A Crisis Of Reality

It's been several months since I've gotten on medication. The confusion has passed and I'm fully experiencing normal. However this was an earth shattering process for me. Once the first couple weeks passed and my body adjusted to my new levels, it was time to start processing everything. See it's a very strange experience to have everything in your mind change but everything around you hasn't changed at all. You start to see the world with a new clarity and calmness that you never had before. For me personally, that was extremely rattling. I had a crisis of sorts. Suddenly I started to see what normal people felt and lived like. I was in shock and so frustrated. Is this what you people live like!? It's a paradise! You have it so incredibly easy! I had to fight every single day to deal with the most basic issues. I had horrible anxiety over insignificant things. Confession: I had a full blown anxiety attack over the wrong dickens village being set up at our house. Normal people don't deal with these problems. I had to live my whole life with this undiagnosed while people enjoyed easier lives. Why had I waited so long to get help?  It's hard to understand just how crazy you were thinking until you take the meds and you're not thinking crazy anymore. It was a several month process for me to stop and look at every aspect of my life and decide exactly how I perceived them now. It was time to realize what was anxiety talking previously and what was reality. This rattled me to the core as I fought with my new logical reality and the chaos I left behind. It's hard to realize that only you are changing.

Passing Through The Tunnel

Adjusting to a medication you'll probably take for the rest of your life is a strange thing. The transition period is nothing I expected. Yes I knew there could be nausea and such while I was adjusting but I still was unprepared. What I experienced was nausea to where I was barely eating, jaw clenching where I thought I'd break a tooth, and so tired that I just wanted to sleep all day. The worst side effect by far was the foggy feeling. I wasn't able to process anything. Everything was through a long tunnel of me straining to process what was happening around me. My ability to translate Spanish back into English in my head was gone. With no cut and dry answer to what would be permanent side effects and what was temporary, this was incredibly discouraging. Would this be my new reality? If this low level of processing was how people normally lived, I didn't want any part in it. I preferred the anxiety. I decided to try half of the dose and saw a slight lightening of side effects but not enough to satisfy me. However I talked to others who take it as well and they encouraged me to push through. With each new day, the side effects slowly started to dwindle and the dark foggy tunnel slowly started to pass. After about two weeks I had returned to my new normal though I was unsure of what all that would mean. How did I know if I had reached normal or if I needed more or a different medicine?