Mind on Repeat
Last night I woke up at around three and couldn’t go back to sleep. My mind was going full speed while my body was trying to rest. I tried to pay attention to it and it had the same thoughts, the same patterns over and over again. It was telling me what I had to do on Monday, which is more or less the same thing I have to do on Tuesday, which is also the same as Wednesday. All the tasks, both large and small, plus some extras, some new things. Physical therapy on Monday and Wednesday, that’s new. Taking Lexapro along with my cholesterol-lowering statin in the morning, that’s new too.
The more I paid attention to the thoughts the worse they became. I wondered if this is just how things go when you are north of age 40, on the ‘back nine of life’ as my mom once put it. (yes that is a golfing reference from my mother who does not golf or even appreciate sports of any kind, lord knows where she got that turn of speech.) I wondered if life just sort of gets worse and worse as you go along and the obligations and disappointments rack themselves up in the spaces of your head.
When my brain races, I think of it as looping. I wondered if I will loop the rest of my life — it seems to be something my brain wants to do — to just endlessly work over things that I have to take care of, in an anxiety-riddled attempt to feel like I’m in control, like things will be OK, like I won’t forget anything. In an attempt to stop it I refactored the thoughts into code.
while ( me = alive )
for (x=1; x < NUMBER_OF_ALL_OBLIGATIONS; x++)
{ print “I have to do OBLIGATION[x]” }
Because of the way the loop is structured, I go right back to printing the first thing to do once the last once is printed. This will keep going until the day I die because I will never be able to change the way I think.
I also tried, after a while, to force other ideas into my head which might drown out the list of Have Tos.
I might have a baby with my wife, I thought. This turned into thoughts about having to buy diapers and wake up in the middle of the night and always check in on the kiddo to make sure it is ok, thoughts about needing baby monitors and having to get rid of the furniture in the guest room to make space for a crib, and I had to shut that down.
I wonder how things will go in Rhode Island this weekend? My wife and I are going to a bed and breakfast in Newport, RI, near the old mansions that the Richies of America used to own — Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, those families that made their money in rail and oil and built white elephant summer homes on the coastline to show off their money and taste. This led into worrying about my car — the tire pressure indicator is low and I need new windshield wipers and it’s probably not too early to check and see what the weather is like with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
I wonder if the Lexapro is causing this. Not a great thought. I went on Lexapro last Friday. I had a therapy appointment with Dr. B.W. that day and we concluded it was time for me to start trying drugs. I’ve been avoiding being on antidepressants my entire life, for the usual reasons. I worry that they will make me a different person, change the way I think — turn me into something other. I don’t want to be another person, I want to feel like myself. I worry about being chemically dependent on something. I worry about side effects — most specifically libido, your basic dick functionality and so on — but also headaches and insomnia and, well — mental looping.
I asked my therapist what exactly Lexapro does and he said it can help with a general lowering of anxiety. And I asked if that might help me not constantly stop thinking about shit I have to do, and he said yes, maybe, if that thought pattern has its roots in anxiety. He said it could also help with my esteem — might make me generally feel better about myself, reduce the number of everybody hates me type thoughts that I often have during the day. (These thoughts are often coupled with a have to thought, for example, I have to do Thing X, or Person A will be upset with me.)
That’s when I said yes, let’s do it. I’ve had a bottle in my bathroom for two months now — I got it and then didn’t take any, did online research about side effects, got scared about libido issues and weight gain and insomnia and weird behavior. I told my wife and she said “wait until this IVF cycle is over, let’s make sure you can donate sperm, then maybe you can try it.” So after my therapy appointment I called my PCP and gave him a heads-up that I’m starting on it and we have an appointment scheduled for the first week of January to check-in to see how things are going with it.
He advised me to ramp up slow — only a quarter of a pill a day (2.5mg) for the first four or five days, then I go to half a pill for a week, then a full pill if I’m “tolerating” it okay. That’s the word they like to use, tolerate, which is something I say usually in conjunction with mosquitos or something — can’t walk on the rail path right now, the bugs are intolerable. I asked what he meant exactly and he said well, basically you are monitoring yourself for side effects. Dry mouth, headache, insomnia, that kind of thing.
Finally I asked, how do I know if it is working? How long does it take to feel anything?
At least a week, he said. Most people know in about three weeks if they are starting to feel a little better or not. But for some it takes eight.
I have to be on this shit for eight fucking weeks before I know?
Yes. And if it doesn’t work you have to ramp down slow too, you can’t just stop taking it.
A fucking miracle drug, I said sarcastically.
I would write more about this but my time limit is up and I have to start working because I have unskippable meetings today that I have to prepare for.
I also have to wake up at 4:30 tomorrow to work until 7AM so it’s anybody’s guess as to whether I’ll have enough energy to do an OD entry after that. Probably not.
You know, I read journal entries from other people on this site sometimes and I see phrases like “It’s gonna be a good day today!!!”
I cannot remember the last time I felt like that. Even on my wedding a year ago I didn’t have that thought. I was happy to get married and see people but underlying everything was this feeling of dread and obligation that seems to coat everything in my life — I’m so used to it that it’s hard to imagine life being any other way. But maybe it could be, maybe this fucking drug will work.
I’m glad I’m giving it a chance.