MIA
Internet's down, which sucks for me, but I've been getting a whole bunch of necessary boring stuff done in the absence of distractions. I hope to figure out what's wrong with it soon. I haven't abandoned the blog!No, not a baby. Not literally, at least. Today marks nine months that I’ve been using this blog to the day. I posted my first post on July 16th, 2008, and it was a journey in agonizing over details and themes and harassing my friends about what header looks best where and what title is the most awesome. I really can’t believe it, and I’m not exaggerating. It just doesn’t seem real. Milestones like this, however small, are what remind me that life keeps going no matter how terrible the little bits seem. I can’t remember what was making me sick with stress that week in July, though I’m sure something was, and when it was it was just filling my vision. The next week, I’m sure it was something else entirely. That’s what gets me through tough times, uncomfortable confrontations and bad dreams – reminding myself, through things like this almost-anniversary, that eventually, none of it will cross my mind anymore.
I’ve updated my goals page and added a couple of new things. I know I could put this on the news page or in the alert box but who cares for all that streamlined stuff anyway? 
Though I may add it to the alert box as well. perhaps that’s what those are for…
P.S. The birds are up and chirping, as it’s 10 after 6 in the morning, and I fucking hate it.
P.P.S. I will never not swear. I used to avoid it as much as possible because I wanted this blog to be unoffensive linguistically to everyone, but I like swearing and it’s me and it’s how I get through the day so fuck that.
Bonus picture of some graffiti I found on the subway. I think it's very profound.
I really want to put up signs around the city that say Lost Fish, with a picture of Piggy (my goldfish) and some contact info (maybe this email address)
Lost Fish! Greatly missed. Answers to "Piggy." If found, please contact satisfiction@ymail.com.
What the fah.
My laptop fan is working again.
My friends are like “that’s good!” BUT IS IT REALLY? It was dead for several months and now here it is again fanning stuff. I don’t know how I feel about a zombie fan. How long will it live this time? Why is it making a sort of wheezing noise? What is the cost of this working again? Is it my soul? Or is the fan being powered by whatever entity made that sneezing noise that time? Is it working again because it knows that I’ve been shopping for a new one? If so, does that mean my laptop has become sentient and my threats are not falling on deaf ears?
This is all very confusing and requires some thought.
Hahaha! My sister just pointed out that it’s Easter and my laptop fan rose from the dead.
Seriously. Today on FML I saw the perfect example of why grammar matters. The entry says,
Today, I was flirting via text with a coworker. Things started getting heated, and I wanted to send her a sexy picture. I asked if she had any suggestions. She said, “Your nuts!” She meant, “YOU’RE nuts.” I sent her a photo of my junk. I offended a co-worker with incriminating evidence. FML
Wow. Right there. That’s why. Bad grammar and spelling can actually cause you to commit a crime. If you need any further proof, see the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves. (If you’ve never come across it, the joke in the title is that you can either eat, shoot people and leave, or eat shoots and leaves. “Eats [food], shoots [people], and leaves [the area]” versus “[it] eats shoots and leaves [the vegetation].”)
On a related note, FML is the best website ever. Visit it often. You will feel better about your own life.
Oh and it’s probably always a bad idea to send people pictures of your genitals.
Considering how Fail Blog and the internet in general regards women, including dismembered bits of women that exist for amusement of the men, I’m genuinely and pleasantly surprised to see that aforementioned Fail Blog calls the following picture a fail and not a win. In case it’s not clear, that’s because using women’s bodies for amusement is never a win.
see more pwn and owned pictures
Things are going fairly well, which scares the bejesus outta me because things never go well. Then again, I’m appreciating the tiny things in life, which could actually be safe.
My iPod was broken. In the middle of scrolling through a playlist, the buttons just stopped working. No warning. Thanks iPod. But, I gave it to my dad since he’s near the Apple store a lot and he gave it to them (it’s still under warranty) and they fixed it! Pretty pretty iPod is back. Bus stops will no longer suck! Except when my headphones quit on me, which will for sure be this week. I should have gotten new headphones when my iPod was in but I totally forgot.
