experiments in self-medication or lack thereof

it's getting a bit strange - another k dream last night - maybe i've so ached for the quality of cognitive colour-vision through the most recent months of this twelve-step life-sentence, that i kinda accidentally-on-purpose poked a loophole for trippin' baaawlz - cause all i did was remove a substance, the re-uptake inhibitor, and if it should so happen that its absence feels like the presence of a drug, that's not my fault, i'm just clearing away some chemical junk from the synapses - absence of sertraline is giving me feelings i would've written off as cliches and exaggerations about what supposedly happens to quitters - dare i say, there's deeper feelings? dunno if there's anything realer about them though, are you more correctly oriented to reality when a puppy chow commercial brings you near tears?

but it's eerie when something that's just an emotion also feels like deja-vu instead of anything normal - most of the month has been a simple bad case of dejected defeatist thinking and negative feedback loops, such thorough lameness that it couldn't be induced by anything other than me being unimpressed with everything in a way that's typical - but just lately, as i've dropped to zero mg, there's a broader spectrum of feeling - it's not all negative, just mostly negative - it's not that i feel anything positive, except maybe a hint that there's a sunny land attached to these new bleak vistas somewhere beyond the horizon - but i still worry that's wishful thinking - the thing is, it's so strange to feel anything close to crying, and crying is a little more satisfying than just tired, disappointed, frustrated listlessness

there's also a feeling of sickness, but like withdrawal sickness - which it is, isn't it? it's not that different from coming off a years-long meth binge, i've conditioned my brain to expect nothing but the state of synthetic serotonin regulation - now it's protesting loudly, and making me a little dizzy all the time, and a lot dizzy in spells a few seconds following the slightest movement or physical exertion - and there's a slight underlying nausea that feels somehow emotional as well - it's weird - some of it is inverse placebo / hypochondria, all of it psychosomatic in a literal sense!

seems that last jump from 25mg to 0 is an order of magnitude more difficult than the prior steps, as if just some amount of the medication in my system made a major difference, even if it was a third the normal amount

there's a few things keeping this from becoming a reckless stunt, first that it's starting to get vaguely spring-like in the outside world, so although it seems to me like the most unimpressive spring ever, coincidentally enough, and i can't remember ever being so blase about such a welcome change in weather, it's still making my surroundings a little less bleak, and not exacerbating the inner-gloom - second, the experience is giving me something to write about, it does feel like there's some purpose, beyond writing fodder, in wresting myself from the chemical regime, or at least trying to - naturally, people are reluctant to encourage me in this the way they've encouraged me in quitting other drugs - and i understand, because it's scary when you have no control over or vision into the mind that's meddling with itself, and thus, you worry about what might happen, what valleys of nervous malfunction might lie beyond the slope

really though, i'll just go back on the meds if it seems to be a bad course of action - but i need to be a little further on that course before i'm able to judge - and especially now, as i feel acute withdrawal, it hits home to me how zoloft is another substance that's controlled me, i'll grant in a far more benign way than others have, but not without its own malevolence - the violence with which its tentacles cling to my neurons is indicative of its control freak nature, and it makes me angry that i'm so beholden to it - i paid tribute every month at the pharmacy, dutifully swallowed pills each morning, so punctual, practically institutionalized myself - and it was my idea to get on this stuff, but i can barely remember the episode, it was so long ago, i think i just wanted to check it out, see if i could get a little better living through chemistry in the socially acceptable way - and now the ferocity of my brain's pushback makes me want to get this detox over with in a hurry, white-knuckle it and see what's on the other side - maybe nothing much, but being able to know one way or the other is a compulsion i have, insofar as i have any, which i don't - a function, a tick, a tock, smalltalk, getting smaller as it swells in perverse superfluous verbiage

frustration again, of writing crap, not being able to smooth out the awkward bunches in the sentences - lame landmass once again filling every horizon - good to know, i guess, if i want to feel outside the bounds of that desert, i could just tune into a sentimental dogfood commercial, or garden variety tv drama where i can't help caring about the characters even as i'm cursing the shittiness of the soundtrack, in trying to sound cool and current with a bunch of unnecessary and annoying trends - but what can you expect from me? i don't care for music much anymore, and good christ, how painful it is to pretend to care, or contrive something to say about somebody else's creation out of obligation