Hey, buddy, where you been?
DID YOU KNOW? If you drink a bottle of red wine in about 10 minutes it has a similar effect as taking a Xanax.
Don’t. It’s an incredibly stupid thing to do.
I know this because I’m a gifted self medicator. But wait. We’ll get back to that in a short minute.
I haven’t written anything for ages. No blog posts, anyway. In truth, I have a dozen half arsed, half written, demi-blogs sitting in my Google Drive, but I’ve been unable to finish and/or send them.
The last thing I sent in was a reworking of a piece I wrote about my anxiety. That’s handy. Over the last few (several) weeks I’ve noticed my sleep patterns going skeewiff and my daytimes getting harder to deal with.
There’s no great mystery as to why this happened. I’d managed to run my medication down to the point where I had none. I take many medications. A cocktail, if you will. I let myself run out of the more situational anxiety meds, without much fuss. Then an antidepressant that I take at night, which has the added bonus of making me drowsy, the absence of which eventually manifested in increasing insomnia. Finally, I ran out of my staple morning pill, or as I now think of it “the final straw”.
Last week I got myself back to my GP, refilled the medicine cabinet, and am well on my way back to my version of normal. I didn’t slide too far, luckily. It wasn’t a “spiral”. (I like to think of longer, deeper depressive episodes as spirals because a: you feel like a WWII plane falling out of the sky and b: spirals are pretty).
Back to that bottle of wine…last week my anxiety had been building and I bought myself a bottle of wine. By the time I got home the anxiety had attacked and I pretty much skulled the bottle to turn down the noise. It worked. My wife came home to find me in bed, fully clothed and passed out. I was really lucky.
If I hadn’t been found like that it may have ended up a spiral event. Nobody wants that.
I write this, in part, to explain my absence and in part to remind some of you out there to refill your prescriptions.
I will end this slightly manically written post and force myself to send it in and try to do better next time.
Brain
