Category Archives: Sleep

A Dream

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I had a dream, a wonderful dream.  So wonderful that I didn’t mind having it.  I actually liked having it.

But then I woke up.  I woke up because I was so excited from the dream I thought that it was truth.  And I wanted to live it, with my swollen heart.

But.

It was just a dream after all.  Now it is reality, and I must somehow go back to my broken sleep.

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” ~ Saul Bellow

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Three Weeks

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And two days, for those of me keeping track.  That’s how long it’s been since I stopped my miracle med I was going to take for the rest of my life.

Since I wrote The Finish Line, things have improved quite a bit with my psychiatrist.  And I was cautiously optimistic about the three drugs we had decided upon to replace the one I had to stop.

Things started off well enough.  I was getting up mornings and doing yoga, then going over to the rec center and using the bag for an hour.  I was feeling motivated and determined to fight with everything against depression, because that had been creeping on for a long time even before the med issue.

After about a week or so, I noticed by the end of my day my head was in a complete fog, and I felt like I had been up for three days in a row, mentally (though I wasn’t requiring any extra sleep).  The only thing this could have been coming from was the medication I was prescribed for the immediate relief of my depression.  I held out until the middle of last week, when I realized that even when I doubled the dose, it would only help my depression for half-an-hour, max.  I then said enough.

Strike one.

The second, more long-term medication that was meant for my depression is one you have to start slowly and raise the dose of incrementally.  The reason is there is a small chance of a potentially deadly rash in reaction to it.  You may know the one to which I am referring, but I would lay down 20 to 1 you don’t know half the fun, detailed, descriptively vivid particulars about the two distinctive rashes you really need to watch out for, the ones that are actually serious.  My former psychiatrist believed education was key, and God bless the man for that.

I did very well on this drug before, no reaction, good response, took it for years.  Earlier this week I raised my dose on schedule, and the next day the tip of my tongue hurt a bit.  I figured I must have burned it, or perhaps I was dehydrated.  When I woke up Friday it was in so much pain that I couldn’t move it around my mouth, all I could do was take little sips of tepid water and hold them on it a bit before swallowing.  I knew I wasn’t dehydrated at that point.  I put in a call to my psychiatrist, and even though it looked completely normal, I had already decided I was taking no chances by the time he called back.  He found it odd, had never actually heard of anything like it, but was in agreement with me.

So I didn’t take any yesterday or today, and my tongue is improved enough for Fugdesicles.  My father got the sugar-free kind by mistake, so that’s a good 80 calories a day right there I’m living off of!

Strike two.

The third medication, which I insisted upon because I had no anti-manic. . .  Well, now I’m off the amphetamine all I’m doing is sleeping.  I increased the dose to treat what I rightly identified as prodromal mania last week.  So the last two nights I quartered the dose I had gotten up to.  Tonight I’ll go down to a half.  And maybe, by Monday — when I next see my psychiatrist — I’ll be able to stay awake for more than an hour-and-a-half at a go.

In which case we’ll call that one a foul tip.

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I added that ‘specially for you, Sailor.

Thank you so much to everyone who has shown me such love, support, understanding, caring, and kindness, and to all of you who continue to do so. It means more to me than I could ever find a way to put into words.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

On Doing Something I Shouldn’t (Should)

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I shouldn’t be writing this to you right now, lovelies, I should be trying to sleep.  But that’s exactly the reason I am writing it.  Lemme ‘splain.

This week has been such a good week.  I’ve had wonderful days, and I’ve had wonderful days.  The former have been wonderful because everything was so beautiful and right.  It’s the latter we’re concerned with.

These past few days I’ve stepped out of the glowing bubble.  I’ve felt distress, I’ve felt sorrow, I’ve felt rising anxiety, I’ve been disturbed, and I’ve had a night of very fractured sleep (this last one).

So why is all of that wonderful?

Because the distress didn’t become anxiety.

