I don’t know why I am writing this as I am very tired and want to go to sleep. Except the voices are having conversations in my head about things. Some stuff I can decipher, others I cannot. It is very annoying. I wish they would just go away and let me be but they are not so accommodating.
I have lowered my dose of my antipsychotic because I was having side effects. I don’t think I can go back up without my doc’s ok. I just need a little time to adjust to this dose and I am hoping the voices will go away. Something tells me this is just wishful thinking. I really don’t want to go back into the hospital. I won’t have my music to listen to and having music with me calms me down. I will get agitated if I don’t have music, and well, you don’t really want to have a meltdown on a psych unit. It is not pleasant. I guess as long as I am not feeling paranoid I am doing ok. But then, there isn’t much interaction with people I don’t know. I am grounded in my house because my funds for Starbucks have ended. I can’t have my coffee until next week when my paycheck gets in. It’s just as well because I think the caffeine might have had something to do with the tremors I was experiencing. I have been ok the past few days but I still get the feelings like my arms are like stretched out elastics. I know that is a little of the dyskinesthia I experience. I am also worried that this feeling is going to drive me nuts more than the voices will.
In case you are just reading my blog for the first time, I have been hearing voices since the age of 5. They started off as imaginary friends but have always stayed with me growing up. The voices have changed over the years. My latest new voices have an English accent. I think that was because I was preoccupied with England for a time. They have gone away but sometimes still creep back. I also have experienced paranoia while on the bus. I thought it was anxiety but if anxiety caused paranoia than why would I think one of the passengers were going to harm me in some way. I have not been taking the bus that often anymore because of this.
Sometimes I have delusions. When I was younger I had delusion that I was living on the holodeck on the Enterprise. I created this other life that I still somewhat believe today. Or I wish it still existed. Lately my delusions are related to the type of voice I hear. If the voice says he is Allah I will have religious types of delusions. Usually these new voices are often commanding voices (they tell me to do things) and always lead to a hospitalization. I don’t know why voices are an automatic reason for getting hospitalized. I just know that I could be ok otherwise but soon as I say I have voices that are not controlled, they put me in the hospital. It drives me nuts, no pun intended. Other delusions that I have had in the past centered around my coworkers conspiring to fire me or have me fired by planting devices in my email. I felt like every move I made was being watched and every email I sent was being monitored. Usually, it would center around one person. And eventually, I became fearful of this person though I had no real reason to be. When I seriously asked my coworker if she was going to kill me, she gave me a crazed look like “you kidding me”? I then knew that it was just my illness talking and that it wasn’t real.
The hard part about dealing with psychosis is that your view of reality becomes blurred. You often don’t know what is real and what is not. There was a good period of time when I thought God was always watching me and that I had to watch what I was doing so not to offend him. These feeling persisted even when no one was in the room with me, I still felt his presence and it was not a good feeling. I felt like I was constantly being watched and the voices helped to confirm my suspicions. It wasn’t until I started on the drug olanzapine that all this went away. For the first time in my life, I felt free. But then out of fear of me getting diabetes, my psychiatrist took me off this drug. I was fearful that this paranoia was going to come back but it has been over ten years since being off that drug and so far I am still free from that type of paranoia. I often wonder how other people react when someone tells them that God is all around them. For me, I ended up with paranoia for most of my childhood and early adulthood. And it all stopped by taking medication. I was on other anti-psychotics at this time, but none of them took care of that presence I felt all the time. It feel good knowing you don’t have to always watch over your shoulder. That is why I am fearful that I might have to stop this medication. I haven’t had any symptoms since Monday and I hope it stays that way. Maybe it was just a little hypoglycemic attack (low blood sugar). But that still doesn’t explain why I had symptoms later that night AFTER I ate a good meal. It doesn’t make sense.
I see my psychiatrist tomorrow. I hope she has answers for me that doesn’t include me being taken off my medication. So far she has not responded to the emails I sent her so I am hoping that by reducing the dose, I am doing the right thing. But in doing so, I hope that doesn’t mean it’s also open season on a voice attack and that paranoia will start coming back. I am just fearful of this happening. But I think if she really wanted me off this medication, she would have responded and told me so.
midnightdemons7 