The last week has been a hell of a ride. Emphasis on the hell.
The risperidone has caused terrible insomnia, insomnia so terrible I thought I was going crazier than I was. Or I'm not sure, it might've been the crazy causing the insomnia. It's so hard to tell with crazy. But I think, I think, the crazy was from the insomnia.
Saturday night I drank a lot of beer to try to get to sleep. It worked for a few hours, then didn't. Sunday night, I hardly slept, but I don't much remember that night. I think I felt okay during the day Sunday. Restless, and I couldn't stop moving, but not bad-restless. I took some pictures of a deer carcass I found, and the carrion beetles eating it. Also the fur. I don't think I drank or did anything else Sunday night. Monday morning I saw the psychiatrist and tried to explain about the insomnia and the terrible racing heart and the weight of each heartbeat, and he seemed less concerned than I thought the situation warranted, since it feels so desperate on the inside of my head and I can't quite communicate that. He gave me an Rx for a different antipsychotic, said I was in the minority on the risperidone side effects. Apparently it is supposed to make a person sluggish and tired, and gain weight. Monday night, I felt desperate, terrible, and I took Percocet to try to get to sleep. Massive failure. I read and fooled around on the Internet till 1, then turned it off and tried to sleep, then failed, turned the computer back on, stayed up till 2:30, then tried to sleep more and failed again, then turned it back on, then gave up around 3:45, then laid there till 5:45, then fell into this state that resembled sleep the way a drawing of a tree resembles at tree, and got up at 7:30.
Tuesday morning I realized as I was walking in to work from the parking lot that I was talking to myself and yanking on my hair. I don't think I was saying anything important, but I had this idea that there were people populating the inside of my head, and everything I did was a show for the people, like nothing was particularly real, but I had to pretend it was. I don't know, it's hard to explain to myself, and even now it's hard to remember exactly what I was thinking, because I was in such a weird state. I think I remember saying things like "Oh, it's because of the people," (and I remember that making sense, even though it doesn't now) and saying "shut up shut up" over and over. I think there may have been a dramatic reinterpretation of some Nine Inch Nails lyrics. I know there was more because it happened all the way from the car and into the building and up the stairs, and that's a pretty good clip. By the time I got to my desk and had to interact with real people, instead of the ones in my head, things seemed more real, less tenuous. But I noticed any time I was quiet, or not interacting with someone else, things in my head started getting weird again. Like my brain was being jerked to the right constantly. And I had some bizarre emotional reactions to things I wouldn't ordinarily give much thought to. A guy got on the elevator I was riding and I stared at his shoes and got sucked into this morass, nothing I can properly write out because I don't understand it. I don't even have names for those emotions but none of them were positive. Then again, I was in such a slur that it didn't last long. It was like a bottled-up essence of some emotion (or more than one) tipped over in my brain, but it was like alcohol and it hit the warm surface of my cognition with a stink and a flash of sensation, and then it evaporated.
Also I have been visualizing chopping off parts of my body with the 12-inch Turkish cleaver hanging under the kitchen cabinets. No plan to do this, but it's this thing that floats through my head over and over.
Whack. Then the mess.
I'm writing this down because i want to look at it later and decide how crazy this is. Or was. Because it's better now, but it's not so much better that I can think clearly. I can't.
I smoked weed that night, Tuesday night, thinking surely, surely. This will create sleep. It did not. The shapes of sounds got very distinct, crisper than they've been in ages. Which was lovely. But I was so stoned I had trouble walking. I kept having conversations with my friend and being amazed that the things I contributed to the conversation made sense, because in my head, they did not make sense at all, and each time I said something, it was in response to only the sentence she'd spoken last, not her point as a whole (ha ha, probably there wasn't one, because she was stoned as fuck too). I have no memory of anything she talked about, only the shapes of her words, and the texture of her voice. Even now in my mind it's different from how it was before I listened to it that stoned.
After she went to sleep on the couch, I went into the guest room and laid on the bed, hoping to fall asleep. But I could feel the spinning spinning still happening in my mind. Spinning round. It felt like a thing with substance, a solid instead of a gas. Which was weird, because it hadn't felt that way before. It felt like I was cohabitating in my head with it. Like we were roommates.
Last night I did not drink or smoke or take painkillers, and I somehow managed to sleep for seven straight hours without waking up once, despite thinking around 10:30 that it was going to be a hard night. Then I got up and rode my bike twenty miles to work this morning, and felt generally like a washed-clean specimen of human until I remembered around 1ish to take the risperidone, and twenty minutes after i took it I thought I was going to pass out. I walked from the kitchen back to my desk and the floor seemed very far away and uneven. I'm glad I was alone in the hallway. I think if another person had been in the hallway, I would have asked for help, since reality was slinking away like a kicked dog. But no one was there so I rode my feet back to my desk, seeing as they knew the way, and I sat there stunned for a while till the feeling passed, then I ate my lunch.
Now it's 10:30 again and I'm going to go get into the bed and lie there and see what happens. I hope the thing I hope happens will actually happen. That would be lovely. Lovely.
