Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
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Category: Depression
The War Inside
Posted on June 6, 2017 in Depression Silicon Valley Uncertainty Writing Exercises
I still wonder if I did the right thing, if I did any good in the world.
Seeking Help
Posted on April 24, 2017 in Depression Psychotropics Writing/Darkness
I woke up one morning, turned on my side, and said to Lynn “I’m sick.” Oh, I had sought help before this, many times from therapists and, one time, a psychiatrist. Encouraged by my mother, I tried the bootstrap approach where you somehow reached into your soul and made the depression go away.
What had preceded this bout? Several months of going from town to town speaking about the war in Yugoslavia and how people could support the peace movement over there. The subject had worn me down, eroded my belief in myself. I stopped returning phone calls, stopped believing in my own intelligence, my worthiness to be human. The period came to a soft but painful landing like running into a beanbag chair and feeling nothing of the collision except a rash of pain. I was not rested. I slept badly. I stayed up in the night and stared at the ceiling. I did not even have the energy to hate my condition. It was as if I did not have a proper body, just a jelly log that could do nothing but lie in bed. Who could pull themselves out of this by sheer force of will when there was no will to have.
I had heard about this new drug, Prozac, and I wanted to try it. Kaiser required that I make the appointment myself, so as Lynn watched, I picked up the phone and arranged to see the psychiatric triage nurse. I feared that she would see me as a fake, but she passed me on to the psychiatrist who prescribed Prozac.
I was cured the next day. Uh oh.
A Time I Shared Something Personal
Posted on April 23, 2017 in Depression Humiliation Privacy
Trust was lost.
Events Before My First Episode
Posted on April 21, 2017 in ADD Childhood Depression Writing/Darkness
I was a tangerine.
Senegal and other places
Posted on October 23, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Depression Encounters Mania Vacation 2015
I’ve been in three time zones this trip
Sandra Bland and Ableism
Posted on July 23, 2015 in Courage & Activism Depression Stigma Suicide Violence
Black lives with mental illness matter, too.
Why I Still Fear My Illness
Posted on June 30, 2015 in Depression Mania
The future remains an unprinted page whereupon there are no answers.
The Sickness of May and June
Posted on May 4, 2015 in Body Language Depression
Curses on the May Disorder. Curses on June Gloom. Sixty days before it passes. Sixty not quite miserable, annoying days.
Accountability and the Grim Facts of Depression
Posted on April 22, 2015 in Anxiety Attitudes Compassion Depression Guilt
The black spiral literally knocked me off my feet. I decided on my own to stop taking Geodon — a horrible drug that left me dizzy for all but the last three to four hours of my waking day — and I crashed and crashed hard. My bedroom was my habitation; my cats my constant companions. I felt the after effects for months — a dimness of the world, a heaviness on the brain, and difficulty forming thoughts. Shortly after I emerged from more than a week of never moving from the bed, I wrote:
I count nine days of nothing but turning on my bed, sleeping on the best of them, just clutching blankets on the worst. I run back and forth writing, thinking, and hiding under the covers for this one. That’s my activity and I need to make more. I’d be at the gym working out except I took two Ativan and do not wish to risk the drive. And it is too hot and unshaded for the walk around the condos that I have made my regimen.
Coming “back” implies seemingly ridiculous victories. Today you brush your teeth. You take one less Ativan. You go for that walk twice at dawn like you should. You write in your journal. You blog. All in between visits to the bed, your teacher and your protector.
Just yesterday, I heeded studies which suggest that spirituality helps those suffering from depression and mixed and remixed the books next to my bed until I found a pocket Buddhist companion. This (translated into the objects of depression) made sense to me:
I am not my depression. My depression is not me. The world is not my depression.
This doesn’t say that I lie under the covers for not discernible cause and it doesn’t say to stop taking the meds as appropriate. It simply separates my disease in the same manner as one might separate the eye or the ear. My eye is not me. I am not my eye. My eye is not the world.
We get into an ownership thing in Western thinking — if not throughout the whole world. We own our body parts and our diseases rather than seeing them as causes. They are neither separate of us nor part of us. They are facts.
This gives me personal relief from this nine day good-riddance if rid of it that I am. And I’d rather not talk more about this. It makes sense to me.
Facets
Posted on April 17, 2015 in Depression Mania Memory Reflections Stigma
What could they have said to a raging bullshit artist?
Can You Talk Someone Out of a Depression?
Posted on April 11, 2015 in Depression Therapy
You are dealing with an irrational disease not a philosophical system.
