"Bad day, fuck it," says Stephen Baldwin in that movie

Hey, how you doing?

Last week, after meeting with new doctors and drafting a new plan, I was hopeful for the first time in weeks. Life was still hateful, mind you, but not as bleak. Like the first day of a new semester, before the actual work begins, before the responsibility of learning becomes tiresome and real, when effort is just an idea in someone else's brain and impossible-to-know theorems are sunshine and fairy rainbows. Then you read the first chapter and think, "Napoleon sucks. France sucks. I want a taco." Well, the notion of getting off drugs you've only tolerated for three years and replacing them with promising, benign, new drugs sure opens your heart like first love; the reality is more difficult. Also like first love. It closes your heart like a hammer on a seashell.

I'm slowly realizing how psychologically dependent I am on drugs I don't even like, how reluctant I am to get rid of them, despite my distrust of them, a lesson I''ve patiently refused these three years while under their influence. Now that the opportunity has come to try other options, I'm afraid to let go. Take my old friend imipramine hcl. I've been on and off this loathsome horse since I was nineteen. It turns my mouth into fried Andean sand, sends the earth spinning every time I stand up or bend down or basically move, persuades me to sleep restlessly for eleven or more hours at a time, and, jackpot, from time to time makes me feel unreal and confused and basically ghostly. It also does some guerrilla-style urban warfare on your dental health, by which I mean it ruins it. But! Maybe I'd be worse without it? Probably not. But you never know, and that glint of uncertainty is all the anxious mind needs to savor the stress, to chew it tasteless like an uncharismatic gum.

At this point, as I taper from that gum so that I can subsidize other obnoxious gums, my mental engine is grinding very hard and hot, like Melville's paper machine in the Tartarus of Maids, to manufacture blank sheets of paper: phantom fears and predictions about what catastrophes will befall me when I forsake the god of imipramine for his cousin god. It's a stupid but compulsive game to play. And although I know it isn't, participation feels mandatory.

So, for the past three or four days, as I decreased my dose, I've worried more and more about the doom scenarios I'm letting myself indulge. Meanwhile, the anxiety I'm already feeling, in addition to the stress generously supplied by these indulgences, through the contribution of bad sleep, good but pernicious tranquilizers, stubborn, wild bodily sensations, and gripping headaches, disorientation, and nausea, and with the support of every grievous thought I've ever had, has made me feel, to put it mildly, undecided. Not about giving up the drug, which I have to do, but about the action's benefit. And about being undecided. Which is a whole other set of spirals and Mobius strips and chaos riddles. 

So, that confidence I mentioned earlier--I called it "hopefulness"--that's been mutilated. It's still here in some form, I think, but it's grown ugly enough that I'm having trouble recognizing it. In its place, I've found some hideous gnomes called "resignation" and "fatalism." Not that these creatures impress me. But they are persistent, and they can jump on you from behind and choke you, like the turtlenecks Mitch Hedberg warned us about. They wear you down. Or they try to.

So, as I get ready to get ready to go to bed--I'm so anxious these days that I build rituals to prepare myself for other rituals--I reflect on a long day (it wasn't really, but it felt interminable and also weirdly light, as in the unbearable lightness of being, as though it hadn't been here at all), a day of feeling headsick, then heartsick, then uncomfortably empty, then unspecifically heartbroken, and now a little of them all plus nervous, I have to say, like Stephen Baldwin in that movie, "Bad day, fuck it." But I'll never wear a big cross like him. I have to draw the line somewhere. Everybody has his Waterloo.