Long, Cold Winter

Hello, my dear friends and readers. It’s been a very long time, and I’m sorry for that. I miss you all. I haven’t reached out to you since the beginning of December, and that was to say that my world was growing darker, and that I’d be taking a break.

Well, that break turned out to last three months, and I need to make it clear: I’m not back. Not yet.

It’s been three months since I last wrote here on WordPress, but more to the point it’s been three months since I was last capable of writing at all. Throughout December and into January, my mind collapsed. That’s the best word I can think of to describe it; it feels like nearly all of my mental faculty is crushed and flattened, obliterated and destroyed beyond recognition. Since my depression began in my late teens, I have never experienced anything quite like this.

It began slowly, but daily the task of getting up and going about my day became increasingly overwhelming until I found myself spending every available moment in bed. I still do. I became unable to clean, unable to eat, unable to take care of myself on the most basic of levels. I stopped showering. I stopped brushing my teeth. I wore the same clothes for a week at a time.

Now I’ve become incapacitated before when faced with something that felt unsurmountable, but in the past it always turned into an internal battle – the overwhelming desire to cower in a corner and block out everything around me, pitted against the guilt of my incapacity and the desire to please the people around me. But this time, the battle never happened. I had simply given up. My brain decided it couldn’t cope with the struggle any longer, and began to accept the world around me as unchangeable fact, rather than a catalyst for action. Dirty dishes? Yep, I agree, they’re there. It won’t be me cleaning them, though. Floor needs sweeping? Sure does; I’ll see you in bed.

If this sounds selfish, it’s because it is. However, it’s been the only way for me to survive the last three months. I spoke with my therapist, quite seriously, about hospitalization. I didn’t see how I could continue to survive. Somehow, against all odds, I’ve managed to drag myself to work every day, and the Lovely J was blown away. Most people, she said, would have called in sick. Who knows what perverted dedication I have to my job; I certainly felt like calling in sick, but for some reason never did. For that reason alone, she said, most hospitals would refuse to take me.

So instead I’ve tried to build a new life at home, based around this newfound incapacity. Little Satis does the dishes now. He and Mrs. Satis do their laundry separately, and I’m left to do my own. Every two weeks it goes in the washer, then in the dryer. I only take it out of the dryer when I need it. I eat separately; usually a bowl of cereal or a loaf of bread – whatever makes the least mess. I sleep in the guest bed, so that I can lie in bed out of sight and so have less of an effect on the family.

Mrs. Satis has been incredibly accommodating, and I want to thank her with all my love. I know this can’t be easy for her. She tells me she loves me a dozen times a day, and every word makes a difference to my world. I’m not back yet, but with my family’s support I’ve managed to sit down and write this post. It’s been three months in coming.

I’m not back. I’m not resuming Thought of the Week. Not yet. But if I can write this, then maybe there is still hope.

Lastly, thank you to every one of my readers – knowing that so many people have read my words is uplifting, and goes a long way toward getting me back on track.

We’ll see where things go from here.

Featured image taken from http://barbarashdwallpapers.com/dark-blue-winter-landscape-with-forest/.

Satis Logo with ©

Thought of the Week: Into the Darkness of Winter We Go

Well, dear friends, the year is coming to an end. Four weeks now until it’s 2014, and we start the whole merry business of being alive for another year all over again.

That reminds me, I ought to do a recap at some point.

As the days grow shorter, I find myself in an ever darker place, spaced out on lithium and unable or unwilling (I find it hard to tell the difference) to complete even the most basic of daily chores. I’m sitting in front of my computer, mug of tea by my side, much as I have done most of this day, playing Bioshock or dozing away. My eyes feel glazed.

I received the editorial review (the second one) from my publisher again, and disappointingly they’ve rejected it again on the grounds of poor character visualization and dialogue attribution. Basically I don’t describe my characters enough and I don’t make it bleedingly obvious who’s talking. They’ve highlighted examples in the text that I can’t even see a fault in.

I’m still hoping for publication by early next year, and I know I can do the work they’re asking me to do; it’s just that after so long, and so much effort, it’s hard to muster the courage to dive back in.

