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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-28)
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Last June, I lost my health insurance. So I stopped taking my meds some time in late July. I stopped amphetamines, SSRIs, and whatever Buspirone is. I tried to take some of Sanguine's prescription to make the tapering easier, but that ran out.
I decided that this austerity nightmare could be something I did on purpose and not something that I was subjected to completely out of my control. I didn't refill my meds once I got insurance again in September.
I noticed one change right away: I could cry. For a year or more prior, I had picked up the odd habit of crying for literally five seconds before I just reflexively grasped at composure again. One or two sobs and then I'm done. I thought initially that this just must be how my particular brain chemistry had sorted itself out, but I only thought later that maybe I had just become an expert in repressing my emotions. Once I got off my meds, something changed; I was crying "to completion". After I had gotten done sinking as low as I really felt and leaving nothing out, I came back up to the surface feeling this intense presence and clarity. It honestly reminded me of how I felt when I was on shrooms. Which is wild! Like, I needed to take hallucinogens to experience something that's actually supposed to be a natural part of my emotional life cycle, and I experienced it as completely novel.
Soon after I started teaching, I was feeling enormously down on myself, and on my drive home I was casually entertaining the idea of crashing into the median as a way of not having to go to work the next day. The first weeks after getting raped this summer had me thinking similar things at times. Suicidality has been part of my emotional life from maybe age 10, and I had spikes of it in the last years of repressing my transness, but practically none since then. It's a bitter reunion, but it feels like coming home. My sadness truly holds me. My loneliness, faithful companion, finds me again.
Feelings aren't so scary once you let them in. Part of me knows this, and another is undergoing un dur apprentissage sans bout.
It's sobering to think of how long I've been living on the surface of myself. Humbling.