HappyComeLucky

Today is a bright new day. This morning, I woke up and felt that I was me. I felt my energy and my connections. I stretched and curled my body, put my hand between my legs and wanked.

For most of my life, this would have been a normal morning but something happened to change that. During last year, I had a seemingly never ending set of challenges that added to my stress whilst other things destabilised me. When it got to August, I broke. I had such serious panic attacks that I feared for my life. I sought urgent help and got it in the form of antidepressants. There was also an offer of a talking therapy but I had previously completed that course and was able to use the strategies from it.

The tablets worked. I used to rock climb and when I did that, I needed someone to belay me, to be holding the rope. The tablets were that safety rope. They kept me alive. I still had to work hard to make it through each day. I still had to climb but, I could climb. I could climb because I wouldn’t die if I slipped.

Sometimes when you start out with climbing, you need that safety rope to be taut. When you get more confident and more skilled, you need more slack in the rope to give you the freedom to move and to be bolder. The same could be said for the antidepressants. They weren’t without side effects. The main one was the tiredness. I work long hours and by 9pm, I was exhausted, utterly falling asleep. That didn’t give me a chance to love beyond work. The effort needed to give the time and attention they needed felt huge. I was alive but there was so little of me left to do more than exist, it was hard. I felt like a shadow of me.

Things have changed gradually. The number of additional demands, all of which added up to several sets of full time hours has diminished. I am now down to working a fifty hour week and doing all the family things without studying on top. The change from multiple deadlines to only work and family ones has been huge. I can cope now.

I will always have mental health as an active part of who I am. The difference is between mental health that I can live with, and that which I can’t. Now I am back to mental health that I can live with.

Under guidance from the Doctor, I have halved my dose. Suddenly, the light has come on. I’m not living through a blur, a veil, a fog. Suddenly, I recognise me. I feel me. I am me.

Suddenly, I am connected to me all over again. Suddenly, after losing so much zest for being me and enjoying me, I have my joie de vivre back. How do I know? Life is in technicolour in my emotions again…

Oh, and I am back to being a wanker again. Hello, libido. I’ve missed you.