Pithy Little Phrase Insight

I remember a time when sleep would wipe the slate clean, completely refreshing me and I would wake up feeling slightly drowsy and cozy under the blankets. For years now I wake from sleep with a stiff alertness, as if part of me is standing guard for intruders, while another part of me is filling out tax returns in my sleep. I took a couple of sleeping pills…nothing strong, just over the counter stuff, and so I wake up late and feeling drowsy. Drowsy is good, vigilant is bad.

I make some Sumatra Decaf. I sit down at the dining room table to do my daily morning writing. I don’t recall what I wrote this morning because mostly it was a chaotic stream of concerns and thoughts. Keep the pen moving…keep the words flowing…doesn’t matter what they are. If it’s total gibberish just keep moving the pen. And move the pen is what I did. It’s nice to know that there is something I can do in my life which is impossible to screw up.

Every depression will eventually lift…that’s what they say. To medicate or not to, that is the question….or is it? Nothing is guaranteed, everything has a risk. Antidepressants tend to lobotomize my emotional life, but depression does the same thing. Take your pick; a bleak shade of grey with a suppressed sense of joy, or a perky, slightly manic up-do which is routed in nothing more than an over abundance of certain neurotransmitter activity, of which the long term side effects are unknown.

Some research now indicates that there might be a slight possibility that prolonged boosting of the serotonin and dopamine levels in the brain, induced by such antidepressants as Paxil or Prozac, can lead to Parkinsonian type symptoms, some of which might possibly be disfiguring and irreversible. What would happen if millions of people, who faithfully took their antidepressants to stave off another depressive episode, awake one day to find they have developed a tremor or a facial tick that does not respond to any kind of treatment? Hmmm. Now that would be depressing.

And so, without another single pithy little phrase in sight, a new day begins…