(no subject)

[greenstorm]

The writing part of my mind is still offline, or rather, resting comfortably with no real desire to do anything. It's quiet and calm in here for the most part.

Most of the sertraline side-effects have subsided, with the exception of a couple: I get long, very intense... I guess panic attacks? ...where my freeze/flop response (as in fight, flight, freeze, flop) turns on for a couple hours. After that I get really tired and need to nap it off. This is happening maybe 1 day out of 3? And it usually occurs in the mornings.

I'm still a lot sleepier than normal, which is nice when I'm able to have naps during the day. If I keep very caught up on sleep it's not so cad; I'm much more sensitive to any missing or disturbed sleep though.

My skin occasionally still does the extreme tingling thing; restless legs is unbearable without supplemental magnesium but as long as I take magnesium supplements it seems to be ok.

On the benefits side: my mind feels calm, stable, and like it has skin again; it's not thrown around by any tiny twitch in the internal or external environment. I feel safe; the last several months before this, on the combined birth control pills, were definitely very hard and very scary and I wasn't sure I'd make it through. I have these side effects now that aren't great, but I'm not concerned about myself anymore. This isn't white-knuckling; it's observation.

I've been keeping on the birth control pill at the same time, in part because I wanted to see how long I'd bleed (roughly 45-50 days in a row, ugh), in part because if the sertraline worked while I was on the pills it would work at the worst part of my cycle (I am assuming) and it has. I think it might be time to release the birth control now and see what my mind is like during the swing of a cycle (assuming my cycles return to normal). My house is very much missing the cleaning days of my cycle, and I'm curious about how everything would respond. It might be super difficult to tell that I'm going to bleed without intense mood cues? Will I get the sunny expansive ovulation feelings still?

I definitely have a lot more inertia than normal. I'm musing on these things, not feeling driven to try them immediately.

My PDA is also manifesting much differently. Because I can see things coming in my mind, the strategy of just doing something and not thinking about it first isn't working as well, so I'm getting much less done. I'll have to remember other strategies; certainly I think my capacity is less and I need to adapt my life to be a little more spacious.

Anyhow, wanted to get this into the record. It's a busy couple weeks right now but I always regret not recording things.