🧐 I Don't Know What's Wrong With Me
But I also know exactly what's wrong with me
When you have something wrong with you, everybody else knows exactly what’s wrong with you. I do this, too. I have some stock questions that help me get to the bottom of it:
Are you drinking enough water? Have you eaten recently? Are you sleeping enough?
I think we do this because we imagine other peoples problems as surmountable obstacles while our own problems seem impossible to solve. Your problems are like mere pebbles in your shoe. Simply take off your shoe and remove the pebble! Why are you being so dramatic?
My problems, however, are enormous, complex, and impeneterable. Don’t even look at them or they will blind you. Your simple “tricks” to feel better are cantrips while my moods loom like mountains. What possible good could a better night’s sleep do to fix my ailments? My life is woe.
You think you have problems? I could repair every tear in your life’s tapestry before getting out of bed! They are nothing to me.
I have a therapist. We talk a lot about what’s wrong with me. I keep going back to him because he helps me figure out what’s wrong with me. But we don’t spend too much time on the whys. He’s not that kind of therapist. He’s more focused on how to get over the mountains, while I like to spend a little more time looking at them.
There is absolutely no benefit to looking at the mountains longer than it takes to figure out how to get over them. And yet here I am, obsessing over the mountains.
I know exactly what’s wrong with me.
This newsletter has taken me so long to write that I have bits and bobs from earlier times. This paragraph, for example, was written months ago. I’m putting it in italics to indicate this:
I'm getting over my second covid booster, which put me on my ass for a day. I talked my way into getting a second booster when I probably don’t really qualify for one (technically). How did I talk my way into a second booster? I said the word “cancer” which is a good word to use when you want to get people to move around a lot. Sometimes it makes people squirm, but it makes health things happen faster, too. If I have a health-related problem all I have to say is “I had cancer” and people open doors for me. Sometimes I say “I had cancer” and they hear “I have cancer” which is most definitely not what I said, because I don’t have cancer.
This part is a little more recent, but it’s still valid to my current raft of Things That Are Wrong With Me:
The Second Thing is that I am coming to the time when I need to get my yearly MRI. Real Jim-Heads will remember that summer time is yearly MRI time. That makes me anxious but it’s the kind of anxiety that hovers just behind me, not the kind that jumps in front of me. If you’ve encountered anxiety at all in your life, you know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t encountered anxiety in your life, consider your own MRI, because there might be something wrong with you, too.
The Third Thing is that I’m stepping down my klonopin. This drug, generically known as clonazepam, is a drug I’m trying to get out of my life completely. I’ve been taking it for many years, first prescribed by a psychiatrist I don’t see anymore. He prescribed it to me because I was throwing up when I took xanax.
I was taking xanax because I had started taking my antidepressent again, after years of not taking it. I went from taking zero lexapro to 15mg of lexapro. This is not how you’re supposed to take lexapro.
You’re supposed to start slow. I didn’t know that, so I started fast. I had a very bad night after taking 15mg of lexapro. I don’t know if I gave myself a seratonin storm, but that’s what it felt like.
- Agitation or restlessness
- Insomnia
- Confusion
- Rapid heart rate and high blood pressure
- Dilated pupils
- Loss of muscle coordination or twitching muscles
- High blood pressure
- Muscle rigidity
- Heavy sweating
- Diarrhea
- Headache
- Shivering
- Goose bumps
I had a bunch of those but not all of them. I paced in my living room until I fell asleep on the couch, and sniped at my friend who tried to help me by saying soothing things. I remember being so inconsolable that I drove them to leave my house completely. I’ll never, ever forget the look on their face as they left. I’m sorry. I wasn’t feeling myself. This was nearly twenty years ago, but I haven’t forgiven myself.
I’m trying to do better.
There’s a moment in the new Spider-Man movie where somebody asks Peter Parker how he’s doing.
Peter’s answer: “trying to do better.”
It’s not the younger Peter who says that, or the youngest Peter who says that, it’s the middle-aged Peter who says that. This is how I feel, too. I’m just trying to be a better version of me. Most of the time, I don’t succeed.
But Peter doesn’t say “I’m being a better person,” he says “trying to do better.” If you’re trying, you’re moving, you’re improving (even if it’s incremental). It’s not a guarantee. It’s an intention pinned to our better natures.
Sometimes that’s all we can do.
We don’t really know how the human body works. I mean, we kind of know, but we’re not entirely sure how it works. We understand even less about the human mind, which is intrinsically linked to the human brain, which I've written about extensively before.
I take SSRIs because they work, but nobody really understands why. This is a theme.
Some Thundering Realizations About Myself
I love the adjective “thundering” and I use it all the time. I’ve used it twice in The Collected Foremania over the years, which is a lot for a word that I’ve never actually used to describe the weather, which is what I imagine the 16.4 million google results refer to.
