thoughts

today is a good day to ponder the thought process and how it changes in a situation like mine, mostly because i was mulling over topics and this is what brandie requested. the amazing thing is that my thoughts haven't actually changed much at all - it's only the severity of those thoughts that have changed.

as near as i can tell, there is no drug out there that will make one happy. all modern medicine can do for someone like me is take the edge off the issues. as krisha, the on-staff therapist at the booby-hatch, said, these drugs simply make the lows less low. essentially, they blunt the effects of my own brain chemistry. and so, 2 weeks after a major breakdown, i still think the same way. i still look at things and wonder why anyone wants me to be part of them, i still haven't figured out how to be a happy person. the negative spiral still goes downward, but not as quickly as not as far. i still am filled with self-doubt. i still freeze up momentarily at the thought of having to speak to someone i don't know, and i still have a skipped heartbeat when i have to speak to someone i do know but who is not on 'the list'. there's nothing that can be done medicinally for that. hence, therapy. and that has only just begun.

i have to admit to continued curiosity about alternative treatment, though i think it terrifically unlikely that i will ever go that route again. my former natural remedy had lost its effectiveness without my realizing it, and i'm not certain i'm willing to take that risk again, not to mention my concerns with making such a switch again in the first place. but there is an analogy for brain chemistry that was shared with me once that makes a terrible lot of sense, and it is that analogy which bothers me.

picture your brain as a bathtub, and the water as your stability- and happiness-inducing brain chemicals. the water comes into the tub via the faucet, and exits the tub via the drain, and in a normal brain these two rates of flow are essentially equal, keeping the water level basically consistent. this is mental health. in a brain like mine, the drain is larger than it should be and the water level drops rapidly, creating depression. this is not mental health. now, faced with this problem in the physical world (i.e. were this an actual tub and not an analogy), one would solve the problem either by reducing the size of the drain or by cranking open the faucet; however, we haven't yet figured out how to reduce the drain flow and things are a bit unscientific when it comes to increasing the faucet's output, which was the intention of my former nutritional-based therapy. the issue seems to be that the drain eventually opens wider to accommodate the increased flow. so modern medicine has taken option c: add a few bricks to the tub to raise the water level artificially. seems to be a goofy way to go about it if you ask me, but it is effective and we've got it figured out to some degree. think of it like a man who knows nothing about home repair: he doesn't know enough to change out the drain pipe; he can turn off other water usage in the house to increase the water flow, but only until someone flushes the toilet or starts the washer; so dumping a brick or two in the tub will work just fine. simple, and he can easily see the results.

but in the end, the bricks don't belong in the tub, do they? and what happens when the tub is full of bricks, anyway? no, it seems to me that the only way to do this over a full life span is to figure out the water flow issue, not to mask it or compensate for it by using something outside of the system. over time, maybe this leap gets made and i can stop worrying about it. maybe in the long run i can go back to eating right and taking a few neurotransmitter precursors to increase the flow in, or we find the grail and manage to shrink the drain. for now, i am not happy with this solution but will gladly accept that it is working since i no longer wonder if it would hurt to run my car into the bridge support under eldorado parkway.

the rest of the thought process has to be fixed one malfunction at a time, like debugging programming code. you don't know what the next problem is until you solve the first one. so you work on the big bug you find first until it's resolved, then the next one pops up and you go to town on it. for now the program is still busted. it's just not taking the operating system with it anymore.