Because the sorrow was so completely different from depression.

Because the rising anxiety dissipated when I told it to and then read a book, no Xanax required.

Because the disturbance was the thing most likely to throw me off-balance, and it didn’t.  It may have contributed to the fractured sleep, but so may have a lot of things.

And because the night of fractured sleep was exactly that.  It wasn’t my brain not shutting off, it wasn’t my sleepies failing.  It was simply that I had things tugging at me that kept me from sinking into complete and total somnolence, which I have done every other night this week.  And those things will not tug at me tonight, so I don’t fear more lost sleep.

Isn’t it so very wonderful?

(Incidentally, why did no one ever warn me that Splendor In The Grass was such an incredibly fucked-up movie?  I mean, it was excellent, I know it was excellent by the way it resonated deep within me, flipped me all around, and nearly caused a misstep.  But geez, it would have been nice to know what I was letting myself in for!  Though maybe it meant more because I didn’t.)

Moral of the story:  Fear is antithetical to growth, progress, and strength (yes, all of them).  Quash it whenever possible.  ;)

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Of All The Weeks In My Life, This Has Been One Of Them

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And it has been very long.  Very, very long.  So long.  Long.

I think I am the opposite of most people who deal with manic-depression, but I’m not sure. I try to remember from the zillions of books I read on it, but that was so very long ago. . .

What happens with me is that when I am depressed, time rushes by, but when I am manic, it goes so very, very slowly.  Guess what this week turned out to be?

“I blink and half my life is over. . .” ~ Pete Winslow

I have never been a huge poetry-reader, I will confess that now.  Mostly I stuck to prose, especially in my younger years.  But beginning a poem in an anthology that one of my dearest and my oldest friend brought back to me when she visited the City Lights book store in San Francisco years ago. . .  (you know who you are now?  hi!).  That line began a poem and it jumped out and grabbed me and has stuck with me in a way so many and so few things have.

City Lights possibly might not mean a lot – anything – to some of you, but if you’re familiar with the Beats and specifically Lawrence Ferlinghetti, that’s his.  The progression is I spent pretty much all of my teens wildly enamored of Jack Kerouac.  I have made good acquaintance with Ginsberg and Cassidy and Burroughs and Holmes and so many more as well, but Kerouac will always be my true love there.  We are both “crazy mixed-up Catholic Buddhists,” though I only have a name for it because Jack gave name to it.

Thank you, Jack.

This week was, as I described to my psychiatrist Thursday when I saw him, florrid mania.  Psychotic, to boot. But then it had little tiny ultradian cycles woven inside the days and most especially the nights.  I would lay in my bed at night, knowing there would be no sleep, listening to music, Thinking, and hallucinating with four out of five senses.  Time stretches out for me in a very unreal way.  And I lay there and I Thought about so many things.  One of them was how I was having my parents drive me to my doctors’ appointments, because I didn’t feel like it was at all safe for me to be behind the wheel of a car.  A decade ago that would have been the first place I jumped in that state.

I have slowed down.  I have grown older.  I have grown wiser.  I have grown tired.

(For those of you keeping score, 72 hours awake, 4 of blissful sleep, 16 awake, between 30 minutes and 2 hours asleep – little hazy about what happened there – 14 mostly awake with a wee bit of dozy time, which is not real sleep but is closer to it than anything else I found, 4 of sleep, 6 more awake and that is now.  I know.  It’s confusing to me, too.)

By Wednesday afternoon I decided the best only course of action for me was to go silent, which I learned by hard lesson is what to do with myself in that state.  I stay completely off of the internet, and keep all other interaction very minimal, until I feel like I have most of my judgment returned.  If I ever disappear for a long period of time with no notice, that will most likely be why.

Thursday night the mania dissipated (though the insomnia didn’t) in a very nice and novel way.  Just a matter of minutes, it was like inside me some dials and slider switches were moved and I was restored to euthymia.  Euthymia.  Such a pretty word.