And my discontinuation syndrome has pretty much discontinuated (<–not a word)! I actually left my house today for the first time since last Wednesday and I didn’t have to take Gravol or stop moving to keep from throwing up. Yaaay. Unfortunately, though, this means I’m going to have to go to class on Monday and hand in a ten page story I was supposed to write during these days of can’t-look-at-a-screen-or-my-eyeballs-will-spin-right-outta-my-head. Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day of writing.
And, there’s a wicked storm going on outside! Most people don’t like storms but I love them. It’s been pouring since last night and the wind is intense, all breaking trees and bending signs. I think I like storms because the weather is as chaotic and messed up as I feel most of the time.
So, except for finding the downside to those first two things, life’s ok right now. My deposits are in for college, I’m going to cash the bonds my grandparents set up for me (and buy some new damn headphones and a new laptop since I swear to god this one’s getting a hammer in the face if it crashes one more time), and I can leave the house and listen to music while I do so. Plus there’s rain to watch and an excuse to wear my brightly coloured rain boots.
P.S. It seems I’ve reversed my sleeping again. Not really sure how I pulled that off. So, it’s 6:30 in the morning and I have yet to sleep. Which means you all get to be treated to my weirdy 4 AM thoughts! And this is another good thing, I guess, as long as I can pull it off. I’m still getting more than enough sleep and for some reason I much prefer to be up at night than during the day. I get a lot more done (homework, file maintenance, writing, housework) in a couple hours in the middle of the night than I do getting up at 7 after a full night’s sleep and having the whole day.
P.P.S. It occurs to me suddenly that I’m on no medication at all right now, not even the pill since it’s my off week, and it’s kinda scary. I like the feeling, though.
I know I said at the end of the last post that I was going to bed but I had a tiny freak out. I got very emotional and teared up a bit. It’s partially because I was completing a survey about applications to post-secondary institutions, because I know stuff like that calms me down, and I was a bit stressed about that post. It was hard to write. It got me thinking about everything I’ve gone through, which is weird. I wrote an original version of that post that was four times as long and very detailed, and spanned a lot of subjects. For some reason, that just didn’t get to me. I remember sitting there and thinking “I just put into words so many of the things I’ve been dealing with, and it’s not getting to me at all.” For a minute I wondered if it was because everything had miraculously gotten better and I could move on and be strong and heal and all that good stuff, then I blinked and came back to reality.
I think what was so hard about the shorter, significantly lighter post was that I actually hit “publish.” People know about it now, which again is weird. Just because I’ve never said “I have depression” before doesn’t mean I’ve written from any perspective other than my own or tried to hide it. I just never brought it up. Same way I’m madly in love with my goldfish but have yet to dedicate a post to him. (I do feel bad about that. Piggy knows he’s loved, though. It takes some serious love to produce a fat goldfish.)
So then I was a little stressed and I checked my inbox because that’s what I do throughout the day and there was an email from OCAS, the Ontario College Application Service (which I used to apply to college), inviting me to take part in an applicant survey with the chance to win some Best Buy certificates. I like free stuff and surveys so the two of them together means certain interest. In taking this survey, I was also asked questions about whether I’d applied to university and some other things related to that process. Well, I have applied to university. I applied last academic year in December, then I had a total breakdown and ended up in the hospital. I couldn’t go to school for a while. It got a bit better, then worse. I actually didn’t attend school at all this semester so I’m down to this semester of my second go at grade 12 to graduate.
I highly doubt I would be in this position if I didn’t have depression. Well, I just wouldn’t. I would be able to leave my house like everyone else, and go to class (which I loved the whole time by the way, even when I couldn’t leave the house – what was keeping me in was much stronger than that love though), and follow through with my university applications. I went from a 95 average to one in the 50s and I’m not happy. I’m actually quite devastated. I really wanted to go to Queen’s University. I’d been researching it for years, I knew what courses I wanted to take, and even what building I wanted to live in. It broke my heart to receive that rejection letter even though I knew full well it was coming since I wouldn’t be graduating from high school.
