Mojo Missin Madness

After meeting a good friend for dinner today, I realized something. But first, let me tell you how it started.

She shares her emotional life with me and I share my emotional life with her. To me, that is sharing life.I often have this feeling, like, just underneath the veil of all these physical life things like cars mortgages, pretty hair and bills, there is this whole other undercurrent of an emotional life. Perhaps it's what Carl Jung called the subconscious and the collective subconscious. Either way I am convinced it's there, like a strong river, motivating our words and actions, dreams, self-permission to dream and our identities.

I like sharing that part of myself with others and I consider that intimacy. Sometime that part is celebrating, sometimes she is grieving, sometimes she is just processing or observing. Whatever it is, it's precious to be able to truly allow another to witness it and to witness another as they truly LIVE.

But today, as has been now for a few weeks, the theme to our conversation was that we can share our innermost life with each other. And this friend told me, as did another friend last night, that they really appreciate my emotionality and my realness. And I told them about a woman I know who is in her 50s, who is getting pressure from her husband and family to take antidepressant drugs. I nor she think that she wouldn't benefit from them, she very well may, but the bottom line was that her suffering and authenticity makes everyone uncomfortable. They want her to have a good life and do what they do; go out to dinner, eat gluten-FULL bread, enjoy shallow social patter. And she doesn't. She is real. Like the Velveteen Rabbit. She says she feels like she just discovered who she was at 50; that was about 6 years ago. Then she was offered the red or blue pill and she took whichever one it is that shows you out of the Matrix.

And those of us who are so deeply and truly committed to "realness" often feel isolated and alone, because what we observe is, that, rater than spend their resources discovering who they are and what motivates them, how they can contribute to society and more, most people spend their emotional resources in suppressing and oppressing who they truly are and that seems to be the culture we live in. Perhaps why Brene brown's work on vulnerability has taken such a foothold and is considered so counterculture. But really it's just research on how our brains are wired.

This theme also runs through the AVATAR. I often feel like all I have to do is "drop in" via meditation or intention and I am in the primal world of Pandora.

So maybe we are counterculture or maybe we are the normal ones, confused by the illusion of fancy cars and condos in Miami. It's not that we don't enjoy those things or find satisfaction in them, it's just that the satisfaction they bring doesn't quench our true thirst for self-discovery and the desire to touch, oh if only just a little, this great mystery that we all swim in, clueless and naked.

It's not that we judge others for how they swim. But I have gotten considerable pressure from my family, as my older friend does to go on medicine, the pressure I get is to "just move on" and appreciate life. The message is that there is something wrong with my process and my suffering and perhaps there is but who is to say? I just want to be able to share an emotional snapshot of my life at any given moment and for that to be allowed, welcomed, desired, OK.

But it seems it makes many people uncomfortable but thankfully others find it refreshing.

Like the other new mom that lives nearby. The first few times I saw her at the end of her pregnancy and in the early weeks of her birth, her and her husband seemed very chill and happy. They were going to the zoo, nursing was OK, everything was pink, I felt like a failure in their company which is why I didn't pursue a connection even though she lives a few doors down. But because she lives a few doors down, when I started needing Valium to get to sleep, I sent a text that I was struggling and would she like to walk and she came over the very same day and the first thing she said as she walked in the door was that she had started Zoloft. And that she had been attending a postpartum group. It seems like the realness of the moms at the postpartum group and her own struggles had finally forced her to strip off her false pretenses and she shared with me that when she told her mother she started medication, her mother quickly changed the subject.

As for me I feel equal terror and gratitude for the wakes of PPD becoming a mother has left behind. I think it's because for the last 8 years I have been struggling with a sensory overload and as my acupuncturist calls it a "global activation". I had depression but I was afraid to treat it with meds. I did everything natural you can think of; acupuncture, meditation, yoga, massage, and on and on and on. All of these things helped, but nothing got me over the "hump" of just not feeling alive, feeling like life had frozen still.

This is how I saw my mother and her mother deal with life. After the trauma of my grandfather's death when my mom was 5, life froze and everyone was perpetually stuck in grief. I blamed all of them and hated them for it, but now I see it was also at least some degree of mental illness. Seeing myself here I gain two insights; first that my  mother had profound depression, anxiety and some OCD and that my life as a teen and pre-teen would have been considerably better had she treated it, possibly with meds. I do remember that when menopause hit her she took Paxil for 3 yrs and our relationship was better than usual. And second that with my history of trauma and predisposition to these conditions, I cannot ignore the reality that medication is probably my next step.

I am so encouraged by the fact that in my middle trimester I started nortryptaline for migranes and I have barely had a migrane since; just once when I overdid the salt and the next day was a heat wave. But considering the sleep deprivation and stress of motherhood I am extremely grateful to say that there have been no migranes.

Perhaps increasing the nortryptaline or starting another SSRI or SNRI will allow for even more relief with the chronic pain, anxiety, insomnia and reoccurring thoughts. I just want my life back. I make a life wish to thrive. I am afraid of SSRI side effects but I am also willing to take a leap of faith because I want to be calm and happy and feel good in my body. I do notice that taking most seratonin receptor agonists really helps the body tension and aches. I am excited about the prospects!!!!

All I can do is face the problem and handle it. So that's what I am doing. I am increasing the nortryptaline to 25 mg. I am at 10 mg + 2 ml now and there is 2 mg per ml so I am taking apx 14 mg.

Thank you God,

Amen