Depersonalization post, again

This is going to be a weird post. They're all weird posts, actually. It occurs to me that when I'm sitting here, I don't have a coherent idea or theory about what's going on, healthwise. But then I write something and it becomes coherent, though in reality (or in my head) it's not as clear as it is written here. So that was my preamble and my disclaimer. I'm not saying I know what's going on in (with) my head or whether the chain of causation exists the way I'm about to write it. In fact, my memories of the past few weeks are kind of distorted and foggy, but I think I need to write something down about it.

Once upon a time....

I've been working. It's stressful, even though it's a 9-5 type job. I'm not just a cog in the wheel. The expectations are high, I feel I have to be productive, and [here's the biggie] my work is very "visible." It's intellectually challenging and I feel dumb and lost a lot of the time.

When I started, I felt overwhelmed, foggy and depressed. So, I started drinking coffee again. The first week, I felt like superman. I was flying, felt happy, could focus and I had some measure of confidence. Then, I got habituated. I'm up to four cups a day, but I try not to drink after 1pm or so. The coffee now wakes me up in the morning, but doesn't do much else.

I started looking around for something more, something better. I reached into my cabinet and tried DLPA -- DL-phenylalanine. It helped my focus and my mood. But it also made me a little nervous and I think it contributed to my very weird and uncharacteristic urge to binge eat. For about two weeks I ate everything in sight and went out of my way to buy junk food. This was not sustainable, especially since I wasn't really doing that great in terms of focus at work. So I looked into the DPA (just the D part of the DL-phenylalanine). It prevents the degradation of endorphins. It made me much calmer and takes the edge off the depersonalization. But I think in the long run, it was making the DP worse. This is where things get all fuzzy. Anyway, I decided to quit both the DPA and the DLPA. (Aside from making me binge eat, it was also constipating me like nobody's business.)

It's been a couple of days now off the DPA/DLPA and I feel like a martian. Serious depersonalization that gets worse after I eat. Depersonalization when I wake up in the morning. A general sense of malaise. I'm feeling a little desperate, actually. I had run out of inositol that usually helps in situations like this. Got a bottle in yesterday. Ate the whole thing and it didn't make a dent in how I'm feeling. Also, yesterday--before getting the inositol--I popped 4.5 mg of naltrexone because I read that it helps with DP, though they use much higher doses for DP. I had never taken 4.5mg at once. It calmed me down a bit, improved my mood.

Ugh, I don't know what's going on. Oh, interesting tidbit: when I feel depersonalized like this, I don't really get much nausea after eating. I get the DP instead.

So there you have it. My weird feelings of weirdness.

want to die

Things are bad. I feel depersonalized. I have pain in my abdomen, under my low ribs and almost constant nausea. I should have gone to a doctor long ago, when all this started about a year ago, but I didn't. The only thing that makes the pain and the nausea go away is eating. So I've been eating, and gaining weight. I can hold off on eating, but then the pain gets worse and I end up binging. I feel terrible. I'm going to go to the doctor this week. But I'm afraid they won't find anything wrong with me.

The DP is bothering me a lot. I see my hands as not part of me. I've lost faith in the supplements I spent so much money buying. I've thrown them out. Another few days of this is all I can stand and then I'm going to kill myself.

I don't really want to die. All I want is to feel better. But I feel trapped in my body. My parents don't understand. They say things like, "there are lots of sick people out there with physical illnesses, they don't hate themselves, they don't want to die." While they acknowledge that I may have something physical wrong with me, they still think that the big problem is in my head.

If the doctor doesn't find that I'm sick or that I have an ulcer or something (which is what I suspect), I don't know what I'll do. If he does find that I'm ill, I'll be relieved because it means I won't have to live like this anymore.

I CAN'T TAKE IT. NOTHING IS REAL!!!! I look outside and it's not my neighborhood. I look in the mirror and it's not me. I feel like I'm living inside a shell and can't break out.

And the worst part is, when I feel like the DP is fading...all I get is the usual self-loathing and anxiety I've always had. I can't tell anyone how bad it is because they will take me away and put me in the hospital and I won't have control over my life anymore.

