Allow me to introduce myself...

Greetings, Ducks!

I seem to have taken an inadvertent week off from the blog there--sorry about that. Much of this is because my free time currently is being swallowed by some intense computer programming work; there's a lot to get done, and I'm trying to get it done and over with already, and I've had to teach myself a bunch of things I didn't know how to do before. (Today, I grabbed a static Google maps image and dumped onto my server! Yatta!)

The other truth, though, is that I've been struggling lately with my anti-depression meds. I went off of them over the summer--you may have noticed the intense, burning rage from that period--and went on a completely different med right before I left for Paris. It's an SSRI, a kind of AD that I have a real love-hate relationship with: on the one hand, they seem to work really well for me; on the other, I get all the side-effects. (I now think that my caffeine-withdrawal insomnia the first few days in Paris was heavily exacerbated by the new meds, which have been giving me insomnia of late.) And while the meds definitely kept me from crashing into the slough of despond, I wasn't exactly scaling the heights of ecstasy of late: in fact, my motivation has completely vanished. I haven't done aikido since that night I trained in Paris, I've only posted once in the last week here, and in general I lack any willpower to get things done. (Let's not even talk about my rapidly ballooning weight.)

So I'm going off them again, and maybe I'll find a new psychopharmacologist to get me on something new, or maybe I'll try to find another way to control my mood swings. But I can't keep on going the way I was, with a head lightly wrapped in what felt like fabric softener sheets. And I can't give up my writing, not after I finally began to reclaim it.

This, by the way, is pretty much par for the course with me--I've had a long battle against my depression ever since I finally began to seriously treat it almost a decade and a half ago (there's a fascinating story about how that all came about, which I will save for another day.) The first time I took AD meds, I thought I had locked my depression in a cell deep in my soul and it would never bother me again. The second time, I realized I was locked up in that same cell, but my depression was safely chained up and couldn't get me.

After the third time, I realized that my depression was chained up to me. And if I ever took my eyes off of, that fucker would kill me.

Don't worry, I have an excellent support system and I'm not in any danger right now. And I'm sure I'll get through this and cope--one of the reasons it took me so long to finally start working on my depression is that I'm so damn high-functioning. But it's frustrating to keep ping-ponging around like this.

Also, withdrawal sucks, even with my tapering off regime.