Preparing for Normality.

My head has felt a little different these last couple of days. I started on a new drug (new to me, not new in the other sense) to sort out my brain. It seems like it's working. I haven't been having the crying spells that had been cropping up this last week.

I just feel normal. That's so unusual for me. I don't feel like there's any serious cognitive impairment, but every once in a while my eyes just sort of loose focus. It's not like the world goes blurry, because everything is clear, my processing just goes out of focus. So I could be looking out at some trees, and the trees will still have defined edges, but the visual image doesn't have any connection to anything else. It's like all I'm getting is the feed, and none of the associations.

That doesn't happen often enough for it to be a serious problem. I do need to start going to bed earlier on this drug, it's pretty sedating. I always used to have trouble falling asleep, so going to bed at 2, let alone as early as midnight, was kind of the only option. There are a few things I need to get used to.

I won't be drinking much alcohol anymore. My dad is on the same stuff, and I know that alcohol affects him a whole lot more now. Drinking the way I used to is just out of the question. Given, I used to drink pretty prodigiously. I like alcohol for alcohol's sake though, so I'll still be able to enjoy a snifter of Irish whiskey, or a bottle of good beer. It will just seem like I had far more beer or whiskey than I did. I suppose I'm fine with that. I'm willing to give up drinking for a modicum of sanity. Shit, even if it just rids me of the depressions I'll happily give up drinking. The problem I keep hitting is figuring out how to deal with social situations. parties are exculsively drinking affairs, and frankly they're rather boring while sober. I really don't like parties, and I really do like alcohol, so there's that. I'll likely just be the DD a bit more often when my friends want to go out drinking for the evening. And I do have a rather good excuse. It'll just be a little hard to explain considering how much I drank before.

Of course all of that is probably a good thing. I will miss it, but I am most certainly NOT going to miss depressions.

I'm really hoping my creativity doesn't suffer, but as if to prove that it won't, I'm working on a concept album. This isn't like some of my other projects, started in mania's and never followed through with. I think it may be good. I'm being a little backwards about it, Lyrics first. I've always gone the other way around. I feel like that might produce interesting results. I'm not sure if I want to do it alone or get some friends involved. I ultimately just want to get it done as soon and well as possible, but I don't really know how that'll work.

I'll likely write the songs and then see if my band likes them. They'd have to like all of them for it to work, but if they did that would be nice, I could use drums and a trombone in the songs I think. It's still a major work in progress, I've only the lyrics for one and a half of the songs. It's exciting though. It's interesting learning to work when neither despondent nor ecstatic.

I spent so much time getting used to, and understanding my mental issues that adjusting to a normal life is hard. It won't be exactly a normal life of course, but that doesn't make it less daunting. I haven't ever really been normal. My youth was spent in a very small town, up in the mountains, in this very specific microcosm of a world. my adulthood thus far has been spent grapling with mental illness. All the while I've never quite felt like there are people like me. I take a sort of Shikatagnai attitude about that, but it still is something to note.

Shikataganai is a Japanese phrase meaning "It can't be Helped" is an admission of futility, but not in a defeatist manner

Normal is going to be weird. Normal is not something I've ever truly experienced, and anything close to that is going to be foreign. I don't really know what to expect. I'm not apprehensive, but I am unsure. It will be interesting to find out how I take to whatever bit of normality I can grasp.