LIVE, REVISED

Swimming today. Also boy mode and it feels weird. The park was pretty. I'm less so. Pictures later, upload isn't working right now.

Test with CW and moderation tags

Bums!

Just to let you know I've started adding NSFW content to this blog. If you want to see it, look under CW & confirm your age to appease the nanny state.

I should have probably started writing this earlier but I slightly hyper-fixated on getting this new look sorted out; isn't neurodiversity grand? Anyway, this is going to be a bit of a blog post of correlational & causational... Stuff. As you can see, I've had a bit of a "glow-up" around here & it's all related. I've tried to get a bit of an old-school LiveJournal vibe going on. Nostalgia & LJ-Cutting myself as a midlife crisis maybe? Meh. Don't care. I've enabled comments and stuff too; feel free to let me know what you think about any of this drivel I write.

The main reason I've been able to write anything at all is a change in my antidepressant medication I think. I've been persisting with Sertraline since before Christmas and my experiences haven't been the best. I've had pretty much constant insomnia since I started taking it, and the beneficial effect it should have had tamping the MDD pendulum has been negligible at best.

The GP ignored the raft of peer-reviewed evidence that Sertraline causes sleep disruption and told me to persist, upping the dose every time. With every dosage increase, my ability to function was equally diminished. I eventually stood my ground & told them it wasn't working. Again "Oh, you need to be on it a little bit longer, give it another couple of weeks." At this point I'd been on the maximum dosage for a month & there wasn't a day that passed where I'd not end up wondering what the best exit strategy was. During a Zolpidem (Ambien) drugged evening, I told my nesting partner that I was going to kill myself with helium. The GP gave not shit one about the ideation; he was rude, dismissive and combative. He eventually, begrudgingly switched me to Citalopram 20, admonishing me that "There's no guarantee things will improve, and in fact they'll probably get worse and I won't change your medication for another 3 months." Oh, how wrong he was.

The difference between Sertraline & Citalopram has been nothing short of seismic. I noticed the difference from pretty much the first dose; I could think a little clearer, the anhedonia and inability to do anything but coast along on my ADHD medication started to shift. After 3 doses I've pretty much stopped crying & the ideation has evaporated. In the last 3 days I have baked and decorated a cake & done a fairly big chunk of housework. I had a day that was borderline manic yesterday and I got a lot done. Today has been lower-energy, but I hyper-fixated the whole day on getting this blog just so, so I could write this. Is it perfect? No. Anehdonia has been replaced with... Nothing. I don't feel anything; I'm not happy or sad, I'm not even apathetic. I care, but I feel about as emotional as flatpack furniture. For a Limerant like me whose feelings are nearly always cranked up to 11, it's a weird place to be. I don't like it, but I like the alternative less.

Choosing to say goodbye