I wasn’t feeling off at the moment, but I was on the way either up or down. Saturday Karen took me to the Oak Bay Free Clinic and I asked to see a doctor.

Nurse: Do you have your CareCard?
me: Nope.
Nurse: Picture ID?
me: Nope.
Nurse: Well, I need to know who you are…
me: Can’t you do that thing were I guess the info in my file so you know it’s me?
Nurse: Fine. But next time bring your card. Reason for visit?
me: Mental health.

After a quick chat — and a talking-to about going off my previous meds — I was put on escitalopram, “probably for the rest of your life.” To supplement the first couple weeks’ “getting-to-know-you” phase of the drug, wherein it can actually make symptoms worse I was given what, to my untrained eye, looked like a dangerous amount of lorazepam.

I’m stoned on it right now.

You might have noticed, or not, my self-reports of increasingly-strange behavior on this site: staying up for days at a time, getting virulently angry at the media, making political arguments that might not have made sense, etc. I understand some of your newsreaders caught me writing something very maudlin which I sat-up-deleted-what-the-fuck! the next morning, to no avail.

Stephen Fry made a documentary about his Cyclothymia which I watched around the time of the last gallery opening (after which I showed some hypomanic symptoms). The documentary ends with a girl talking about how depression doesn’t make your writing more interesting — true depression makes writing impossible.

That resonated.

Along with the sleepless lead up to the opening and my frenetic pub activities afterward and my family history of mood disorders I thought I’d better see someone.

Hence the escitalopram: A catchall SSRI to see if anxiety and depression account for my (I think several) issues. The theory there is to reduce anxiety and treat for depression and see if mania still surfaces. If it does, we go from there. I’d also like to look into ADHD or similar meds to let me focus on projects I start (creating lots of ideas and then executing none of them is both a bipolar and ADHD thing).

The lorazepam is to stabilize the stabilizer. Escitalopram can get dark before the dawn. It should take about five weeks to kick in according to the forums. The ‘zepram is to smooth the bumps: Raze the hot shuddering highs to bury the dank cold lows and form a zombie-highway medium.

It’s actually quite pleasant.

Here’s a little couplet I hallucinated Coleridge-styles last night lounging on a lady’s loveseat:

Floating gently down the stream,
Life on benzodiazopenes,

Yeah: They’re pretty good — relaxing. I get the impression the neurotypicals are having some fun times.

The trick, the cliché of all psychiatric clichés, is getting the patient to take the meds. I’m already running into weird kinds of resistance, both in my head and out. People want to be sure that I’m taking the Ativan responsibly, which I am — though this is totally subjective. I could take less, I could take more: What is “unmanageable” anxiety?

Already I want to cut the Cipralex on the theory that my mood swings weren’t that unmanageable… And then I have a neurotic freakout, fix it with Ativan, and agree to give the meds time to do their work.

What is a lack of concentration and what is a lack of planning? What is happiness and what is mania? What is a “normal” level of depression? What is a “manageable” level of anxiety? These are the gray areas I’m spending time niggling.

Last, biggest: What is normal? Or perhaps better: What is adaptive? That’s a question the doctors are helping me with.