Gargantuan

Venlafaxine dose: 130mg.

Tired. A good day, a good week, but now nauseous with pain from an injury and acetaminophen don't cut it.

Massive cleanup yesterday. Apartment now looks almost liveable, but is ringed with full garbage bags that will have to be removed. Flies in here with the warmer weather.

The VFG prescribes watching a DVD and stop typing with your hurt arm, for god's sake.

venlafaxine dose: approximately 140mg

Speaking of 'tracks' in the mind is not just a quaint old saying. Ruts would be closer to the truth, deep furrows of habit. I have been attempting to divert some, and it's heavy labour. Actually it feels more like a sheepdog, one of those wonderful border collies, penning up recalcitrant merinos.

I realised last night that I'd dreamed about the same habitual thinking I was trying to avoid while awake. Stupid brain.

Mind of VFG: am not.

Old venlafaxine dose: 150mg.
New venlafaxine dose: 140mg.
10 minutes free weights.

I don't know if I can update everything that happened since my last post, so I'm just going to start in the middle somewhere.

I visited my psychologist and my psychiatrist yesterday, a few hours apart.

It's "Psychfriday"! Happy Psychfriday, the day when anything can be treated! Take a bow, dopaminergics, serotonergics, and noradrenergics everywhere.

The psychologist is a smart, compassionate woman who thinks I'm amusing because I'm 'training' her not to say things I find annoying, like "Did anything stand out to you about today?" at the end of a session. We talked about dichotomies mostly. The difficulties I have doing normal activities like showering and dressing myself paired with the difficulties experienced when I don't complete those tasks daily. Cleaning house vs not cleaning house. Exercising vs not exercising. Going outside vs staying in the hole with the blinds down.

The mind of the Very Fat Guy has no interest in the outside today. Or so he says.

I still don't know why I haven't died. It is as if I am being saved for something. The sense of purpose, oddly, remains, but it is directionless.

If you're wondering about the top of this post, I am trying a slow wean of the short half-life antidepressant Effexor, because I have a suspicion it is having no effect and the adverse effect profile is less than stellar. Adding low-dose exercise at the same time, and we'll see what the day brings.

I'm a registered nurse, by the way. My specialty is critical care nursing of children and babies. Pleased to meet you.

The mind of the Very Fat Guy is given to wonder if the children and babies think they're hallucinating when they wake up from anaesthesia and see him for the first time.

Labels: antidepressant, effexor, exercise, nursing, venlafaxine

That feeling from yesterday swelled and morphed into an overwhelming sense of doom.  I can't seem to shake it... can't find the joy today.

The Very Fat Guy is still Very Fat, but I don't mind today.  I will tomorrow.  Today I don't mind.

A good day to be working inside.

What a good weekend! Actually got things done. You know you've not
been too well when a good weekend consists of getting a few sacks of
rubbish out into the bins, going out for breakfast and reading the
paper, and writing. Maybe a couple hundred words (not counting
various blogs), but it's more than I get done most weekends.

Not perfect, but I'll take it.

I love breakfast. I don't much care what it is. Bacon and eggs, sure… eggs benedict, or a fresh bagel with avocado and smoked salmon. Rye toast and manuka honey. Hot black coffee.

I don't need to be stuffed, at breakfast. Breakfast is not the time for bingeing. It's the time for being outside and looking across the water, or down a busy morning street and watching the crowds go by. Reading the paper, finding out what the world's been up to while I've been ignoring it.

I don't have time for such luxuries today, but I'm still going to go make coffee and sit still for a few minutes. Let the mind of the Very Fat Guy stray to the end of the week and the blue sky blanketing the city this morning.

How the hell did I survive?

I'm 34 years old. How did I not die yet? I have all the risk
factors, in spades. I don't know anyone beyond a passing hello in the
hallway. My apartment is dirty. God only knows what devastating
bacteria are growing in the kitchen sink, waiting to pounce on my
struggling immune system. Suicidal ideation has been a companion many
times in my life. But for some reason, I'm not dead yet.

You ever get the feeling something is keeping you alive, that you're
not done with whatever it is you're supposed to do with your time
here?

I get that feeling, but then you have to worry... what happens if I
finally figure it out, get it done, and then like the car at the end
of the Blues Brothers movie, I disintegrate from accumulated damage?

I think the idea is to make sure you're 90 years old before that
happens. Not sure I've got that long. Still, the sun came up today.

Changing back to a stock template, till I can sit down and customise properly.

I've noticed distinct phases, which I have come to think of as sunphase and moonphase, in my state of mind.

I think they might be linked to the weather... this whole Seasonal Afective Disorder thing. Looks like I'm dependent on the sun which is odd as I like rainy days, snow, thunderstorms, lightning, fog.

So it's been moonphase for a few months, and the Very Fat Guy has been in hibernation. Batten down the hatches. But you know, it didn't last so very long, and wasn't a complete disaster. The sun comes rolling around again. Seems I'm learning to ride out the bad weather.

