Medicated Me

I'm on my third day now with the little pink pills.

I'm not sure yet if I can feel a difference. I know it commonly takes a few weeks, so I'm not concerned. I feel good, but I had felt good for a couple days before starting them, so who knows? I could be in an up cycle, or it could be a placebo effect. Don't care. I am not one to look a gift placebo effect in the mouth.

Wha??

Also, night before last, I was having trouble sleeping and thought, "Well, this is what he prescribed the anxiety meds for," so I took one.

I have tried twice now to explain how mind-blowing the effect was on me, but so far have failed. All I've managed to come up with is this:

I felt like 90% of my brain had just been shut off. It was the most unbelievable silence I can ever imagine experiencing. All of the voices were gone. And I don't mean voices in the multiple personalities way (yeah, yeah, get all the Cybil jokes out of your systems now, people). I mean that I normally spend a good chunk of my time and energy trying to keep my anxiety at bay because when I let down my guard (like at night, when I'm trying to sleep), all the unspeakable worries come streaming in and form a giant downward spiral that sucks me into the bad, dark places, and I can't fight my way out.

But that was all gone. I was 100% in the present for, I think, the first time in my adult life. I have never felt so there. For the sake of academic experimentation, I actually tried to come up with something to be anxious about and couldn't.

But I didn't feel drugged. I didn't feel spacy or out of it or medicated or sluggish. Well, I was sleepy; I was trying to go to bed, after all. So I'll have to see what it's like some time when I take it during the day.

But what I keep trying to figure out--again, as I had to clarify for Ouiser, not because I'm worried about it, but just out of academic, dorky interest and curiosity--is that what all y'all "normal" people feel like all the time? Or did my medicated pendulum swing past normal all the way to the other end of the spectrum? If that's how the rest of the world gets to live all the time, y'all are dang lucky. It was pretty sweet.