I feel like things are really different. My concerns are different. My interests are different. I used to read three monthly magazines and one weekly magazine as well as reading maybe 24 novels a year. Now I can barely read one magazine, and no novels. I used to follow perhaps five or six TV shows. Now I only watch football, and not nearly as many games as I used to. I used to interested in my work, and I was full of ideas, and I tried to make them happen. People thought I was great. Now I do nothing. Almost. I can’t think of anything proactive, and even if I could, I wouldn’t be interested in it.
Perhaps I had a kind of low level mania going on for five years or so. Then things got crazy, ending up in a depression I’d never experienced before. Suddenly, my interest became focussed on what this disease is doing to the way I think. I sense things differently. I am more emotional. More empathetic. More able to feel or guess what other people are going through based on little information.
The worst thing, though, is this existential confusion. I used to feel absolutely comfortable with the way my life was going. Now I feel like I’ve been doing everything wrong. I’ve been wasting my time. And yet, I’m stuck about what to do about it. I have always been a kind of seeker, but now, the search seems so much more urgent, that thinking about it too much will send me into a depression.
Inside my head, there are other differences. I have become aware of tunes running through my mind most of the time. My non-linguistic brain is sending a lot more messages to my linguistic brain (very difficult to interpret). I feel, sometimes, like I’m dreaming during the say, which is very different from daydreaming.
I don’t know if I like the changes, but I’m helpless to do anything about them. The drugs help me feel more normal moodwise, but they also seem to quiet my mind and my inspiration. I like being calmer. I wish my creativity would come back. It’s weird. I can see more, but I can do less.