I think it was a combination of finding a bit of balance, and some clonazepam (Klonopin) that did it for me.  And yesterday morning my doctor wrote me for my favorite sleepies that didn’t kill me but should have (not a botched attempt there, a drug interaction that no one knew about nor figured out for months, despite me repeatedly blacking out – and I was the one who discovered it – but I’m off the other drug), which gave me my four hours of sleep last evening.  Which I needed, because while I haven’t come down this time into a full depression – yet – things got pretty desperate for me yesterday.

The wherefore of that is a little hard to explain, but it has to do with the lovely way I have of almost dissociating when I am so long with very little or no sleep and nicely manic, and no longer having that, being fully present in the reality of the moment.  And it has to do with how hard I work to insulate my mind, my mental state against anything that might further compromise it, even a little, and coming out of that cocoon-in-a-very-high-tower-with-no-door-and-briars-at-the-bottom.  That’s a good one.  It not only describes perfectly what I build around myself, but doesn’t it sound pretty much like hell to come out of?  It is.  I nailed that, and right off the cuff.  Love it.

Lastly, my desperate state had to do with one of the many moments of clarity I had while Thinking, actually this one deserves the designation of ‘epiphany’, that I found myself in during the whole episode.  I’m saving it for another time.  Maybe.

Moral of the story:  ”I’m a paranoid schizophrenic.  I am my own entourage.” ~ a delightfully misnomered quote, from the always lovable and neurotic John Cusak, in America’s Sweethearts

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Rest Of The Story

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So I didn’t exactly tell all of you lovely readers the entirety of my situation in my last post.  Read on and you’ll find out why.

I’m tired.  I’m so, so unbelievably tired that I can’t do anything and I just got off of the phone with my doctor tossing around possible causes.  All I do is sleep like the dead.  Yesterday afternoon, I had it all set in my mind.  I thought, I’m just going to take a short nap and then I can get my laundry and my packing done.’  Only the puzzle pieces had not yet come together in my head – that happens with me sometimes – so I didn’t set an alarm, and my ‘short nap’ lasted about 14 hours.

I then woke up this morning, thought, ‘Fuck, what am I going to do now?’  posted the entry before this one, talked to my mom for about half an hour, then – you guessed it – I went back to sleep for about three hours.  The only reason I’m awake now is because of the aforementioned phone call from my doctor.

You see, it took a couple of weeks, but it did slowly dawn on me that sleeping upwards of 22 hours a day is not really normal.  I had been having so much trouble sleeping at all, if you remember, so at first I thought my system was just sort of “catching up” and re-regulating itself.  Then, when it persisted, I figured I was letting myself sleep too much, which was making me more tired (one of those stupid but true things that happens).  So I tried restricting my sleep time and doing things to energize me.  Fail.  I would fall asleep while doing things.

This morning it finally dawned on me that, hey, this ain’t normal and it ain’t going away either.  Three possibilities crossed my mind: hypothyroidism, anemia, and the dreaded specter of mononucleosis.

I’ve never been hypothyroid, but my doctor had expressed concern after my last emergency room visit that the thyroid hormone I had been taking to treat depression might have done permanent harm to my thyroid.  It tested normal a few weeks ago, and he doesn’t seem to think that’s causing this.  With this conclusion, I tend to agree.

Anemic is also something I’ve never been, I just know it can make you tired, and thought if I was potentially going in for a blood draw, we ought to check that while we’re at it.  Doctor didn’t think that was the case either.  Okay.

But the mono thing. . .  Let me give you a little background.  Another entry into Ruby’s Medical Incredible.  I have had mononucleosis at least twice, and I actually am pretty convinced I had it a third time and it was just never tested for then – because actually it would have been the first time - so we’ll never know, now will we?

(By the by, remind me, someone – and I mean this seriously, it isn’t like all of my other “Maybe I’ll tell you about that some time” moments – multiple someones, everyone, to write a post about why I have such a certainty about that potential first time with mono.  It’s an interesting idea and I could use some feedback.)

