It's been a month since I last posted but it doesn't feel like it. Every day seems to run into the next. Time is passing, but I'm merely observing.
It's very nearly a month since I started taking anti-depressants. I was worried that medication would either cause catastrophic psychotic side effects or do nothing at all, but I was wrong. How I feel is an absolute mystery to me - I know I have feelings somewhere, but they're so deeply buried that I can't access them. Today I woke up and somehow knew that I should be feeling depressed for some reason, but I felt nothing. Even more confusingly, I don't know how to feel about feeling nothing.
Naturally, the reason I started taking an anti-depressant was to help alleviate my depression. If that's the only valid factor in judging the value of an anti-depressant, then Venlafaxine is a miracle drug. I can't argue that Venlafaxine hasn't fulfilled it's given purpose, but my depression isn't the only thing it's alleviated. In the last month I've lost my sense-of-self. I can't think or feel, and, hence, can't go about life as I normally would. My life now consists of sitting around the house, watching an appalling amount of TV. I used to be incapable of watching more than 45mins of TV without getting bored and switching it off, but now I have no energy for anything else. As well as not feeling myself I am constantly exhausted, my limbs feel heavy, my head aches, I suddenly come over hot and sweaty and I feel weak, dizzy and keep losing my balance. These effects, I've come to know as venlafaxination.
To be frank, I feel pretty damn awful, but I'm not sure if I relish it or resent that. I feel so lazy and get annoyed with my lack of productivity, but I also feel like this is my comeuppance for trying to make myself feel better. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me I don't deserve to feel well. I know my masochism is the crux of the matter, but all rationalisations that my urge to self-destruct is not beneficial to anyone fail miserably.
At the end of the week I'm due to see a psychiatrist who will consider increasing my dose. I hope they whack it up so that the side effects will get worse and I'll suffer, but I do know how insane that sounds. It leads me to question the reason I decided to go on meds again. Was I really just hoping that they would give me psychotic side-effects again or did I actually hope they'd help? Surely you'd have to be truly mad to hope for a psychotic episode.
