silver
Terrified Newbie
Joined: 10 Jul 2007
Posts: 3
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 Posted: Tue July 10, 2007 Post subject: let me introduce myself... |
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...I'm a man of wealth and taste.
Well, not really.
I'm 24, from the UK, doing a Masters degree at the moment. I spent most of my life up to the age of 23 utterly screwed up. I think I was ok when I was there - had an eccentric sense of humour and a strange imagination, and I could make people laugh on the rare occasions when I was utterly drunk and utterly comfortable, but most of the time I felt like I wasn't there. It was impossible to talk to me and I felt blank, confused and incoherent. This made me pretty terrified of people, although I was ok asking for directions, going to the supermarket, talking on the phone and all that. I even kind of enjoyed embarassing myself in public - I found it amusing, and it made me appear to have a personality, in contrast to the grunts and monosyllables that people would be confronted with if they actually tried to talk to me. The whole thing sucked basically. I was a virgin, and suicidal about 25% of the time. Actually spending a week without feeling absolutely rubbish would be an astonishing acheivement.
At the age of 22, I finished my undergrad degree thinking "right - what an awesome waste of time that was". I'd kind of got bored with what I was doing, and thought I'd change tack a bit by doing a masters. Only problem was I felt like the most malajusted person on the planet, and I saw moving to another uni as a final opportunity to actually socialize with people and fix things up. I really wasn't up to that at the time, so I decided to take a year out and work, and try and fix myself up. I tried a lot of things, but it was difficult. You'd have to wait for two months after sending your details off, and then you'd ring them up out of impatience and they'd be like: "oh! Actually we were just about to post you a letter!". Then you'd go an see them, and it'd be this miserable little office with a completely apathetic woman who'd end up sending you on a flower arranging course. When I actually got to see someone it'd be equally frustrating. It was some social anxiety thing, and you'd get the impression they'd just read a bunch of things out of a textbook which didn't really apply to you, and they were trying to shoehorn you into this diagnosis, even when the stuff they were actually telling you to do wasn't really helping, and their advice didn't really seem relevant. And then there were the "art therapists" and "counsellors" who'd tell you stupid, meaningless things like "take responsibility" and blame your parents for your problems. The whole thing basically started to remind me of the Wizard of Oz. Like I'm being given a silk heart stuffed with sawdust rather than a real one. I started to think modern psychiatry couldn't really help me, because noone actually knew what they were doing, so I started going to little academic studies, and getting my face put in a clampstand while I was shown pictures of people on a screen.
It was on one of these that I found something that actually helped. They were doing a study on the effects of an SSRI called Citalopram. I was sceptical - the whole psychopharmaceutical thing just seemed like "oh, we've got this chemical, we've got no idea what parts of your brain it bludgeons, or what it really does, but it seems to help, so have some", but I just thought "what the hell" and took it anyway. It hit me like a sledgehammer. The first couple of weeks I just felt really strange, extra paranoid, and for some reason I had Bryan Adams songs stuck in my head, but after that cleared I started getting somewhere. I went to a house party about a month later, and halfway through I thought "hang on - I'm actually talking to people and getting on with them". I was absolutely astonished. After a couple of months I was like "right - time to get laid", met some girl on the internet and I've now been going out with her for 10 months. Woop de doop de. This stuff seemed to go part of the way to removing whatever was blocking my mind up - I seemed to be able to think a lot more clearly, and I was a lot more chatty. Life actually felt worthwhile.
I was still a solitary creature on my masters course. Didn't feel like I had much in common with anyone, and I had my girlfriend for the small amount of human contact I needed, so I just thought screw it. I felt people liked me, and I had people I could go out boozing and enjoy myself with when I wanted to, but I was generally a bit reclusive and I didn't actively persue friendships. That was fine with me though. You don't have to be social - I can be happy if people just generally give me positive feedback and let me do my own thing. It's all fine and dandy.
So now I've been slowly stopping the meds... and things are getting worse. My mind feels jammed again, I find it more difficult to express myself, and my girlfriend finds it harder to get through to me. I'm thinking screw going back to how I was a year ago, so I guess the way forward is just to munch down on more magic drugs. This aint great - I'd rather not basically be a junkie for the rest of my life, and ideally I'd want someone who could help me in some other way, but at least I've found something that works for me, astonishingly enough.
Anyway. That's me. Wishing everyone luck. And wish me luck getting a real soul, to replace the plastic one I've bought off the NHS.[/i] |
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