Recently I met two strange women. Not strange peculiar, strange new. One is a 'text buddy' who has SMS'd me back and forth for quite awhile now, and we caught up for a coffee on a sunny-turned-windy day last week. Walked and talked. I suspect there's a buddy-type relationship there which would be nice, but just the sniff of perhaps a little something more... stay tuned.

Another, an arranged meeting through one of those introductions sites which I joined in a moment of weakness. Coffee again, it's been a caffeinated week! Some connection on an intellectual level (I love meeting people who can write) but I doubt much more than that. We're walking back to our respective apartments, which by chance are quite close together. Mind of Very Fat Guy tries to absorb data and come to correct conclusion:

I have no instincts. I don't know signals. I can't read the signs. Too long away from civillisation. Might as well have spent the last decade in the jungles of the Congo for all I know about talking to people.

Scratch that. Would've met more people in jungles of Congo.

I think I'm getting the polite brush-off. Am I? It's hard to tell. "You've got my number." What does that mean? I should use it? She's going to be very busy, she says... surely a hint.

You've got to laugh, don't you? I could be a runway superhunk and I'd still have no clue.

But then, I hear that cluelessness is not completely unknown in the male population, so there may be hope for me yet.

write.

Why is that?

I have discovered a cache, at the foot of my bed, obscured by a table.

A cache of socks.

It seems that when I get home, exhausted, I kick off my shoes and socks, and lie down.

So that's where they all went!

names

Michelle left a note worrying about calling me 'Creature'. I don't necessary think of it as a derogatory term. After all, I am to some extent a creature of habit. I'm often a creature of instinct, and there are days when I think of myself as a creature of the sea. I'm clearly an odd creature, usually a timid creature, and on rare occasions a fearless creature. Naturally I enjoy my creature comforts!

And yet, the mind of the Very Fat Guy recognises that

there is the monstrous within us that must be wrestled with (or embraced).

sun creature

The name in fact comes from some verse I wrote at the end of last year, when things were really beginning to change.

aftermath

i am a creature
of the sun
shapes plucked from shopsigns
twist whirling in my
seeing space
i am a creature
of heat and hard
bone
the furnace now is me.

every day,
every interaction
brings its own addition
to my core;

selfishly i make them mine,
for i am of the deserving ones
who sat in silence,
i who went to die
became my other,
lost a brother
and regained
colour and the juice of oceans,
the blood of leaves

i fought at shadows and
lost;
i cast aside a mountain and
took flight!

now i see the flux
it is me
i flow past, behind, in tandem with
adversaries, and in my wake they douse themselves;

i am a creature of the sun;
it never lost its way
and i have heard
its flamboyant cries
again.

I know there are many other deserving ones who sit in silence. I don't know what can be done about that yet, but I hope someday soon I will understand.

I went out this morning to look at the world, have some breakfast and watch the water for a moment or two. Cold and bright, an ice-blue sky, hard sharp-edged buildings with perfect outlines. Sunlight-speckled waves.

I wish I lived somewhere snowy.

I've been getting the "You've lost so much weight!" remarks the last week or so. It's nice, but I wish they wouldn't. I think it warns my brain that something good might be about to happen, and it naturally veers toward doom and disaster again. The more static I am, the less I move each day, the easier it becomes to continue the slide.

How do we get that way, where we seek ruin and shun good fortune?

At a crucial point, age eight or nine, do we decide that loss and isolation are safer?

Tomorrow morning, first thing, supermarket. If I walk along the foreshore, I know the day will go well no matter what else happens. Mornings are important.

Just watched an old episode. At the end, the writers speaking as Chris:

"I know most of you have been where I am tonight: the crash site of unrequited love. You've asked yourself, "How did I get here? What was it about her? Was it her smile? Was it the way she crossed her legs, the turn of her ankle, the poignant vulnerability of her slender wrist. What are these elusive and ephemeral things that ignite passion in the human heart? That's an age-old question. It's perfect food for thought on a bright midsummer's night. Hey, you said it best Will:

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind
And therefore is winged cupid painted blind

Yeah."

The unhealthy part comes when every day is like this. When every love is unrequited. After awhile you start to fall into a pattern. You obsess for a week or two, knowing deep down nothing will come of it. And eventually it fades.

I often wonder what it must feel like to be in a normal body and not know what's going to happen; to avoid that sense of inevitability, throw the dice and take your chances. What possibilities must dance in their minds, with blinded cupid flinging arrows at random in the hopes that one will strike home.

But after awhile, after years of it, you begin to feel as if you don't want to inflict yourself on anyone. And that's where the rot sets in.

Some days, more often these days, I can say "fuck it" and get on with things. Not so much tonight. Talk about wallowing! Pass me the serotonin, if you'd be so kind.