Playing With Fire

I want to go off Zyprexa.

Well, I do. I’m in a major creative dry spell and I want to feel something strongly enough to be able to write about it. I also want to throw off this lassitude which is keeping me from shaking up my job search and thinking outside the freaking box. It’s weird how I can get so excited about a football game and yet have so little enthusiasm for everyday life (although I’m still pretty stoked about the possibility of that writing job). Maybe if I weren’t on so many medications…..

Of course, that might be a tough sell with Dr. Awesomesauce, as much as he doesn’t want to keep me on Z forever. I’ve already been on it for six months, and was on more than off of it for the three months prior to that. However, he just reordered three more months’ worth of it so I don’t think he’s going to take me off anytime soon. Still, he may be OK with me trying to cut back a little, even though it didn’t go so well last time. I hate being such a slug in the mornings…..it practically takes a crowbar to pry me out of the bed, no matter how early I take my nighttime meds or how well I sleep. That won’t do if I get a day job. I remember having difficulty staying awake at my desk during my last job, and it’s never really gotten better. Dialing back the dosage might fix that.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything without Dr. A’s knowledge and approval. I know only too well what he’d say, and I don’t want to disappoint him. He can shame me almost to tears with a certain facial expression, and I don’t want to see that. (Funny how he keeps me on the straight and narrow even between appointments.) I also know I’d be risking the reappearance of Manic Barbie…..but sometimes I just can’t help missing her, or wanting a taste of the wild, wild world I used to live in. The depressions are awful, and mania itself carries its own set of problems; but a little hypomania would be so refreshing!

I know even THINKING about this is like playing with fire, and when I think of how bad my mood swings used to be, I wonder why I’d want to take a chance of going back to those days. I remember the time I crashed and burned after a particularly severe manic episode; I sat up in bed long after Will had gone to sleep, crying in the dark and swinging one leg over the side for hours. I ended up sneaking into the bathroom around four AM and calling the suicide hotline because I needed someone to talk to and I didn’t want to wake Will up and scare him.

That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore. It hasn’t happened in a year and a half, and it seems even longer ago than that. I keep telling myself that a brief, delicious ‘high’ isn’t worth going through something like that again, and that the Vitamin Z is responsible for this relatively long period of remission. What kind of fool would even think about screwing that up just to chase the high?

Thinking about it, however, is all I’m going to do. I won’t strike that match, no matter how tempting it is. I promise.