This has been a difficult week. I’ve had a lot of emotional turbulence as I’ve started up a new medication while still on an old one. It’s not making me feel things, but it does seem to be amplifying my naturally occurring emotions in weird ways. Or doing nothing except leaving me incredibly sleepy. I also had a day where I just felt out of it, like I had a bad head cold that was making me feel foggy. Today (a week before this posted), I feel mostly normal except all of my emotions are hitting me at full power rather than drifting up and down as normal. I think this is the unfortunate combination of weaning off my previous medication while starting up my new one and the sort of daily variability of it is giving me hope that this is just a temporary side effect as my body adjusts to the changing chemical levels within it [this seems to have played out as I hoped it would, with these symptoms largely vanishing by the time this posted]. That all of this emotional variability will calm down eventually and my body will adjust, settling into routine side effects and new chemical balances that will hopefully have the desired effect of treating my depression and anxiety. Eventually. For now, though, I’m implementing a lot of “Shut The Fuck Up Friday” best practices because I’ve caught myself prepared to say some things in the workplace that wouldn’t necessarily get me in trouble but would give my coworkers a better glimpse at the person I am than I’m prepared to show them in a structured work environment. I mean, I don’t exactly trust them after all…

Work isn’t the only place I’ve felt the urge to speak out of my usual patterns, but I think I only let one slip through and that one was a weird tangent and mostly just embarrassing to me because I was raised to feel shame any time I tell “strangers” my personal business or take up space in peoples’ minds. It’s been a tiring experience, to have to fight for the usual placid expression and general lack of an (expressed) opinion that I’ve become so accustomed to for most of my adult life. Not that I never speak up anywhere, I just don’t have a lot to say constantly and whatever I do have to say usually winds up here. I took it for granted that I was content with my relative silence and now that I feel the urge to say stuff to people constantly, I’m struggling to keep it buttoned up. It would be one thing if I felt more conversational in general or that I had the energy to stand up against stuff that always bothered me (like people using the wrong pronouns in reference to me), but I just feel more wildly emotional and less restrained. I got all the impulse control issues with none of the extra energy to deal with those impulses or the fallout from indulging them. I’m really hoping this doesn’t last much longer because I want to be able to relax and speak casually in my video game voice chats again. Now, I have to slow down, double-check everything that comes to my mind, and carefully edit everything to be as tame as I can make it since I clearly am having trouble accurately gauging what might or might not be the right thing to say or do in any given moment.

Impulse control issues would be a weird one for me to suddenly need to deal with. I’ve never had “normal” impulse control issues in my life (the sort of things that people think of when they say the phrase) and have gotten so adept at dealing with the OCD and trauma-based ones that they hardly register anymore. I am confident I could learn to deal with them if I’m stuck with them, but I would really prefer to not give myself impulse control issues when so many of my impulses are in the form of intrusive thoughts. None of those ever need to be acted on, nor should they even be named, and it would be frustrating to have come so far in dealing with my trauma and OCD only to have to constantly fight my intrusive thoughts again after having them largely deflected and dealt with for the better part of a decade. Plus, it would really suck to develop a host of new mental health issues while trying to treat my existing ones. I have lived most of my life with those issues and have gotten fairly adept at dealing or coping with them. I’ve had practice and have reached a level of profiency that drastically reduces how much effort they require to properly handle. Which means they’d be so much easier to deal with than anything more than mildly inconvenient side effects from this new medication, given that I’ve largely shaped my life around figuring out how to work with them when I can and around them when I can’t.

It’s difficult being in the middle of this. I know, for a fact, that it will take another few weeks of this to actually get a sense of what my life will be like on my new medication. I know this stuff always takes time and that all I can do is be patient. I know that I should appreciate not being as dead-tired as I was even a few days ago. It’s just a lot to feel so exaggeratedly when I’m used to having a decent amount of control and much lower emotional intensity in general. Hell, I spent most of my life feeling things incredibly lightly and needing to perform emotional responses for the comfort of those around me and the sake of my relationships, so just feeling strongly enough to actually need to restrain myself from responding emotionally to something is a very new and foreign experience. I don’t think this will be permanent, but I wouldn’t mind if some of it stuck around given that, even now, I still have to project my emotions a decent amount for other people to actually pick up on them, especially when I’m still masking (in both senses: a physical mask to protect me from airborn particles and a veil of neurotypicality to protect me from social rejection) in public and in contained spaces. It would be nice to feel strongly enough to actually express myself emotionally about things other than my current constant misery and burnout. Not this strongly, mind you, not all the time, but occasionally, when the moment calls for it, it would be nice. Anything to break though the miserable and unremarked experience of the last year and a half that doesn’t also create new problems for me. If I could get that out of this, I’d be happy. It’d be an improvement after years of needing to search my emotions in most interactions to figure out what I feel and then how to project it enough that the person I’m talking to gets the emotional feedback they’re expecting.