Matthew
Jedi Master
I have not been active here recently so I thought I would tell you of my adventures while I was away.
My G.P. asked me to have a checkup a few weeks ago due to my age and long term condition. Several of the results were not ideal but he seemed especially concerned about the low sodium levels in my blood. This can be indicative of some rather nasty things going on in the body apparently e.g. cancer so he told me to reduce my Citalopram (anti-depressants) to see if they were the cause of this. I suspect it is more likely due to my inordinately high intake of liquids (I practively live on coffee/tea/hot chocolate and water) but he did not raise this concern with me and merely asked his admin staff to telephone me to issue his diktat. I had been on a dosage of 30mg/day for several years and I was instructed to reduce that to 20mg/day. As you might expect, this reduction did not come without repercussions for me. Frankly, it was pretty brutal. Then less than a week later, the diktat came to reduce it to 10 mg/day. More joy!
I went from feeling not exactly great but at least feeling strong enough to cope with some of the responsibilities of daily life to feeling incredibly vulnerable and hypersensitive. I would see someone be unnecessarily unpleasant to someone online and whereas this would bother me when I was on 30mg/day, I was resilient enough to deal with it without too much distress and move on with my day. On the reduced dosage, however, almost all of that resilience had abandoned me and I would get intensely angry or upset at such incidents. During this period something, in particular, upset me terribly and I just could not shake it off. It took me to a very low place indeed.
During this very low period, I was thinking about how I was feeling and how it was something so familiar to me with my lifelong difficulties of being able to deal with life, other people and the world in general. I sat here thinking to myself: “Why am I such a mess? Why have I spent so much of my life like this? Why can’t I get past this?” The thought popped into my head that it would be great if I could ask my higher self and/or higher authority (to me) the answer to these questions but I didn’t know quite how to do that so the moment passed.
My circumstances did not improve but a couple of days after this I woke up one morning and was lying in bed in that lovely state between sleep and wakefulness. Part of me was in the land of wakefulness and close to being awake but the greater part of me was in the land of sleep and would have happily slipped back into a dream. Sometimes I wake up into this state and my thoughts are inordinately clear and illuminating but to my great delight, on this occasion, I had a bit of an epiphany.
Now, when I say ‘epiphany’ I mean ‘a moment of sudden and great revelation or realisation’, rather than ‘the manifestation of Christ’ although that may have occurred when I was younger but that’s a story for another day, perhaps.
In this not quite awake and not quite asleep state I had the answer to my questions from the other day i.e. why am I such a mess and have pretty much always been so. The answers were:
Now, this is pretty embarrassing and difficult to admit to myself let alone anyone else but I cannot deny the truthfulness of these statements. On reflection, I think that I have always known this but was not prepared to face up to it before. It all makes sense if I think about the circumstances of my birth, my familial relationships and how I dealt with those, my inability to find a man who was fully Mr Right, and so on. I can go further into these if anyone wishes but, at this point, I would rather discuss what effect this had on me.
My big take away from this was that at the age of 54 I should probably stop hoping that someone will come along and look after and comfort me and instead I would be far better served to concentrate on doing a better job of looking after myself! Since then I have tried to do a better job of this and actually started getting some exercise which has really helped to offset the reduction in my medication. I have so much more that I can work on but it is a start at least.
So there you are; make of that what you will. You may find the above interesting. Life has certainly been very interesting for me recently!
My G.P. asked me to have a checkup a few weeks ago due to my age and long term condition. Several of the results were not ideal but he seemed especially concerned about the low sodium levels in my blood. This can be indicative of some rather nasty things going on in the body apparently e.g. cancer so he told me to reduce my Citalopram (anti-depressants) to see if they were the cause of this. I suspect it is more likely due to my inordinately high intake of liquids (I practively live on coffee/tea/hot chocolate and water) but he did not raise this concern with me and merely asked his admin staff to telephone me to issue his diktat. I had been on a dosage of 30mg/day for several years and I was instructed to reduce that to 20mg/day. As you might expect, this reduction did not come without repercussions for me. Frankly, it was pretty brutal. Then less than a week later, the diktat came to reduce it to 10 mg/day. More joy!
I went from feeling not exactly great but at least feeling strong enough to cope with some of the responsibilities of daily life to feeling incredibly vulnerable and hypersensitive. I would see someone be unnecessarily unpleasant to someone online and whereas this would bother me when I was on 30mg/day, I was resilient enough to deal with it without too much distress and move on with my day. On the reduced dosage, however, almost all of that resilience had abandoned me and I would get intensely angry or upset at such incidents. During this period something, in particular, upset me terribly and I just could not shake it off. It took me to a very low place indeed.
During this very low period, I was thinking about how I was feeling and how it was something so familiar to me with my lifelong difficulties of being able to deal with life, other people and the world in general. I sat here thinking to myself: “Why am I such a mess? Why have I spent so much of my life like this? Why can’t I get past this?” The thought popped into my head that it would be great if I could ask my higher self and/or higher authority (to me) the answer to these questions but I didn’t know quite how to do that so the moment passed.
My circumstances did not improve but a couple of days after this I woke up one morning and was lying in bed in that lovely state between sleep and wakefulness. Part of me was in the land of wakefulness and close to being awake but the greater part of me was in the land of sleep and would have happily slipped back into a dream. Sometimes I wake up into this state and my thoughts are inordinately clear and illuminating but to my great delight, on this occasion, I had a bit of an epiphany.
Now, when I say ‘epiphany’ I mean ‘a moment of sudden and great revelation or realisation’, rather than ‘the manifestation of Christ’ although that may have occurred when I was younger but that’s a story for another day, perhaps.
In this not quite awake and not quite asleep state I had the answer to my questions from the other day i.e. why am I such a mess and have pretty much always been so. The answers were:
- That I am like a baby who needs someone to look after them and to hold them and comfort them
- That I have felt this need to have been unfulfilled all of my life and that is why I have done such a bad job of looking after myself because I do not want to let go of this primal yearning and hope that someone will come to comfort and take care of me.
- That it is why I have looked for a ‘knight in shining armour’ as a lover in my adult life and why no man has ever been able to reach this unfairly high bar.
Now, this is pretty embarrassing and difficult to admit to myself let alone anyone else but I cannot deny the truthfulness of these statements. On reflection, I think that I have always known this but was not prepared to face up to it before. It all makes sense if I think about the circumstances of my birth, my familial relationships and how I dealt with those, my inability to find a man who was fully Mr Right, and so on. I can go further into these if anyone wishes but, at this point, I would rather discuss what effect this had on me.
My big take away from this was that at the age of 54 I should probably stop hoping that someone will come along and look after and comfort me and instead I would be far better served to concentrate on doing a better job of looking after myself! Since then I have tried to do a better job of this and actually started getting some exercise which has really helped to offset the reduction in my medication. I have so much more that I can work on but it is a start at least.
So there you are; make of that what you will. You may find the above interesting. Life has certainly been very interesting for me recently!