The first time it was medically documented was high school, and it knocked me flat on my back for a few months.  I would quite likely have died from starvation within those first couple of weeks, had it not been for my mother.  She would literally wake me up a couple of times a day, keep me awake long enough for me to drink a vitamin shake, and then I would pass back out.  I was damned near comatose.  I came slowly back to consciousness during those months, but I had to drop an entire semester of classes.  It actually hit me so hard that after a summer spent convalescing, I returned to school – only to have to drop that subsequent semester halfway through.  I was still so easily exhausted that I just couldn’t keep up – or more accurately, awake.

Venture into mono-land number two (or three, maybe), happened about four years later and put me in the hospital.  I was tired, but not in the manner nor to the degree detailed above. I was vividly yellow from jaundice and severely dehydrated.  Initially my bumbling medical team (this would be the time when my regular doc was out of town) thought – nay, they were convinced - that it was gallstones.  The gastroenterologist (God bless him) who was scheduled to operate on me the following morning took one look at me and said, “She doesn’t have gallstones, it looks to me like she has mono.”  Apparently they never tested me for that one, because that was back in the days when they still thought you couldn’t get mono more than once, not unlike chicken pox.  There, now you have a better idea of how old I am.

Sure enough.  The jaundice element was because my liver swelled into hepatitis (my spleen, of course, swelled as well) causing the attractive flavescense in my pallor.  Both my PCP and my infectious disease specialist told me that I was the first documented recurrence of mono (blood work to back it up) that either of them had ever seen.  They’d seen relapses, yes, but that would be sort of what I had during high school.  Four years in between does not a relapse make.

Back to the present, my doctor didn’t think mononucleosis was likely either – and I don’t know that I do, but damn, it does feel an awful lot like it.  The few suggestions he did come up with – well now that I’m fully awake, I wish I had argued my point more forcefully (or at all) because I know myself and they’re wrong.  That’s something else going on with me lately, I’m so worn out that I can’t even be bothered to get upset or fight my own battles.  Which is going to mean so much more to those of you who know me and have for some years.

I’m not depressed, although I have had random bouts of crying here and there for absolutely no reason that are easily suppressed and pass quickly.  And I’m not pregnant, a possibility my doctor raised.  Or if I am, another entry into Ruby’s Medical Incredible.

And in the first thought of, last mentioned case, I know depression in all of its many presentations and manifestations, and this is not one of them.

So what is it, then?  Right now I’m thinking mono and hoping that I’m wrong.  Although that really isn’t such a huge deal, it’s pretty innocuous as illnesses go, just a pain in the ass, and I don’t have a job or classes or responsibilities (as such).  I just have to power through the errands and the packing, I’ve got my mom as my backup, should she come home from work tonight and find me asleep, she is to wake me up, I mean really awake so that I can show her I’m all packed.

Here I go.  May the Starbucks be with me.

Moral of the story:  Time and tide.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Sleep, And Medication, And My Metabolism, Oh My!

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time, it apparently just needed to cook some yet.

I’ll bitch about my psychiatrist for many reasons – okay, mainly because of the ECT debacle – but I cannot in good conscience let him take the blame for something that is not his fault.  It’s something that isn’t anyone’s fault, not really.

Per my sleep issues – well, I guess it’s best to begin at the beginning.

My sleep issues did not develop concurrently with my manic-depression.  My mother remembers, as I do, that when I was a very young child she would put me to bed and it would take me roughly two hours to fall asleep.  She would hear me in my room, talking to myself, talking to all of my stuffed toys, talking to the bedpost, or to the ceiling, for all I know.  I had a very vivid imagination, and I guess back then it didn’t much bother me that I couldn’t sleep, because there weren’t regular instances of me getting out of bed, looking for attention or distraction.