The stress of work makes things harder...but, as usual, when it comes to work, I always pull through. I keep it together during the week. I do what it takes.

I need some relief soon.

It's hard to believe that things look so normal on the outside. My own apartment, a job with prestige and a lot of responsibility. A house plant. God, I can't take it....

Does anyone even read this shit? I googled some of my problems and my own fucking blog came up! How sad is that?

I did get a comment the other day from a nice woman who also had itching...that was sweet. Thank you.

At last! I have...

Gainful employment. A full-time job. Benefits. Pension. Even a little prestige. All within two weeks of passing the bar. The fam. was much impressed.

I'm relieved to be employed--particularly in this economy. My current co-workers took me out for a drink this past Friday to celebrate and the one clerk I don't like (former professional dancer turned fat) could barely form a smile to congratulate me. Jealous bitch :-). Warms my heart!

But this makes my mental health more of a problem. I have a job now, big question is, can I keep it? It's provisional for a six-month period. If I fuck up, I'm OUT. In fact, I happened to mention this to the nice clerk I work with. He said, "I was betting it would take you less than 10 minutes to to find something new to worry about." He's such a sweetie. I'm so glad (a) that he has a girlfriend and (b) that I would never date him. Otherwise, we could never be friends.

Speaking of which, the new clerk who started just recently is a real looker. Wowee!! I think he has a girlfriend. In any case, I don't date anyone without a law license :P. I'm only kidding. Sort of. He's not really my type anyway, except for the good-looking part. That I can dig.

Experiments with supplements

Shouldn't I know better?

But here's a health update, starting with--you guessed it--a bowel-status update: Massively constipated. Hardly any urge. When the urge hits, it's rabbit pellets. Since I have no self-control when it comes to supplements, I don't really have a clue what caused this phenomenon. A month ago, this was NOT happening.

A while back, probably around my last post, I weaned myself off inositol. The withdrawal was painful, but there's something about inositol. If I have it in the house, I end up swallowing the entire bottle and sitting there with a spaced-out smile on my face as I ride the high. Seriously, if there's something to get addicted to, I'm your man (or, woman, actually). Yet another reason why I would never try hard drugs. I figured these ups and downs were not sustainable, so I went cold turkey and decided only to take inositol if it was packaged with choline.

But I needed to do something to mediate the horrific withdrawal. So I started popping phosphatadyl serine. This was moderately helpful, but I needed more. While trolling the net, I stumbled upon another supplement which I happened to have in my embarrassingly overstocked cabinet. It was carnosine (that's with an "S", not to be confused with carnitine or acetyl-l--carnitine). This was a pretty phenomenal supplement...for a little while. My body is weird like that. A supp works for a few days, then my body changes, and the supp feels a little different. I felt real and normal, focused yet calm. It's then that I first noticed the pellets, supra. Turns out the carnosine was packaged with calcium. Well, calcium will screw me every time. So I switched the a calcium-free version of the same. Pellets continued.

I became a little panicked, so I stopped the carnosine. Got some withdrawal from that. Started acetyl-l-carnitine. The first day, I felt great. Then it made me nervous and depressed. I broke out and felt cold all day. It sort of sucked. But my cravings went away. Yay!

Anyway, today, I tried n-acetyl-cysteine with some pantothenic acid. Don't know why. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Made me sort of sad and tired. But since I stopped taking the acetyl-carnitine, my skin has cleared up. All it took was a day.

Sooooo...I've also been taking rhodiola on occasion. It makes me feel less tired, which is definitely a plus. But it's another supp that I can't take too many days in a row or I get depressed and nervous.

That's me, in a nutshell. (I confess, I just took a acetyl-l-carnitine because I was feeling the old cravings. Now I'm craving-less and freakin cold--I read it interferes with thyroid conversion in some people. Why is it that I'm always "some people.")

Feeling like crap

Here I was, thinking that passing the bar would change my life. Actually, I knew it wouldn't end up making much difference. Rather, it would have made a difference--a bad difference--had I failed. But passing is just...eh.