Who knew that in trying to calm myself down, I would make everything worse? I’m definitely going to get going on Eff Parade, which will be dedicated specifically to those issues. Though, I might change my mind and just bring it all over here and have a warning on top of each heavy post and put the content after a page break. Bah. Sleep, then decisions. I feel a bit better now, but I think it will always make me sad that I can’t go to university. At least not until I have a college diploma. I want to go into law I think so what’s two more years on top of a law degree? Valuable life experience, that’s what.
Not only have I been under the weather lately but my internet’s been all ridiculous. It’s driving me nuts because I kinda had a mini epiphany and want to write about it. In my last post, I said I’ve been sick lately. I have something called discontinuation syndrome, which is what you can get when coming off certain meds, even if they’re non-addictive. And the reason I was on that medication is something I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned. I was on Effexor, a type of anti-depressant called an SNRI, which stands for serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. At one point over the last year and a half I was on it, I was at the maximum recommended dose. (All of this – the dosage, the discontinuation – was with the supervision of a psychiatrist, by the way.) I have Major Depressive Disorder, which is about as bad as depression can get from what I understand, though they’re all hell to deal with. If untreated, it can end in suicide, psychosis or dementia.
Because of my depression, and because this was not my first “major depressive episode,” I needed to be on the meds at a much higher dose than I had before, which is why my discontinuation is so awful this time but barely noticeable last time. I believe they helped me, if only to stave off my suicide and keep me functional enough to eat and sleep until I could really work on what was happening.
Anyway, I’m going on tangents, and I really wanted to keep this short. The first incarnation of this post was over 2000 words long.
The mini epiphany was that I realised that I can really benefit from writing about my journey with depression and what got me there in the first place. Maybe it could help someone else, too – or maybe I’m just being narcissistic. Since I don’t feel that something that heavy (depression so serious I can’t get out of bed, self-mutilation, hardcore medication, psych hospitalizations and dealing with abuse) is in the tone of this blog, I’ve decided to start another blog called The Eff Parade. I came up with the name when I was thinking of my old tagline for this blog, which was “Fun, Fact and Fiction.” Then I thought of all the other awesome things that start with eff, like feeling, funny, fuck, frittata and so on. So… a parade of effs. I know it isn’t for everyone, but maybe some of you who regularly read the blog or come across it in your internet journeys will be curious. At the time you read this, there may be nothing up there, since I’m about to go to bed. And, who knows, I may find something better and change my mind about the url and title later, in which case I’ll edit this post accordingly.
Jeez. I’m writing this in notepad since the internet’s down and after selecting all the text to paste it into Word (will it will undoubtedly be safer thanks to auto-save), I hit ctrl + x instead of ctrl + c, so I cut the text instead of copied it. Thank god for ctrl + z.
But not the fun kind that includes sickie blogging (where I’m juuust out of it enough on cold medicine to be a whole other kind of funny). I’m finally done my damn anti-depressants after way more than a year. The reason I was on them so long is my shitty psychiatrist who knows less about my meds than I do. Finally I just said fuck it and stopped on my own. So now I’ve got what’s called discontinuation syndrome. It’s awful. Really, really bad. I’m dizzy, nauseated, constantly on the verge of vomiting, and my brain is doing this thing called brain shivers or brain zaps depending on who you talk to.
Basically what it feels like is when you’re on a rollercoaster and your stomach goes somewhere totally different than the rest of you, but with your brain. It also kinda feels like if you’ve ever hit your head wicked hard and can’t really get your equilibrium back. It’s really bad. I’ve spent the last several days sleeping and just wishing this will be done soon. I’ve heard about people that have discontinuation syndrome so bad for so long that they can never stop their meds, and others that have to open up the pill capsules and reduce the dose by one med flake every day.
In the mean time, I’ve got a hardcore flu kinda thing and get to miss school for the first time all semester. So, Weekly WTF will be late this week. Hopefully I’ll feel better soon. Gravol and Tylenol are doing nothing.