Fast forward to middle school.  I had a very good friend, and both of us had our own private phone lines (teenage girl’s dream come true!).  We would wait for our parents to go to bed, and then spend hours on the phone talking, probably until around one or two in the morning (I may be misremembering, but I think that seems right).  Well, once we got off of the phone, she would doze off and I would get down to the business of doing any homework that was due that day.  There was usually a tediously time-consuming amount.  So let’s ballpark me at three or four for bedtime, can’t remember how long it took for me to fall asleep, but I had to have been up by about seven.  Middle school was also when I pulled my first “all-nighter,” coffee and all, to finish a big project.

This is when things get a bit murky, because by then my mood symptoms had begun to manifest pretty rampantly, though not quite full force gale.  Okay, I take that back.  Eighth grade was my first episode of months’ long hysterical depression, preceded by hypomania, and after that – well, I would say ‘All hell done broke loose.’

Translation:  There would be periods of no sleep, periods of constant sleep, sometimes coinciding with mood swings, but not to the point where anyone ever saw something which needed diagnosing.  Well, one person did, from many miles away, and I flipped shit on him when he suggested I should see someone.  I never did apologize for that, and it bothers me to this day.  But I had a third-party (who knew me well) help me determine a few years ago that it wouldn’t do him any particular good.  But it still nags at me.

In my early 20s, when I had my girls, I could spend a day chasing two kids (ages four and less than a year), get prettied up and go out for the night, get home around two, shower and crawl into bed, then wake up around five in the morning and do it all over again.  By then I had already played around a little with the sleep aids with my primary, and our success was limited, at best.

Now to – well now.  Over the years my shrink and I have tried everything – sleep aids, benzos, sedatives, hypnotics, atypical as well as conventional anti-psychotics, things not even prescribed for sleep.  We have tried them in various combinations, he has written me for the highest dose he feels won’t kill me – literally, that was how he put it with one.  He has thrown out a book on sleeping medications during an appointment.  I found one that worked for a little while, and then we had to continually increase the dose, until I finally hit the ceiling and it wasn’t doing a thing for me.

This is all on top of my regular meds, which both my psychiatrist and PCP swear should take down a 350 pound man.

There was one med that worked for me, and we only had to up the dose once.  I found an interaction that no one had heard of, including a PhD in Pharmacology (that’s pretty much their area of expertise, interactions).  Upon further investigation, and the look on my PCP’s face after he got off of the phone with the Pharm PhD, apparently I am extremely fortunate not to be dead because of it.  Thank you to my insane drug metabolism.

The only thing I have never tried are barbiturates.  And really, I know now that there’s no reason to.  Highly addictive, highly lethal (although probably not for me), long-term side effects that are irreversible and not pretty.

So actually there is no solution here.  I need the magic pill, the one which doesn’t exist.  I need something that would knock me out like a barb would (in theory), but that I can take every night for the rest of my life if I have to.  That’s what started me fighting the tears when I was at the doctor last week.  I finally realized that what I need has not been synthesized or harvested or discovered.  For my intent and purpose, it doesn’t exist.

So what now do I do with this knowledge?

Moral of the story:  A gauze pad won’t take the place of a tourniquet, but if you apply enough of them on top of each other, you may stem the bleeding so that transfusions can be given and clotting agents administered.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

When You’re Trying To Say Apocalypse And It Comes Out As Acropolis

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I know my mind has been miles away.  I know I’ve been having sleep issues (different kind than usual), my eating habits have changed, I’m tired (physically), cranky, not keeping up with things, and completely dissociating.

While walking around the empty house, muttering talking to myself like the stereotypical crazy lady that I may just be, I not only have trouble pronouncing words, they become something else altogether.  And then I laugh hysterically at my brain.

I’ve been dealing with the inability to sleep, but what I find more disturbing, actually, is that when I do sleep I kind of drift in and out, never quite making it past the dozy stage, and having some very, very strange thoughts (I don’t think they count as dreams when you aren’t actually asleep) running through my head.  For example, I was back in the Gulf of Mexico, but instead of floating I was sinking to the ocean floor – and loving it, not trying to fight at all.