The risperidone has caused terrible insomnia, insomnia so terrible I thought I was going crazier than I was. Or I'm not sure, it might've been the crazy causing the insomnia. It's so hard to tell with crazy. But I think, I think, the crazy was from the insomnia.
Saturday night I drank a lot of beer to try to get to sleep. It worked for a few hours, then didn't. Sunday night, I hardly slept, but I don't much remember that night. I think I felt okay during the day Sunday. Restless, and I couldn't stop moving, but not bad-restless. I took some pictures of a deer carcass I found, and the carrion beetles eating it. Also the fur. I don't think I drank or did anything else Sunday night. Monday morning I saw the psychiatrist and tried to explain about the insomnia and the terrible racing heart and the weight of each heartbeat, and he seemed less concerned than I thought the situation warranted, since it feels so desperate on the inside of my head and I can't quite communicate that. He gave me an Rx for a different antipsychotic, said I was in the minority on the risperidone side effects. Apparently it is supposed to make a person sluggish and tired, and gain weight. Monday night, I felt desperate, terrible, and I took Percocet to try to get to sleep. Massive failure. I read and fooled around on the Internet till 1, then turned it off and tried to sleep, then failed, turned the computer back on, stayed up till 2:30, then tried to sleep more and failed again, then turned it back on, then gave up around 3:45, then laid there till 5:45, then fell into this state that resembled sleep the way a drawing of a tree resembles at tree, and got up at 7:30.
Tuesday morning I realized as I was walking in to work from the parking lot that I was talking to myself and yanking on my hair. I don't think I was saying anything important, but I had this idea that there were people populating the inside of my head, and everything I did was a show for the people, like nothing was particularly real, but I had to pretend it was. I don't know, it's hard to explain to myself, and even now it's hard to remember exactly what I was thinking, because I was in such a weird state. I think I remember saying things like "Oh, it's because of the people," (and I remember that making sense, even though it doesn't now) and saying "shut up shut up" over and over. I think there may have been a dramatic reinterpretation of some Nine Inch Nails lyrics. I know there was more because it happened all the way from the car and into the building and up the stairs, and that's a pretty good clip. By the time I got to my desk and had to interact with real people, instead of the ones in my head, things seemed more real, less tenuous. But I noticed any time I was quiet, or not interacting with someone else, things in my head started getting weird again. Like my brain was being jerked to the right constantly. And I had some bizarre emotional reactions to things I wouldn't ordinarily give much thought to. A guy got on the elevator I was riding and I stared at his shoes and got sucked into this morass, nothing I can properly write out because I don't understand it. I don't even have names for those emotions but none of them were positive. Then again, I was in such a slur that it didn't last long. It was like a bottled-up essence of some emotion (or more than one) tipped over in my brain, but it was like alcohol and it hit the warm surface of my cognition with a stink and a flash of sensation, and then it evaporated.
Also I have been visualizing chopping off parts of my body with the 12-inch Turkish cleaver hanging under the kitchen cabinets. No plan to do this, but it's this thing that floats through my head over and over.
Whack. Then the mess.
I'm writing this down because i want to look at it later and decide how crazy this is. Or was. Because it's better now, but it's not so much better that I can think clearly. I can't.
I smoked weed that night, Tuesday night, thinking surely, surely. This will create sleep. It did not. The shapes of sounds got very distinct, crisper than they've been in ages. Which was lovely. But I was so stoned I had trouble walking. I kept having conversations with my friend and being amazed that the things I contributed to the conversation made sense, because in my head, they did not make sense at all, and each time I said something, it was in response to only the sentence she'd spoken last, not her point as a whole (ha ha, probably there wasn't one, because she was stoned as fuck too). I have no memory of anything she talked about, only the shapes of her words, and the texture of her voice. Even now in my mind it's different from how it was before I listened to it that stoned.
After she went to sleep on the couch, I went into the guest room and laid on the bed, hoping to fall asleep. But I could feel the spinning spinning still happening in my mind. Spinning round. It felt like a thing with substance, a solid instead of a gas. Which was weird, because it hadn't felt that way before. It felt like I was cohabitating in my head with it. Like we were roommates.
Last night I did not drink or smoke or take painkillers, and I somehow managed to sleep for seven straight hours without waking up once, despite thinking around 10:30 that it was going to be a hard night. Then I got up and rode my bike twenty miles to work this morning, and felt generally like a washed-clean specimen of human until I remembered around 1ish to take the risperidone, and twenty minutes after i took it I thought I was going to pass out. I walked from the kitchen back to my desk and the floor seemed very far away and uneven. I'm glad I was alone in the hallway. I think if another person had been in the hallway, I would have asked for help, since reality was slinking away like a kicked dog. But no one was there so I rode my feet back to my desk, seeing as they knew the way, and I sat there stunned for a while till the feeling passed, then I ate my lunch.
Now it's 10:30 again and I'm going to go get into the bed and lie there and see what happens. I hope the thing I hope happens will actually happen. That would be lovely. Lovely.
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