Stream of consciousness

That moment when you watched Ally McBeal and she had one of her fantasy sequences and you thought, "ha! I'm not the only one!"

That moment when you watched a JD fantasy sequence on Scrubs and thought, "ha! I'm not the only one!"

That moment in Broadcast News when Albert Brooks says to Holly Hunter, "OK, I'll meet you at that place by the thing where we went that time..." and you totally got what he was saying.....

I'm in the middle of Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess). Good stuff, quite funny, in that delightful I-can't-read-this-at-work-cuz-I'll-attract-attention-with-my-laughter funny...but as she's delving into what makes her, her special brand of crazy, I'm reading it and thinking, sonofaBITCH, why didn't anyone ever give me this diagnosis?

We'll skip right over the fact that I probably shouldn't be borrowing diagnoses from someone who's a pinch crazier than myself....

Generalized anxiety disorder, or social anxiety disorder, that is. Cuz I'm reading parts of this book and thinking, "ohmygod, this lady must be my mom's 2nd lovechild after Jeff Dunham, she has to be, because I like, totally get EVERYTHING she's discussing because I've so been there!"

Now granted, maybe they did diagnose me with that stuff, simply by prescribing me Paxil (and allowing me to stay on it for 14 frickin' years), which is supposed to assist with social anxiety. Interesting how docs are fine with prescribing and not getting on your case about talk therapy...if I wasn't on generics, I'd wonder about kickbacks. I guess once I stopped being a danger to myself, they could care less how my addled brain dealt with stuff.

I'm betting too, that docs shy away from using terms like generalized because well, it's just too, y'know...generalized.....but it's striking a chord because it falls away from the diagnoses I was used to hearing back in the day. Counselors, social workers, psychologists, ARNPs, and psychiatrists would come away from my sessions with notes that read "marked to moderate depression" and not much else, and I was too low on their pretty scales and charts to be categorized as bipolar. The first 3 types of folks didn't have the skills to diagnose thoroughly enough, and the latter 2 were there to write scripts and send me to the other three. Gotta love the revolving door philosophy...or I would if there weren't so many memories of panic attacks, banging my head with my hands, curling up in the fetal position, enjoying the after-effects of whip-its while watching MTV's AMP...but I digress....

So I latched onto the lithium deficiency diagnosis once we started drawing and testing my red cells, because I've always been a cause-and-effect gal—brain's goofy, brain doesn't make lithium, brain has a reason for being goofy. But that doesn't always help explain why I am what I am, especially now, when I'm back on the lithium and while it's taking the edge off, I'm already wondering if I need more because there's still plenty going on upstairs to distract me from things that I need to focus on, but of course, then there's the question of taking so much of it that you're basically poisoning yourself (which really doesn't make sense when you consider your brain doesn't make the stuff and metabolizes what you do take so quickly, that you wonder how the frick it's possible to take too much...), AND also if you take too much lithium, it flattens out your personality, you lose the ability to react properly to everyday stuff, and life becomes ho-hum, which is why so many bipolars go off it once their symptoms start to abate, because it totally takes away that "god, I'm so ALIVE" feeling...which, since I can totally relate to, makes me start wondering if I've always been a little bipolar and just wasn't diagnosed accurately.....

And now I'm talking myself out of it yet again, the idea of having social anxiety disorder, because while I can be a bit of a recluse, I don't stress over it...and I can still get up in front of crowds and speak without worry of my head spinning off its axis and flying around the room. Thank you, Dale Carnegie. I don't stress over much of anything. When something doesn't go my way, I'm all, well, must've happened for a reason, no point in crying over spilt milk, where's the towel?

Yea, Melanie, that's the Paxil doing its job, ya dink!

Yea, but if it was really doing its job, wouldn't my brain be less like THIS?!

And the hilarious thing is that while I'm debating this and "not" stressing over how nutty I still am, I've been spending my 40s saying how I really don't mind how I am anymore, that it's shaped my personality, it is what it is, so why keep trying to change what you can't? But if that's totally true, what was the point of this hysterically long post, right?

Melanie's world is special. Stop in sometime...we have cookies.