All sorts of sweets lying around the house that I’ve been nibbling on.  I enjoyed them, for a couple of days, now I’m just pissed off that with two kinds of cake and scones, the only chocolate in the house is the Hershey’s syrup.  Veggie dogs it is, then.

In theory, I could go to the store and get some chocolate, but that would involve So.  Much.  Effort.  Getting up off of the couch to get my meds is a challenge like no other.

I snap at inanimate objects, and I keep far away from the animate ones.  No emails, no phone calls, no texts, nothing.  I’ve been very angry and bitchy and hurt by things people haven’t even done to me directly, so I know I need to stay away from anyone and anything that could exacerbate that.

And blogging?  Why bother?  I slow traffic with my writings because they’re an oddity that no one understands.  Ninety-nine point five percent of the time, people can’t relate to me or my words, trust me, I have empirical evidence of this fact.  That doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop writing, it just means perhaps I need to step back and change my medium and approach.

It would seem I might be depressed.  Am I?  I don’t honestly think so.  I just think I am weary of this world and this life.  But it’s okay, it will pass.  It always has.

Moral of the story:  (This song and video are solely the property of their respective owners and artists. Absolutely no copyright infringement is intended.)

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Dreaming In The Real World

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Everyone has dreams in their life.  Unless you have a traumatic life course from birth, usually the younger you are, the bigger and more plentiful and completely in your grasp those dreams are.  As we grow up, different things work to shape and limit our dreams, both from within and without.  You find your passions and begin to focus more on those, and like it or not, the world at large can and does have an impact on what we are able to accomplish.  All of these factors vary from individual to individual, but the premise is consistent.

I’ve had a rather unusual life when it comes to my dreams.  Less than a decade ago, I was still going to take on the world the way a child does – and even more so, because I had the maturity and life experience and skill and confidence that you acquire only by living, but while I had lost many things since my childhood, my belief that I could do anything, anything I decided upon was entirely intact.

I have to smile, because I wasn’t going to detail what dreams I let fly free from my grasp, specifically, but one begs to be mentioned right here.

I was going to be an emergency room doctor.  I would have made an excellent one, too.  I had begun to take my courses, so I know that I had aptitude.  I also had the temperament, the more stressful and chaotic the environment and circumstances, the calmer and more logical I became.  And was I ever quick to think on my feet!

But of course there were my moods.  By the time I had slapped a label on part of what made me who I was, but before I received a formal diagnosis, I knew that I couldn’t do med school and an internship and rotations and keep myself in top form.  Most individuals can go 48 hours without sleep and not run into catastrophe.  Me, I knew even then that would have been a dangerous choice for me, and consequently – and more importantly – a dangerous choice for my patients.  So I let that dream go, I sent it back out into the Universe for someone else to grasp.

The reason I’m mentioning it, though, is because I have something else that would have compromised my abilities.  It wasn’t much back then, even now it’s just diagnosed as an essential tremor.  My hands shook some from time to time.  Back then it was barely even noticeable.  It has progressed in the years since, it no longer affects just my hands, and different things may exacerbate it greatly.  For example, I just took an asthma inhaler.  Now my fingers are having difficulty hitting the right keys on my laptop.  That’s why this story is in this post.

In any case, I had a breakdown, my moods hit me unbelievably hard and my mind went for a time as well.  Coming out of that (and I won’t claim that I have completely yet) there were no dreams.  Partially I didn’t think I could ever do anything with myself, with my life, but probably most of it was because I wasn’t thinking beyond my next pill and making it through the rest of the day or the rest of the hour, even.

But I began to recover.  In fits and spurts, the process is by no means smooth and linear.  And one thing I had possessed a long time ago that returned to me in spades was instinct.  I don’t know if I classify instinct as a purely unconscious, animalistic response or trait.  I think if you really have instinct there are at least three factors.