In the time since I wrote the above, which was months ago, and today, July 24th, I have made some realizations about who I am in 2022. Not bad for 45 years old, but that leads me into the first thing:
I’m a Late Bloomer
I have an essay in me called the Lay of the Late Bloomer, which starts with the reminder that the word “lay” also means song, though it’s a bit archaic (which I am, too!). That doesn’t matter, but what matters is that I’ve realized that I’m a late bloomer. Actually, I’ve always known that about myself, but it’s something I’ve lately come to accept.
I didn’t kiss a girl until I was 25. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 26. There are lots of other examples that I won’t get into here, but suffice to say that I take my time getting going and that’s okay.
It’s not important that I wiggle my butt ten times before I leap, what’s important is that I do, in fact, leap. This leads me into my second thing:
I’m a Cat Person
I love them. I can be a cat person and also be a dog person. They’re not mutually exclusive. Anyway, take a look at my instagram page if you don’t believe me.
That’s where the butt-wiggling refers to. My cat, Emmitt, does it, but I've seen other cats do it, too. I don't know why they do it but it's like a warm-up before they jump. Maybe it's nothing more than a ritual and it has no intrinsic purpose.
It doesn't matter that Emmitt wiggles ten times while other cats might not wiggle at all, or some might wiggle five times. My cat teaches me a lot about myself, which is why I’m a cat person.
I Need Surprise and Routine to Be Creative
This is extremely fresh news, so your Jim Almanac definitely doesn’t have anything about this, though perhaps it’s there anyway, between the lines. It’s something I learned by talking to my therapist, which is a great way to learn about yourself, generally speaking.
Let me start by showing you my workspace. This is where I Do My Creative Stuff.
I sit down here and I immediately need to leave. I can’t sit there and create. It doesn’t work. It’s painful. It’s like there are literal chains coming out of that chair and I have to clap them over my wrists and ankles. I don’t want to sit there. I don’t want to!!
I told this to my therapist. I told him that the only creative writing I’ve been able to do for the past 2.5 years has been the newsletter.
So we went back to what made me want to write in the first place. No, that’s not exactly right. We went back to the circumstances of both my earliest writing and my most recent fiction writing.
My earliest writing was pencil on paper, and it was writing sentences. Our assignment, back in those earliest of 90s or latest of 80s, was to take the ten words for that week and write ten sentences, each using one of those words. I loved this because I could be creative, yes, but also because we had to read them to the rest of the class. So my therapist and I recreated this, and I wrote sentences based on vocabulary words that he gave me. The creativity came easily.
Going to coffee shops has been a huge part of my creative process. I wrote almost no other place. When I was living in Wheeling for a few years, I drove to Pittsburgh two or three times a week so I could write at my favorite coffee shop because I simply could not write at home.
I always thought it was the coffee shop that I loved so much. I tried to recreate the coffee shop experience here in my apartment, at my dreaded creative stuff desk. I got a TV and put YouTube on it with videos of people working at coffee shops. It was good, and worked a little, but the dread still set in. I hated it.
Thanks to the advice of a helpful fellow creative person and another suggestion from my therapist, I forced myself to write. Every day at 8pm, no matter what I’m doing, I fill a page with writing. It doesn’t have to be a lot, and I can draw a single line of ink down the page if I don’t have anything to write, but what matters is that my 8pm alarm hits my phone and I open my journal and I write.
This is consistent with advice that I, myself, followed when I first started writing seriously, and is advice I gladly share whenever solicited: you can’t wait for inspiration, you have to make it happen. You don’t hold your strike until the iron is hot, you make the iron hot by striking it.
Wait, so what was so great about the coffee shop? What about it made me want to write?
Aha. That, you can see, is the rub. So I know I can write if I go to a coffee shop (or a library, or a bar, or any place that isn’t my Desk of Dread). I can also write if I have a buzz from alcohol, or excess amounts of caffeine, or, as I learned today, pseudoephedrine. I also find a brisk walk brings the creativity out in me, too, and I can write after that.
I need to have my drink stirred.
I need to get a little dizzy.
I need to smack myself.
I can’t roll out of bed and simply be creative. I need to spin around a little, put myself in a place that I’m not normally, either physically or mentally.
I don’t know exactly what about that planned burst of surprise that makes me able to create, I just know it works. It works.
It’s the wiggle before the leap. And it’s okay.
Oh! Empathy, empathy, empathy. From MRI anxiety to meds to cats to the Dreaded Desk. I’m borrowing the word “thundering.” I’ll return it, wrapped carefully in felt and twine. Take heart! Take care. Keep up the great work.