Getting used to the new meds.

I had a very long and very interesting idea to plug here, but I started on it, and a paragraph in, I felt like it just wasn't quite right. I have these ideas all the time, big and small, important and unimportant, but only so many of them are of worth.

I've been having less as of late. The ideas that usually flood my brain, and the songs that play whether I want them to or not; the need to produce or explode, and that energy that just takes me every once in a while, are gone. I'm convinced my pills are saving me. From a possible suicide, from depression which steals from me months at a time. I'm being saved by these drugs, but the sedation, and the dampening of ideas is such a burden. I was so defined by constant production. I've said it before, I'm not real unless I'm creating. Fitting into whatever this modern mould is doesn't work for me.

I will keep taking my drugs, but gods do I wish for a world in which I didn't have to. I value my life enough to take the slow creation, and effortful work that comes with it, over the fiery passion that it's replaced. If only to continue living and perhaps increase my creation over the longer time I'll be spending here.

I can feel why people don't stick to their drugs. I picked up the guitar today and played for about an hour, but the things that came out all sounded the same. The songs I played were songs I already knew. I've plenty of days where new things come out, but I hate those days where it doesn't happen. I've been having new ideas for parts of stories, and for stories themselves, and I keep loosing them. I keep losing the things that used to keep me grounded.

I feel so disjointed. I still want to drink and smoke and be wild, as if it would bring back the creativity that once was paired with debauchery. I'm not sure if this is permanent. I hope that it isn't.

I don't feel right without some world being created in my head. I don't feel right without ideas flowing so fast that I can't even hold onto them.

I think that's where my problem is. I've spent too long being exceptional. By exceptional I don't mean wonderful or brilliant, I mean an exception. I have been too long an exception to the rules that govern most people. For better or worse I've gotten used to being either this dynamo skittering with thought and creative passion or being this inert blob made of pain and despondency.

Being in this odd inbetween state that it seems is normal for everyone just doesn't feel right. I don't know how normal people exist. I still don't know how. I feel like everyone would rebel against their mundane lives if they had even once felt the power and beauty and terror of a mania. If just once people had felt the horribleness of a depression perhaps they wouldn't have such faith in indifferent systems. If people knew what I know I don't think they would be the way they are.

Everyone seems to me deluded and overly optimistic. Even while everyone is crying wolf and worried that their savings will disappear under an ocean of debt, they still believe in some sort of meaning to the world.

I can't feel that. I can't feel the love of God, and I can't feel ever that normal is good enough. So I am left with the decision to either live in a way that the rest of the world accepts, taking my pills and being dulled down into a manageable middle, or to go crazy and be at odds with all that this world stands for.

If I weren't afraid of another depression, afraid of that horrible time when I feel like destroying my hands and myself, I would stop my pills to feel the joy of mania and to once again have so many thoughts piling around in my head that I have to get them out on every surface I can. I used to cover my arms with notes, and fill notebooks with ideas. I used to positively crackle with passion, and now I am much like everyone else, whatever the fuck that means.

I'm glowering right now feeling bad about the lack of creative prowess I've been displaying lately. My pills sit on the desk next to my computer. I will take them soon, before heading off to bed, but they'll go down into my stomach, anchoring me to the rest of humanity.

There's the good and there's the bad about all this. I am no longer a risk to kill myself, I no longer will spend all of my money on frivolous things, I no longer will have to after every mania go get an STD test and check on my finances and feel my liver aching. But I also will no longer have 72 hour writing sessions broken up only by cigarettes and store visits, I will no longer have a song in my head every hour of every day.

I like the benefits and I hate the costs. I don't know if it's worth it, being sane. I was both happier and so indescribably sadder while I was crazy.


I have been so many things. I have lived more lives than most 21 yearolds could ever hope to. I have existed for what feel like 26 years. My time has been lengthened, and now dulled and medicated I don't feel like the person I've been the last three years, or six years, or whatever it has felt like to me.

I don't know if I'm the same person, and I need to find new ways to bring out the good things about my craziness. I need to find out how to bring out the creativity and passion that before smouldered beneath my breast.

I think I'm succeeding to a certain extent, but I don't know, and if I keep feeling this hopeless, what's the point of taking these drugs at all?

Writing like this may be one of the ways I can draw out the passion that I haven't been finding in the slow rhythms of every day. I know that when I write, things feel good. The stuff that comes out, be it filled with vitriol, or filled with joy, always feels true. That can't be said of most things. My writing and my music feel true, and for someone who isn't even sure about there being any objective truth that's a rather important statement.

So for all my ranting, and for all that I feel a little constricted on these new drugs, things are good. I am well, and I am still writing. I am still producing written word that hasn't been written before, that is hopefully interesting. As long as my blood is still pumping and my hands still writing, I will be ok.