On Taking Psychotropic Medications

I missed one of my medications for two weeks. I don’t know I did it, except it fell off of repeat refill, and I didn’t notice it was gone. It was my anti-depressant; I take a cocktail of meds to manage my bipolar disorder. Which means that without them, I progressively got depressed and anxious, curling up in a tiny ball, saying the grownup equivalent of “Nobody loves me” because the whirlwind in my abdomen felt that way. I still functioned at work, because I have a solid sense of duty that keeps me from calling off.

I just figured out on Saturday what happened, and by Sunday I got the prescription refilled. I am recovering.

Photo by The Lazy Artist Gallery on Pexels.com

It sobers me that one half of a teaspoon of chemicals daily keeps me from non-functionality, or at least less functionality. I admit the meds are miraculous, even with their side effects, which include benign tremor, dehydration, and maybe a bit of incoordination¹. These meds keep me from despondency, from helplessness, from inertia, from self-flagellation, from a variety of self-deprecating and ultimately self-destructing exercises in my life. On the flip side, they also keep me from frightening elation, a feeling of invincibility, magical thinking², and a touch of grandiosity.

I function well because of chemicals. Not even perfect chemicals — none of these efficiently target the difficulties in the brain, but work together to keep something (usually excitatory actions of the brain) from happening and make other things (retention of neurotransmitters and inhibitory processes) more likely to happen. My brain chemicals are tripping my body to be hyper, to be miserable, to be depressed, to be despondent when there are no stimuli backing up the feelings. The medicine keeps that from happening.

Very few people tell me to “go natural” and quit treating my bipolar. I think it’s because bipolar scares them and they don’t want to see me without my meds. I suspect they think I will become psychotic if I go off the meds. Probably not. But I appreciate their faith in my meds.

Again, it’s sobering that I function because of medications. but I’d rather function than not.

It’s hard to tell which is my natural incoordination and which is the medication, to be truthful.
Magical thinking is believing in irrational connections between A and B, where A is “step on the cracks” and B is “break your mother’s back.” I contrast this to most practitioners of magic, who believe that stepping on the cracks may affect your relationship with your mother but not break her back, and besides that, they don’t do actions with evil undertones.

Little Hiccups of Happy

This is how I’m feeling these past few days. The weather is finally trending cooler, and autumn has arrived. A gentle rain fell yesterday, and I traveled in its chill. I love Autumn — even the rain, especially the rain.

Missouri Hope last weekend was successful, and I’ve heard lots of good feedback, which makes me feel like I’m doing something right.

A couple of things have happened this week to make me chuckle. The Interim President of the university missed me at coffee the other day. I never thought I’d be able to say that. An acquaintance of mine ordered a paperback copy of my latest romance. He’s a retired Brigadier General. So, yes, a Brigadier General is reading one of my romance novels. I should offer to autograph it.

I’m (or rather, my husband and I are) making progress on the latest Christmas romance. He’s supposed to do some background research for me and I’m looking over our notes. Things are going well, and I feel a hiccup of happy in my chest.

Belly cat and updates

Update:

Belvedere the kitten (Belly for short) is still alive in his fourth day, slurping down syringefuls of milk and sleeping in happy milky drunkenness. He’s absolutely tiny:

I’m not quite getting enough sleep given his every two hour feeding schedule, but this too will pass.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten a few more rejections from agents and I just don’t know what to do about “this doesn’t really grab me” comments. Still haven’t heard from DAW and it’s officially been six months.

I wrote another short story I’m thinking of posting here but, since my stories are the least read of anything I post (TL; DR?) I don’t know if I will.

Waiting for another idea to come my way.

In other words, I’d feel down except for the kitten. Kittens somehow exude happy chemicals.

Satisfaction

My seven-year-old honorary niece, Marcie, asked me if she could teach you about satisfaction, so here goes:

“Satisfaction, Aunt Laurie says, is a type of happy. I like the word ‘happy’ better. There are different types of happy, and they make you feel different ways. There’s big wow happies, there’s little fluffy happies, and there’s the ‘I’m so happy the tiger didn’t eat me’ happies.

“The thing is, how you get the happy makes a difference in how you feel the happy. If you want to do something like write a book, and you finish the book, you’re like ‘Wow! Big happy!’. But the next morning you’re like ‘ho hum, time to find something else big to do.’ It’s like eating ice cream — you want real food a couple hours later after you weren’t hungry for dinner. But if you have something you want to get good at, and you do it all the time and get better and better, you feel this little warm glow and it lasts a long time. So getting better at something isn’t as yummy but it keeps you full longer, like oatmeal with raisins and honey — not as sweet, but it lasts longer in your tummy.

“Aunt Laurie just typed 50,000 words — that’s a lot of words! — and so she won something she calls NaNo. But this morning she woke up and said, ‘Now what? I met my goal!’ Then she looked at her computer and said, ‘I still need to learn how to write better, so I’m going to keep practicing and maybe someday I’ll get published!’

“The End!”