I'm not sure who reads this or if people get anything out of it, but I like writing, and haven't done much for pleasure this past school year.
I started taking prozac December of 2011, so I've been on it a little over a year now. It has been pretty amazing. It's part of the reason I haven't blogged much, because I haven't been as depressed as often. I went from being suicidal countless times a year, to between 2-3 times since I've started taking it. I never imagined that would happen. It's difficult to say what exactly the prozac does to keep me from being suicidal, but I'm glad it does. One interesting effect this has had on me is to somewhat devalue therapy for me personally. I certainly gained one or two useful insights over my many years of therapy with several different therapists, but absolutely nothing that was helpful in keeping me from being super depressed and suicidal. The prozac very quickly almost entirely turned that off. Clearly everything is not perfect because I've still been depressed enough to be suicidal a couple times, and depressed to a lesser extent many times. Some ideas I learned from therapy can be useful for my milder depression occasionally. The only bad thing about the prozac is it makes me really tired. Not tired enough to be too debilitating, but tired enough to be annoying. I'm not sure I want to stay on it for long, but I'm also not sure I want to change drugs. I'm sure my thinking will evolve over time in regards to both medication and therapy.
I am not thrilled with where I find myself in life right now. I graduated from a school I love which was a cool accomplishment, but I'll really miss it, and have no job and am living with my parents, which is much more stressful than being at school. Last summer I was fired from a menial job I loved working at, which was terrible for my self-esteem, and then I couldn't find another menial job, which was also bad for me. I want to work because I want to make money and not live with my parents, but I don't want to work because if I can't do a job as simple as the one I was fired from, what can I possibly do well. I do have my favorite job coming up for two and a half weeks this summer at Duke, but that still leaves the rest of the year where I need to do something.
So overall, there's good and bad things going on, which I guess is just life. Next week I'm going to blog about some of my thoughts on disability services for the physically and mentally handicapped.
