The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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For most people, the question "What would fulfill me?" is simple; only the "how" is the challenge. Most men just want a woman, while a smaller contingent want wealth, fame, power, community, faith, or some mix of these. For virtually everyone, the template is already there for what to do, and life is simply a matter of meeting the standard. You like engineering, so you become an engineer, etc.
Currently I'm in my mid-20s, and I've stagnated heavily because none of the paths feel right. There is no person, past or present, who inspires me to follow in his footsteps and to do the same actions. Instead it's like I'm pulled far away toward some distant star, to something particular no one has done before. And no matter how confusing or inconvenient this is, it's the only way I can find fulfillment.
Oddly, this seems common with people interested in the Classics (they're also always misanthropes). Not just guys like Montaigne or Nietzsche, but even the blogger TLP who produced shockingly original work at the height of his powers. Their styles are so unique that we can't imagine their work emerged from anything other than a deeply felt, internally consistent drive. They're also all writers. At 6 years old, I decided I'd become a writer, but this dream died years later when I found all existing styles unsatisfying. Now I think I'm coming around to it. When drunk, I pace around in circles rapidly and then sit at my PC and type up a storm. Overall I'm a mediocre writer, but in rare moods everything flows out beautifully. Perhaps I'll find that star soon. I sure hope so.
How is the lying down in front of a fan routine going? Any new insights on your health issues?
Not much has changed. I tried yet another antidepressant (Auvelity == Buproprion+DXM), and after 10 days I went cold turkey on it to see what would happen. Supposedly, going cold turkey on Auvelity is a nightmare and you'll get anything from brain zaps to headaches, nausea, fatigue, insomnia...
I felt nothing. This is one of the strongest antidepressants on the market, but after around 3 days it's like I'm on nothing. Same applies to Paliperidone which I tried earlier this year. And I've done the whole, "8 weeks and change" song and dance before, it never works. However my body's set up, the overall mechanism of psychiatric meds is apparently subverted.
Anyway, no progress. Interestingly, sleeping in front of a fan produces very little effect, maybe due to a lack of stimulants like sugar/caffeine (which I'm usually hopped up on) to magnify the effect. But another angle is, perhaps my breathing is shallow during sleep. The fan stuff doesn't work without deep breaths. I should really do deep breaths for an entire day and see what happens.
Dextromethorphan as an antidepressant, I had not encountered that before. Buproprion seems like it would be a good medication for a person dealing with anhedonia -- though my experience, as someone whose depressive episodes are secondary to anxiety, was it just made me more anxious than I'd ever been before. Like "have a crisis of faith because of brand-new worries"-level anxious.
Anhedonia sucks. Scott wrote once about how his patients with anxiety+depression often said that the anxiety was more disabling than the depression, and if they could just get a handle on the anxiety they could handle the rest. That's true to my experience. But anhedonia is the one thing that's worse: there is genuinely nothing as confusing and soul-destroying as not just feeling a lack of pleasure but a lack of any ability to understand what would give you pleasure.
Interesting that you haven't experienced any brain zaps. But it might actually be too early -- I only get brain zaps after about a week cold turkey off similar medications. It's possible that the brain chemistry changes that cause a lot of the (let's call it what it is) withdrawal syndrome are slow to manifest. So you may yet encounter the symptoms.
The DXM extends the Buproprion's action, but the tradeoff is you're effectively high on cough syrup anywhere from a couple days to indefinitely on this drug.
Maybe. My gut instinct is that there'll be zero withdrawal symptoms. Honestly, I've never had them before with anything (a mild headache when I quit caffeine cold turkey a couple years ago though). If ADs produce any effect at all, it'll be 1-2 mild symptoms in the first couple days, then nothing. Hell, even the Paliperidone felt like I was on nothing after week 1.
The upside is you get used to it. There's only about 2 things I can physically enjoy and I've optimized my life around it. If a recovery happens, the experience would be so powerful it'd be like having a second childhood. I don't remember what it's like enjoying a film, or forming a connection with friends, or having those mysterious and grand feelings as you watch the sunset, but I remember that these experiences exist and that they're amazing. This sounds depressing, but I do believe I'll figure it out soon (no thanks to the medical system). Has to be right around the corner.
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