There’s a lot behind me at the moment, and a lot ahead of me. I’d love to get The Redemption of Erâth: Consolation done before the new year so I can focus on the second book, but I just don’t know if that’s going to happen.

I don’t really know what’s going to happen about anything.

With all these thoughts and all this work, I’ve come to a deciding point, and a difficult decision it’s been to make. However, for my sake and for my book’s sake, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to ‘disappear’ for a little while, just hunker down, bide my time, and bring myself to work on my book. As such, I’ll be taking a break from satiswrites.com for the next few weeks, hopefully to reappear sometime around the new year. I’ll miss you all, and I’ll look forward to having more to say in the coming months, but for now, December needs to be a quiet month. I hope you don’t mind too much.

I might pop up here or there just to offer a season’s greeting, but Thought of the Week will be stopping at least until January 1.

With much love,

Satis

Satis Logo with ©

Thought of the Week: Lithium, One Month In

About a month ago, I wrote about being diagnosed with Bipolar Type I and the treatments I’m undergoing. Specifically, I wrote about adding lithium to my daily pill diet, and being both concerned and excited about this new treatment. I was afraid of the results, afraid of the side-effects; in particular, I was afraid of what it was going to do to me mentally. I was looking forward to the possibility of a more steady life, and afraid that I would become a zombie.

So now it’s a month later, and I’ve been on lithium long enough for the effects to settle in. The overall result? It’s really, really weird.

I haven’t noticed a wide array of different crazy side-effects, but there are a couple of things that are different that I can really only attribute to the lithium itself. The first, most obvious and noticeable effect is a significant tremor in my hands particularly, and in my body in general. Sometimes the tremors become quite violent, although they are mostly more subdued. For example, I spilled tea on myself and my mouse while writing this post because of a sudden shake. It’s even a little more difficult to type on the keyboard (thank goodness for autocorrect). I’ve also noticed a strange phenomena when I’m sleeping. Mrs. Satis has for a long time said that I shake or move uncontrollably when I sleep, but recently when I’m coming awake (that state between sleeping and waking) I begin to shudder throughout my entire body. It’s not painful, but is the most peculiar sensation I can describe. Every muscle in my body, it feels like, starts quivering rapidly, and this continues for several seconds before eventually fading away, leaving me feeling normal. I’ve started to become used to this, and I had something similar (but much milder) before starting the lithium, but it’s a little unsettling.

The second most obvious change is mental. Here, I can almost feel the lithium interfering with the chemical signaling in my brain. I have a constant fuzzy, numb sensation near the back of my head – right about where the cerebellum would be, I’d say – and emotionally I’m simply gone. I can still laugh in the presence of colleagues but I don’t actually find the joke very funny; I can still frown when Mrs. Satis is angry at me for forgetting to do something for the millionth time, but I don’t actually feel upset. I feel steady, certainly; almost like a see-saw that’s frozen in place.

There’s a good side to this. I don’t get nearly so angry, and I especially don’t get so depressed. This is a hard one to explain, actually, because I still feel a great lethargy, which was always one of the key characteristics of my depression. I still want to spend all day lying in bed, sleeping. (I got ten hours of sleep last night, yet I still felt compelled to have a nap all morning.) I can’t bring myself to do anything, never mind the important things that need doing every single day (like cleaning).

And there’s a down side, which is that I can’t react appropriately to anything. If little Satis is happy, I feel a little “meh”. If Mrs. Satis is angry I feel a little “meh”. It’s okay at work – reactions are governed by pre-scripted rules for social interaction, so as long as I respond the way work wants me to respond, I’m good – but at home it’s causing all sorts of problems. Which is ironic, because the whole point of lithium was to improve my quality of life.

It leaves me wondering what the point of any of this medication is. All I’ve done is traded a violent, abusive, depressed and lazy monster for a quiet, monotone, unfeeling lazy monster. And I have no idea which is better.

Do I want to go off lithium? I’m not sure. There’s the part of me that’s enjoying a bit of stability for once. There’s a part of me that hates the relationships this “new” me is forming with his loved ones. And there’s now a big part of me that just doesn’t give a f***.

Sigh. What would you do?

Featured image from http://discoverccs.org/.

Satis Logo with ©