There is the unconscious mentioned above, that you cannot change your capacity for.  Next there is the semi-conscious level.  The part of you that absorbs and assimilates everything that is going on around and inside of you, and stores and classifies and remembers and gives you the ability to make use of it.

Finally, there is the fully alert and aware you.  The being as a whole, who is cognizant of not only the two deeper components of instinct, but integrates them with the third level.  The part of you who listens for every whisper that emanates from deep within, and who feels the slightest breeze brushing your skin from without.  This part has an unbelievable ability to tune out the static around and hear only what you are saying to yourself, and what the Universe is saying just to you.

My first “dream” is no longer that, it has become a condition for my life.  I mentioned it in my post of a few days ago, Magic, Part Two (Well, A Little).  I wish that post could have captured what I wanted it to, but it captured instead what I was feeling, which is what I do when I write a blog.  In case you missed it, the dream turned condition is writing.  As I said, no matter whether anyone ever reads my words save me, I have to write them in order to live.  This I know.

I discovered a second. . . dream, condition for living, message from the Universe while I was floating in the Gulf of Mexico.  Live in the water.  Live your life in a bikini and bare feet and feel the sand and the salt and the liquidity and utter peace and chaos co-existing.  It may seem silly after just a week, but this one is going to be a way of life for me as well.  My dresses will get lonesome on the hangers, my stilettos will cry out for me to strap them on, my makeup will beg, and my jewelry will plead.  And I will feel pity and utilize them all.  Sparingly.

Moral of the story:  Listen.  Listen.  It isn’t too late if you open up your heart so it can hear.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

I Don’t Know Why I Feel This Way

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But someone whom I respect tremendously (and have a bit of a crush on – yes, still, and forever) has kindly offered a medium to explain at least the way I feel for me so’s I can give my overloaded brain some respite.


(This song and video are solely the property of their respective owners and artists. Absolutely no copyright infringement is intended.)

(And anyone who knows anything about me knows how crucial it is to me that he introduced the bass player/vocalist.)

Moral of the story:  “Give your ears a chance.” ~ My maternal grandfather and most kindred spirit, heart of my heart, soul of my soul

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Blogging At 37,000 Feet

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Believe me, it isn’t that I can’t go this long without recording my thoughts for publication.  It’s more that I’ve been trying for more than an hour to get comfortable – or at least less uncomfortable – and if I don’t do something to distract myself, they’ll be making a premature landing of this aircraft due to my histrionics, I’ll be escorted off in handcuffs, and I won’t make my connection.

I will be the last to deny that I can be a very volatile person.  But I am so lethally doped on benzos at the moment that someone could be stabbing me in the gut with knives right now, and at most I would be mildly annoyed.  Seriously.  I had some panic last night, you see.  Understatement.  Rephrasing.

As I was preparing for my departure last night, I had repeated episodes of paralyzing agony such that I seriously thought I was going to have to cancel my holiday entirely.  Which makes little sense given that I am on my way to a beautiful place to spend time with people whom I love.

I’ve stopped trying to make sense of my anxiety.  Now I just do my utmost to dope it out of me.  And dope and dope. . .  Well, last night (and into this morning) being somewhat of an unprecedented and emergency situation, I lost track far past what is considered “safe” and “acceptable” with the benzos.  We’ve had this talk, I believe.

I was finally able to move forward with the ready-making, but oh, how tired I became towards the end of it (not terribly surprising, considering).  I hadn’t time to sleep, though.  I had time to be shuttled off to the airport and dream of sleep.  If only.

I can usually doze on planes.  No luck when I need it most, of course.  Perhaps on the next leg, but I doubt it.  And once I reach my destination, I’ve got to be bright and alive and vivacious and enthusiastic.  And I will be.  Because I have a pill for that, too.

Ruh-roh.  Turbulence.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.