Complacent - Tumblr Posts
Paranoia, pt. 4: Fix one problem, start another
Long story short, the doctor determined that nothing was wrong with my body. Between a blood test (I hate needles), a shock test on my arm (that really hurt), and some sort of heart-impulse-scan-thing (why aren't more tests easy like this one was), he found nothing threatening. However, I do have minor arrhythmia, and that was likely triggering the attacks.
The panic attacks themselves concerned my doctor for a different reason. He said that I was likely experiencing abnormally high levels of stress because of school, with no regular way to work it off (I didn't exercise). So, to kill two birds with one pill, he prescribed a beta blocker that slows the heart down, reducing both anxiety and arrhythmia. He also prescribed exercise, which I never got the chance to do.
The pill, however, worked wonders! I felt more like myself than I had in months, and my stress levels dropped to manageable levels. Most of my friends immediately noticed a difference in my demeanor - and the best part, I had no more panic attacks! (Well, there was one near the beginning, but it was from not being used to it yet.) On the whole, I was incredibly relaxed.
...Too relaxed, in fact. So relaxed that I didn't worry about my schoolwork as much. And at my gifted school, not worrying about work runs a risk of getting kicked out.
Let's not gloss over the facts here: I nearly didn't graduate. Cutting the dosage in half didn't change my predicament. I honestly should not have graduated at all, especially with how many papers I pushed beyond their due dates and how many minor assignments I simply didn't do.
It wasn't just school, either - I didn't feel like doing anything, even my own hobbies. By day I was too relaxed to care, while by night, as the effects wore off, I became uselessly frustrated with myself. Yet I knew I needed the medicine; the alternative was much worse.
Somehow, I managed to scrape by. I think the staff took pity on me or something. Over that summer before college, nothing got better in terms of complacency. It was a great relaxation period from the stress of school, but I spent it doing little more than scouring the Internet.
Paranoia pt. 5: The ongoing struggle
My first quarter of college went really well, but that was from being cooped up at home doing nothing all summer. I was ready to do some work and get some stuff done. Winter quarter didn't go so well, and spring quarter was even more of a struggle, as my complacent tendencies kept getting worse and worse.
I was certain that my pill was the cause. Between that and some new information that it can cause memory loss in some cases, I was tired of it. So, midway through winter quarter, I stopped taking it. There were no adverse side effects (probably because I halved the dose over a period of time), but I did notice myself get more tense and jumpy, and my thoughts raced faster. I haven't had a panic attack since.
But it was immediately apparent that the pill wasn't the problem. It didn't necessarily get worse because I stopped taking the pill, but it did keep getting worse at the same steady rate as before. By spring quarter, I was barely staying afloat grade-wise, and my attendance record was 50% overall.
At some point I even stopped making levels. When I noticed this, I really began to worry about myself. "Maybe I have depression or something? No, that's just my paranoia again. I just have a really bad work ethic. Haven't I always been this way, though? I was this bad in high school too."
With my record this past quarter, I am once again appalled that anyone took pity on my and let me keep my scholarship. And of course these feelings of worthlessness are bigger than just that, knowing that I don't have the drive to complete a simple assignment, or even fully enjoy my hobbies. I feel like I've just turned into a little ball of consumption with nothing to give back.
And thus we arrive at the present day, where somehow all of these feelings of shame, worthlessness, and nothingness have somehow, some way increased tenfold over the summer, even though I've had little to no real work to do. Every time, I think that maybe something's wrong with me, only to remember my paranoid tendencies and tell myself that it's actually my fault.
Just less than a week ago now, a close friend of mine who was worried about me showed me a game called Depression Quest. It's a short text-based browser game playing in the role of someone with depression. The player is given a set of possible ways to deal with a situation, but some of them are crossed out due to the player's condition.
It scared me how much I was able to relate to almost everything in the game. That was the real turning point for me, in thinking that maybe it's not just my paranoia, and maybe something is beyond my control here... Reading and hearing about other people's stories of depression only make me more and more convinced of this:
I think I have depression too.