Tryhard disengaged
"Yet they had set fire to the homestead of his nature, and he would be burned out of cover." - D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow.
I started taking lexapro for GAD two months ago, hoping to glean one more tool for being present and peeling my thoughts away from work when I am supposed to be relaxing. I hadn't taken any behavioral medication before, so I had minimal expectations. When I'd heard my doctor say it takes two weeks to adjust, and that anxiety symptoms may be more pronounced during that period, I thought that might be a worst-case timeframe, and that I'd adjust within the first week. After all, I was starting on a dose of 5 mg/day. The first 3-4 weeks were miserable. When I wasn't sleepy, I was having racing negative thoughts which surfaced as little screams and gasps and big shivers. Embarrassing, isolating. I'd had these symptoms before, but I can't remember a time when they were as pronounced as they became during that period. The third week was probably made worse by PMS, the third and fourth week by my trip to Charlotte, where I live and work in a hotel room with my partner and can't easily or cheaply leave the hotel on my own, which makes me highly dependent and therefore anxious. After that fourth week, and especially for the past couple weeks since increasing my dose to 10 mg, the major difference I feel is the ability to relax the impulse to strive. It's funny how removing that one- apparently chemical- impulse has so changed the story I tell myself about why I do what I do. Even after the try-hard impulse relaxed, the story resurfaces, that relaxation is an unnecessary luxury I can't afford, and, when it comes to pleasure, I should only allow myself to enjoy the effort of striving and not its outcome. Although this story clashes with what understanding of human behavior I've gleaned (thanks Robert Sapolsky, Alan Watts), and although it contradicts itself- what is the point of striving if I cannot allow myself to enjoy the outcome?- I need it to justify the try-hard behaviors that are driven, as it turns out, by anxiety. Of course the resulting cognitive dissonance is its own burden. It becomes clear to me that my philosophies are really just rationalizations of what I was always going to do regardless of the rationale. (It's lucky for me that I was always going to try Lexapro and graduate from try-hard to chiller.) I'm not concerned that I might overrelax and neglect my work, body, dog, and finances. I trust that there are forces apart from anxiety that drive the execution of my responsibilities. My actions can be motivated by their potential impacts, rather than a.) the urge to strive or b.) the moral sense of superiority I assign to the effort of striving. I've got to disclaim here that this is an ongoing process, and I think it's important enough to write down for posterity where I'm at now, so I can measure my progress later. Now that that's out of the way, my next post can be about Geppetto :) P.S. This week I found out that taking Benadryl on a daily basis can actually CAUSE ALZHEIMERS. Which is really good stuff from the Writers' Room, because I started taking Benadryl to sleep specifically to give my brain a chance to thoroughly and consistently dump the Beta Amyloid and Tau proteins that cause Alzheimers. This revelation is based on the University of Washington's 7-year study involving 3,500 men and women, showing that those who took an anticholinergic for 3 years or more were 54% more likely to develop dementia than those taking the same dose for 3 months or less. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4358759/