In any case, here I am, feeling restless, nervous, lonely, shameful, full of self-loathing and disgust. But there doesn't seem to be any outward reason for it. I have a job, I passed the bar, I have a couple of friends, I socialize at work, my supervising attorneys have told me that I'm doing a good job, and my stingy bitch of a landlady finally replaced my toilet after four days of struggle. But all I think about is how nice it would be not to have to wake up again.

The every day is so miserable. I wonder what the fuck it's all about. I want OUT. I'm also starting to feel a little depersonalized again. That is super upsetting. Now that I think about it, that IS the problem. Nothing feels real.

I had a brief period of reality today when I went shopping to buy some stockings and paused to smell some perfumes. I felt in the moment. But it passed. And now it's me against staring at fingers (mine?) typing on the goddamn machine.

The day has come

I passed the bar.

Whew.

I know I've been awol. Things have been hectic...haven't much felt like blogging. But I just had to write this down to make it real. It's so weird. In one month I'll be sworn in. Then I'll be licensed. To kill. Or at least to practice law.

Love to all my reader(s),
HungryGirl, Esq. :P

P.S. Thank god I never have to take this test again.

P.P.S. I also broke the bank on the MPRE, but at the time I got my score, I didn't really think it was too important given the looming uncertainty of bar results.

Depressed, suicidal, generally freaking out

I know I just have to forget about the bar. Thinking of it now = madness since results won't be out until October--those fucking bastards.

But I've been having despair fits and panic attacks, nonetheless. I really don't know what to do about it. It feels like when I used to have hypochondria and would read up on all sort of venereal diseases, look at pictures online and have myself repeated tested for HIV and the like. (Seriously, for someone who has only had sex once, getting three HIV tests seems excessive.) But actually, it was herpes that was my biggest fear. Still is....I don't think I'll be sad if I never have sex again. I'm ok with that. It just seems way too risky.

I digress...back to the bar: today, I engaged in destructive behavior similar to my hypochondriacal fits. At this point, I can't remember exactly what questions were on the bar, but I've been visiting websites and message groups related to bar failure and bar prep. It's driving me crazy. I've been trying to calculate my essay scores and have been working myself up into a frenzy.

Meanwhile, studying for the bar and taking the bar was one of the worst experiences of my life. I'd rather be publicly humiliated in front of my ex-boyfriend or be fat again than have to re-take the bar. It was that bad. So, I think that if I fail I will just kill myself. I can't imagine studying for it again. The anxiety nearly killed me the first time around. Won't do it again. But if I don't take it again, I have no future in law, my chosen profession. That leaves nothing but shame and self-hatred. I don't want to endure that either. Dying is the only choice.

It's not like my life is peaches and cream now. I've been doing the daily swimming. It's the best part of my day. The rest is down hill. This morning, before I left for swimming, I felt like death warmed over. Really hopeless and down. I started to complain to my parents about it. My dad promptly told me "well, since you've finished law school, why don't you get back on meds." I started to cry.

My dad seems to think that all that I've accomplished in the past 5 years I have accomplished despite being off meds. He doesn't get the fact that I've accomplished those things because I've been off meds. When I was on meds, I wasn't myself. I couldn't count on my self-control and diligence. I would constantly be late. I would steal things. I had no control over my eating. I couldn't think straight. It took me about seven years to finish college (including breaks and transfers). I didn't feel human.

Now, at least I'm accountable to myself. I finished law school in the standard three years with honors. I'm clean, I brush my teeth, I get out of bed, I go to work, I try hard, I swim. I'm not perfect. Sometimes I overeat and break my food rules. And, I'm hardly ever happy. But my life is predictable and I'm in control of it.

My dad believes that since I've finished law school and taken the bar that I have nothing to lose. If something goes wrong now, there will be nothing tangible to point to but my profound unhappiness. No bad grades. They probably wouldn't fire me at the job, even if my work started going down hill. Nothing. And if the meds don't work, it will be my own goddamn fault, like usual. (I don't think there's more blaming the patient in any medical field than psychiatry.)

So, that's what's been up with me.