, and Confidence

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It’s been quiet on my end for the last few days.  Haven’t had any real flare ups of schizophrenia or anxiety for several days.  First time in weeks I’ve gone more than a couple days without any kind of flare up.  It’s been strange not having drama in my life lately.  It’s just something I’ve gotten used to.  I’m actually amazed when I go through days when I don’t have to deal with some drama in my life or someone else’s overblown drama.

Even though it’s almost winter, I’ve been getting out of my apartment more.  I make it a point to not socialize much in my apartment complex.  I still have a few problem neighbors who like to keep the drama stirred.  I never understood why there are people who can’t live without drama or irritating others.  I was brought up that if I couldn’t get along with someone, it was best to leave them alone.  Makes it tough to trust some people when I have trust issues.

Oddly, some of my best socializing comes just from bantering and joking with cashiers and store clerks.  I didn’t do this in my twenties at all.  But as I have gained social skills and figured out that not everyone out there wants to take advantage of others, it has gotten easier and even fun. Found that the ones I get the best reactions out of our night shift clerks and cashiers in the 25 to 45 bracket.  The younger clerks take a little more priming before they’ll joke with me.  The older clerks usually won’t joke with me at all.  And this is even with my jokes not being of the unsafe for work categories.  I’m finding that many younger people just don’t seem that confident at work.  I certainly wasn’t when I worked in my twenties.  I never thought that others had that problem.  I didn’t gain any real confidence in myself or even appreciation for my abilities until I was thirty.  That was also the age when I came to the conclusion that I did not have to tolerate poor and uncivil behavior from others.  While I was still figuring my way through my delusions and irrational fears, I thought I was the only one who had these problems.  I just never knew that even those without mental illnesses had problems with not having confidence.  Unfortunately that’s stuff I couldn’t learn in any book.

 

 

Overcoming Loneliness

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Loneliness is often a problem for those of us with mental illnesses.  Our loneliness is often brought about because we are scared to socialize with “normal” people because of stigmas that still surround mental illness.  Loneliness can also be caused by the paranoia that accompanies many mental illnesses.  Loneliness can also be caused by depression when people are to sad or depressed to go out and socialize with even close friends.  Any one of these alone can make the idea of socializing daunting.

Loneliness can be overcome.  It can take a long time to overcome, though.  It certainly takes a great deal of effort to overcome a fear of socializing and opening up to people.  The topic of your mental illness can scare anyone into thinking that no one would want to socialize with him/her.  However, it is not necessary nor advisable to discuss any aspect of your mental illness the first time a new person is met.  Only when any person has earned your trust should you feel like you could discuss it with him/her.  Even then, discuss it only if you feel comfortable doing so.  

There probably will be times when you have new friends who wish to discuss aspects of your illness before you are ready.  In such cases, it is necessary to be polite, tactful, yet firm that you are not ready and do not wish to discuss such issues about your illness at that time.

Fears of socializing can be overcome by with practice and by gradually pushing your limits.  There is no need to feel that you have to conquer your fears all at once.  A fear of socializing, like any fear, can only be overcome by repeated acts of gradually increased bravery and courage.  It just may be just enough to say hello to your neighbors or someone in a store as a first step.  A second step may be to make some mundane comment about something as harmless as the weather to the clerk at the grocery store or anything like that.  From there, you can build up and branch out.  Socializing is by no means an exact science.  It is not something that can be learned from reading a few books or watching others do it.  It has to be learned by trial and error.

From my own personal experiences, I was by no means an extrovert growing up.  I didn’t learn a great deal about ‘normal’ socializing until I was well into college.  I don’t know how much of this was due to my illness or my being a natural introvert and I’ll probably never know.  The fact remains I would have never learned what social skills I have now had I never attempted to work on my skills.  I took a risk, faced my fears (and there were a lot of fears and paranoia), and came out better because of it.  You can too.  You just have to keep working at it.  There are no easy ways around it.