I just took half a Xanax that my friend gave me. I’ve only ever taken Xanax once and it knocked me right out. I passed out 15 minutes after ingestion, and I was in a room with three other people. When I woke up I had no idea what had happened.
So I’ve taken a half. We’ll see how it goes. It’s the favourite drug of many people’ so I am interested to see.
My friend gave it to me today when I was telling her what things have been like for me the past few weeks. They’ve not been good.
Sometimes I go through moods for no apparent reason. Depressed moods. Spans of time, a week or two or three, in which I lose all motivation and hope and interest and energy. I shut myself away and read a lot of Sylvia Plath and watch Elfen Lied and listen to Yield and The Bends and August and Everything After and flick through all my old journals. I don’t mind it too much; it’s a time of self indulgence. It’s somehow peaceful and safe to feel too depressed to care about anything.
So recently I’ve been going through a mood, obviously. This one isn’t depressed though; it’s anxious. For the past three weeks I’ve been experiencing a constant buzz of anxiety and tenseness and stress. I’ve been irritable and grumpy and frustrated with everything I do. I’ve been worrying myself stupid about every insignificant thing, dreading interactions with colleagues and petrol station attendants, lying awake at night with a brain full of static.
It took me a week or two to figure out it was even happening. At first I thought my period was coming, but it didn’t come. Then I thought I was pregnant, but two tests smugly laughed at me for not even knowing my own body and told me to keep looking for an explanation. Then I thought that maybe it was mumm suddenly moving in with a boyfriend she hardly knows, or Brenton and I searching fruitlessly for a house to mortgage ourselves on, or.. hmm, maybe.. work.
Too many too intense clients at once. One really aggressive, verbally abusive client with some kind of undiagnosed personality disorder; one really obsessed, lonely client with another; one child forced to visit her sexually abusive father; subpoenas for client files; etc.
I talked to one of my managers and referred the scary client elsewhere, and suddenly felt a whole lot better. Took a day off and feel better still.
I just feel so silly for taking so long to work it out. A psychotherapist with total lack of insight into her own anxiety condition. Harhar. I’ve just never experienced anxiety before, though! I don’t consider myself an anxious person in the slightest.
I guess it was more stress than anxiety. Stress is so ill-defined it’s difficult to diagnose. Yeah, that’s it. It’s not that I’m clueless about my own feelings; it’s that they’re just so complicated.
How long does Xanax take to work? I think it’s been about ten minutes. I’m going to pause writing and come back when it hits so I can describe what it’s like.
…
It’s been 20 minutes. I’m feeling a bit detached; like the part of me that observes and experiences things is sitting a bit further back inside my head, or maybe has shrunk a bit. If I were a giant puppet with a tiny me inside that looks out through my eyes and feels out through my skin, then the tiny me has gone deeper inside.. has moved away from the experience.
My whole body feels slightly numb and rubbery. My lungs and heart and chest grow heavier; my breathing is slowing down by itself.. it feels too slow, and I find I’m breathing unnaturally, thinking about it.. it’s like if I don’t think to inhale at the end of an exhale then my lungs will forget to do it themselves.
My ability to thoughtlessly use language is decreasing, becoming less natural and easy. My head and vision seem somehow indistinctly fuzzy.
I feel more relaxed, but I can still feel the tension deep inside me. It’s like a ball that has been more strictly compressed, contained, but I can still feel it trying to send out tentacles to reclaim its prime of place in my torso. Prime of place. Does that even make sense?
I feel good, though. I feel like interacting with people. I wonder who’s online…
I really like the word xanax. It has good feng shui.