the usual self-prescription and half-promise to myself

Everyday From Now On:

• holy basil & ashwagandha tinctures – once I get money (hopefully) I will add rhodiola to this, as it also helps to reduce stress and stress-related heart problems (eg. nervous tachycardia, which is probably not doing me any favors; heart attack at age 49 like everyone else in my family?)
• oatstraw tea
• B-vitamins (super stress B-complex)
• vitamin D
• maybe something else to help tone the nervous system but I haven’t decided yet
• not St. John’s wort because MAOIs really scare me and I wouldn’t be able to eat yogurt and fuck that
• leafy greens! brain food! raw stuff!

For a while I was considering asking to be put on antidepressants because my mind is whizzing around and my anxiety is overtaking my body to the point where I can’t distinguish whether there is something horribly wrong with me, physical disease-wise, or whether I’m projecting all of this health anxiety into symptoms that have magically appeared with stress and back-breaking faux-self-diagnoses. In any case, I was feeling terrified last week of slipping into some pseudo-psychotic state of hallucinating (like, Ranger Dave was not walking around my hospital room, okay) and being pummeled by a bunch of really fucked-up, neverending thoughts and my brain feeling fuzzy and difficult to muck through. I was also in the hospital for five days, listening incessantly to Off With Their Heads and watching crappy sitcoms and not having much human contact after being told off by an ex-partner who is a terrible person, so that probably wasn’t really helping, either.

I’ve realized that the well-known anti-anxiety drugs out there are generally sedative, habit-forming acute treatments like benzodiazepines, which I honestly wouldn’t term as “mood stabilizers” because they don’t work to change brain chemistry in a sustainable way; they work by slowing down brain activity, effectively just doping you up and leaving you there in an addictive state of needing to maintain and increase doses to combat anxiety (they are also known to exacerbate depression and suicidal thoughts). Which I suppose is what some people need, obvs, especially with acute panic disorders and such, but every time that I’ve tried to self-medicate with similar herbs in the past, like passionflower or lemon balm or valerian or any of those “anti-anxiety” herbs that are pretty much just tranquilizers, it hasn’t actually helped me to deal with shit but more just to shut myself off, which is the opposite of what I need, given my constant state of snail-like inertia. This led me to realize that a lot of the allopathic Valium shit has fallen out of favor in treating anxiety, and these days those sorts of ailments are often managed with anti-depressants like MAOIs and SSRIs, which are less addictive and tailored more for chronic, long-term treatment of various mental disorders. By altering brain chemistry, they actually help with depression, many forms of anxiety, OCD, and y’know, all of that shit that is wonky with my brain.

I decided, however, to try to find an anti-depressant-like herbal regimen to try out for a while before I consider asking for a presciption. Not that there’s any shame in going the medication route if that’s what I need, but I’m trying to force myself to step outside of my comfort zone and deal with things head-on and not go running away from things that I might be able to deal with if I at least give it a try; also I am scared of addiction (hence my over-the-top aversion to alcohol) and the numerous other side effects of common anti-depressants. In any case, it’s been evident to me now more than ever that my levels of anxiety are severely fucking up my body-body (not just my head), not to mention the obnoxious inconvenience of going to an hour-long police tactics workshop with a focus on DC mobilizations and freaking the fuck out and going home and crying for the next five hours. Like, yeah, I’ve gotta do something about this. Besides the mental fucked-up shit and the wah-wah-wahhhh, my heart rate is constantly through the roof (usually somewhere between 90 and 140), I have pretty constant irritable bowels due to nervousness (which goes along with the mysterious nausea thing, I guess), and the either horribly debilitating neurodegenerative disease that I’m developing, or its stress-related red herrings of twitching and floppy and cramping muscles. Which I’m on the fence about going to the doctor for, considering that I am very close to being broke (thanks to three months of doctor’s appointments that cleaned out my bank account, and no job) and also because I’m sure that I’ll be laughed out of the office and be brushed off with that patenalistic doctor thing of “oh, you’re just crazy, here’s an anti-depressant prescription,” which, the prescription may be totally valid, but they always say it in such a throwing-a-bone, awful patronizing way, like they couldn’t possibly believe that the mind and body are legitimately connected, and mental issues aren’t real bodily issues, just, y’know, craziness, weak people, etc.

In any case, whether it’s an organic thing or a made-up-in-my-head thing, the truth remains that there’s someting seriously wrong with me, something that needs to be addressed, because my body is a far cry from homeostasis right now, and it’s definitely contributing to this vicious cycle of health anxiety and regular anxiety and probably more health anxiety because of the regular anxiety. And my goal is to work on staying constant with good nutrition and supplements and exercise and social-time for the next few weeks and see if that helps at all. Then maybe talk to my therapist about going down another road if I need to do that.

Anyway, now onto mailing out more resumes and cards proclaiming certain cuties as cuties.