I’m having some difficulty with my next post on gender, partly because, as I cannot stress enough, I am not an expert. It’ll probably be another couple days. In the meantime I do recommend ContraPoints’ recent video Transtrenders, though, for people who’d like to hear about trans theory from an actual expert (however fervently she may claim not to care).
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Today is the memorial of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. I have always been fond of the Carmelite tradition: The Dark Night of the Soul by St John of the Cross (the poem, not the full mystical manual) was one of my first tastes of Catholic mysticism, and it carried me through some extremely black midnights of my own as a teenager grappling with sexuality and faith. I nearly took him as my patron saint, and one of the special pleasures of my parish is that our altar houses a relic of his. Given my voracious unchastity, I don’t really feel able to wear the Brown Scapular; but I still turn to St John of the Cross and St Teresa in prayer, and now and again I even get wild and read them.
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My friend Joey Prever is getting surgery soon for some back and foot issues. If you’d say a prayer for him, that’d be cool of you. Incidentally, he was recently interviewed by the Convertigo podcast, discussing his family’s faith journey and his own.
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I’ve been grappling with symptoms of depression again, so I finally got my Zoloft refill. I forgot how much it messes with sleep: it doesn’t so much keep you from sleeping as make you awake, which I expect can’t be great for you but doesn’t actually feel bad, and my depression manifests partly as insomnia anyway so it’s not like it’s interfering with sleep I’d otherwise be getting. A much bigger aspect of depression, though, is a lack of motivation; people tend to think of depression as being sad, when it’s much more a matter of being numb. That involves you in a kind of abstract sadness of course, but it’s a very different experience.
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I have heard, though I have not verified, that ICE (which, fuck ICE) has gone as far as setting up fake Grindr profiles to entrap illegal immigrants (which, actually don’t fuck ICE, it will end badly). So if you’re on Grindr—which I don’t recommend, but if you are—and you either are undocumented, or could be assumed to be undocumented by a racist ICE agent … uh, be extra careful, I guess? Deleting the app would be better. Do that.
I am certainly no psychiatrist, but if you notice rather detrimental side effects from a specific brand, why not switch to another? These days there are many to choose from and not all are of the “SSRI” type. A lot of mental health treatment means finding the right medication “cocktail” so to speak that works best for you. Have you discussed these adverse effects with your doctor?
ReplyDeleteAlso, it may not be the best thing to just stop and start or start and stop anti-depressants as if they were aspirin. From my limited understanding of how they work they have to be graduated, again not something to attempt on one’s own. This is your brain, after all, and these drugs alter brain chemistry. Not something to fool around with on one’s own.
The side effects of Zoloft for me are honestly pretty mild and easy to handle, and it works, so I don't really feel the need to try anything else. As to consistency of use, yeah, I'm not recommending my approach to anybody, but I find that it works best for me -- if I stick to the meds 100% I feel angry all the time, so I space them out.
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