relapse – A Life Of Mental Illness

September 23, 2017

After several rougher than usual days, I’m starting back on the mend. Feeling depressed, anxious, and paranoid really drains me. I still don’t socialize much other than phone calls and blogging. I have recently gone entire days without leaving my apartment. And it saddens me. I am afraid to travel, so I don’t get to see many friends or family. I don’t even like driving across town to buy groceries and house supplies anymore. I’m just so afraid and paranoid much of the time anymore.

Maybe the problems I traditionally have in late summer finally caught up to me. I just usually want to just curl up under a heavy blanket and try to sleep much of the time. It’s usually hunger that causes me to get out of bed.

In spite my recent issues I attempt to stay optimistic. Granted I haven’t been real successful at this lately. I attempt to avoid angry and irritable people as much as possible. It would be better for me and everyone involved if I just wasn’t as sensitive to these kinds of things as I am. Yet, for better and worse, it is how I am wired mentally. Losing my sensitivity, compassion, and empathy would involve destroying who I am mentally. It would mean being someone I have never been. I just can’t do it. I now understand why I never succeeded in a workplace environment. I just have too much compassion and empathy.

Relapse and Feeling Vulnerable

Been having some truly down days for the last week. Finally had a breakdown a couple days ago. I hate those. Seems to be the only way out of those is to just rant and rave to an empathetic person, namely my parents. I am thankful I didn’t have said breakdown in public, otherwise I’d be in jail or dead. It saddens me to read stories like the one about the kid at Georgia Tech getting killed by police while undergoing a breakdown. Now I know most people don’t care about the mentally ill, I get that. It’s tough to relate to problems you can’t see or imagine. But it does scare me that this kid could have been me if past situations were a little different. Now I don’t hate police officers, I have a couple in my extended family. I know they have a difficult and thankless job. But I just fear them. I fear people with power. I’ve seen people with power abuse it too many times. Makes me fear that power is supposed to be abused and that normal people respect those that abuse power more than those that don’t abuse their power.

I guess that I am still depressed and fearful. I know it’s not manly to feel fear and depression. It’s seems like it’s not manly to feel anything at all. My breakdown wasn’t helped any that I finally had to deal with internet trolls on my blog’s Facebook page. I didn’t write back to them, I just blocked them. Seems to be the only real effective way to deal with fools and bullies online. Seems to me that Facebook brings out the worst in people. As much as I love science and tech, I truly fear for our species when mind reading tech is perfected. I fear this far more than I do AI our automation taking millions of jobs. Maybe we won’t solve our current problems. I just fear what the average person is capable of anymore.

Relapses and Lonely Friday Nights

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.