Note: The medication I was taking is called flupentixol (Wikipedia).

I had to dump what I was originally writing to share my recent experience with a “new” medication. I put new in quotes because it was a medication I’ve been taking via a shot for the last couple of years. For months my doctor has been telling me that they’re going to run out soon and they finally did last month. He gave me tablets I could take instead of the shot and… I didn’t trust them so I didn’t take them. I saw my doctor last Monday and told him I didn’t take them and his “feelings were hurt” (he was joking). I told him I’d try them this time and things went terribly. I started taking them this past Friday night and things were fine Saturday and Sunday morning because I don’t have a schedule. Most weekend mornings I play Helldivers 2 with my brother, his wife, and my wife. That’s exactly what we did on Saturday morning. Sunday morning I ended up sleeping for ten and a half hours which maybe should have raised suspicion. Everything fell apart Monday morning.

On Monday and Tuesday, I don’t need to be at work until 4:30 p.m., so I have plenty of time to do my morning routine, write, work, and relax. All of that got blasted out of the water. Monday morning all I could do was sleep. I barely pulled myself out of the house to exercise. I mostly laid on the couch and watched YouTube. It was terrible. I did go to bed late the night before, so I thought that might have been the problem. I made sure I went to bed early Monday night so Tuesday would be good and… NOPE! Tuesday morning was worse than Monday morning. I didn’t even make it outside. It was all YouTube and zoning out.

After that I was like “Fuck these meds!” And decided, with the blessing of my wife, to stop taking them. Wednesday morning I had a day of withdrawal. I woke up fine but felt jittery. Like I drank 3 cups of coffee. I decided to be lazy that morning just because of how strange I felt. That brings us to today, Thursday morning, and…

I feel great! Just like I was feeling last week. It was depressing having my routines and habits crushed because of medication that’s ultimately supposed to help me feel better. I haven’t experienced this in a while, but it’s one of the struggles with mental health. Going back and forth with different medicines. Sometimes you have to try a medicine for a while before you know if it works for you or not. Sometimes that trial period means being fatigued for weeks, or months, as your body gets used to the medicine. I’ve gone through this before but… I’m just not down with doing it again for this particular medicine. This medicine was originally being used as a “break glass in an emergency” type of medicine when my energy was high. It eventually just became another one of the four (so five in total) different medicines I was taking. I never liked it and always had the sneaking suspicion that it was negatively affecting my mood. I started this 108-day cycle with that med mostly out of my system and I was happy the shot wasn’t available… so I could just stop taking the pills I suppose.

That’s the end of that story I guess. I suppose I’ll add a thought about how much SO many things can affect your mood. Sleep, food, work, relationships, exercise, cell phones (endless scrolling), etc. I guess it’s kind of important to have a baseline to understand what your mood is usually like so you can understand how different things might be affecting it.

I’m going to give a shout-out to How We Feel.org. It’s a really professional, scientifically-backed app for tracking your mood. It’s also free. The shift in my mood was so great that I probably would have noticed it without tracking on the app, but the app did make it clear that things were off.

The prompt for this photo was “I need an image for my blog post. This is the post:” along with a copy and paste of everything above. This is the first image it made. When you pay for ChatGPT it has a memory of past conversations and it affects image creation. Ever since I asked it to make me at a desk with a journal in black and white, it loves making black and white images with a guy holding a journal. Maybe next week I’ll tell it not to access the memories when making the image and see how that goes.