Anxiety

Being treated for mental illness with medicines is not as easy as, say, being treated for an infection with an antibiotic. There’s an amazing and somewhat horrifying amount of guesswork involved. There’s no blood test for depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or the slew of other things that effect a broad swath of humanity (yet). There’s no way to measure what exactly is lacking, or overdone, or exactly what needs adjusted, to bring someone back towards the mean.

(note: none of these are currently true, to my knowledge) If I fall asleep on a plane, they won’t wake me up when we get where we’re going, and will just fly off again with me on-board, specifically, to Denver, Colorado. Soreness in my arm means that I am having a severe allergic reaction to my tetanus/whooping cough booster shot, and my arm is about to fall off. A co-worker will never speak to me again, because my husband annoyed him.

Well, comfortably is probably a stretch. It is surprisingly hard to get involved with things these days, though. I am struggling to keep engaged with things that I used to enjoy, finding myself just not able to find the energy to get emotionally engaged in the sports I have loved, the hobbies I enjoyed, even playing games with my husband. I find myself retreating into reading a lot, mostly familiar stories by familiar authors I don’t have to put much effort into.