Innercept: A Mixed Bag of Delights

I'm really in the mood to write a blog, but I don't know what my audience wants me to talk about. Some of my popular blogs are spiritual blogs, blogs about my mental illness, and Innercept. Wait, those are pretty much the only things I ever write about.

I have been out of Innercept for over a year now. What has this year been like for me? Well, it's been the best year ever, minus some of the drinking I could have done without.

Those are some memories of the year that came back to me recently, being drunk and depressed. Basically, if I'm alone, and I'm drunk or I have been drinking, I am depressed.

When I first got out of Innercept, I faced a major dilemma. I don't know if I've mentioned it here, actually I know I have, but my problem was I grew up not being social. When I was delusional, I would sit around at home and hardly ever do anything social, and I was just consumed with my own thoughts.

In high school, I spent weekends alone most of the time. Never went to parties. Never drank. Never did much of anything besides sit at home and program my computer. I had enough of a social life to make it so I didn't feel alone and depressed, but compared to most people, it was hardly anything.

So this is what happened as a result of me being at Innercept. I don't know if it's really anything Innercept did. But I am social now. I can talk to people now. I'm not "conversationally challenged" like I used to be, where someone would try to talk to me and I would either stare blankly or give one word answers.

So I was exposed to people all the time. And I had spurts, where suddenly it was like, "wow, I can talk!" Trouble is, there was no filter, so I just said whatever was on my mind all the time. And people got annoyed and I went silent again. And then I later opened back up.

Anyway, so what I am trying to say is, if Innercept did anything for me, it was make me social. I have friends now from all over the country.

So I get back home, and I don't have a whole lot of friends in Oregon. There were like two people who I would actually hang out with, Rebecca and Matthew, my ex-boyfriend, though we have long since went to just being friends and things are cool like that.

So I come home and I'm social and I have hardly anyone to hang out with! Gradually, though, I began meeting up with new people.

Group settings are the hardest. One on one, people will talk directly to you, and you can keep the conversation going. If you are in a group of three or more people, they will talk to each other and exclude me. I remember in high school, I liked groups of three or more people better because the pressure to talk wasn't on me. But now I find this to be not the ideal social situation.

I realized that I am too shy to NOT drink in some social settings. This is why I say, I fucking hate drinking, but I am going to keep drinking on occasion, on hopefully as rare of occasion as possible.

It doesn't fuck with my meds. I had some CRAZY CRAZY delusional experiences in the past year, but the mental issues that accompanied those have disappeared. My intrusive thought problems have all but gone away. I have slight anxiety sometimes but that's all.

So, honestly, I will say that Innercept can be good for antisocial people. I'm not really antisocial at heart, like some people are, but I was kind of like a feral, undomesticated cat, which has the potential to be social and domesticated.

However, Innercept is insanely expensive and not helpful for a lot of peoples' problems. Like kleptomania. I don't steal, but I knew people from Innercept who did. And honestly, I don't know how you fix that.

Innercept keeps you kind of sheltered in a comfortable cocoon. One of the great things is that everyone who is there has issues, so for the most part, the most part, people don't judge you for your issues. At least, no one I encountered judged me for being bipolar or delusional or crazy. If your problem is say, torturing and mutilating animals, you will be judged for that.

So at best, Innercept is mixed bag of delights.

Kicking the Benzos

So I have decided to kick my benzodiazopine habit. See, I take Klonopin. I used to take 1 mg at night. So I told my doctor I wanted to quit, following the success of me kicking my nicotine gum addiction, so now the doctor has me down to a half a milligram.

Klonopin was something I would take not because I particularly liked it but because it altered my conscious state. I would take it for anxiety, which meant during one of my freakouts about my many issues. I am obsessive and insecure and get overly embarrassed about every single thing. Some of these things are actually embarrassing and some aren't really but I obsess anyway, because I get in these moods where I am just so god damn uncomfortable. And if I think you are judging me based on one of these things that I obsess over, you are going down on my enemies list.

Damn I hate withdrawal symptoms. Plus I realized the other day that adderall was the reason I get so god damned angry sometimes. My sister called me the other day to vent about the things she was angry about. She doesn't do drugs. It made me wonder what her excuse was.

So anyway, I would take this drugs when I was anxious, but by the time they took effect I had usually calmed down. Obviously, because the drugs make you calm. But you know I mean before they take effect.

Then I started taking Klonopin every single day. And it started to feel kind of nice. And then before you know it, I was a benzo addict.

But I thought this was going to be easy, just a minor adjustment to not getting that calm feeling every single night. But now I can't sleep. Or sometimes I sleep better.

I wake up all thoughty and thinking all strangely and funnily about things. I roll around and roll onto the floor with my pillow and lie on the floor. I wander around my apartment. Last night I realized that the common thread between the two nights I couldn't sleep on klonopin withdrawal was that I hadn't drank a lot of caffeine in the afternoon. So I had a few sips of coffee last night. I got tired. Then awake. I had several gulps of coffee. I became even more awake.

I feel all funny sometimes. Sometimes I feel a spiritual vibration.

But that might be the spirits.

[Abrupt Ending]

Leaving Your Comfort Zone Despite Crippling Anxiety

So I'm wondering why I decided to continue on to intermediate acting. Actually, I know why I decided to. It wasn't because I plan on making any sort of career out of acting. I know that I am fooling myself if I thought I could be good enough to make it like that. The reason I took the class was to get myself out of my comfort zone. It sounded like a good idea about three months before classes started.

We were assigned an assignment which involved us doing something in front of the class that we only did alone and makes us slightly uncomfortable. The trouble with this particular assignment is, it doesn't matter what the hell I'm doing, if I am in front of the class alone then I am uncomfortable. On top of that, we are supposed to make ourselves vulnerable in some emotional way through what we are doing.

So I decided to do something in front of the mirror. I kind of planned it out but didn't practice. I realized as I was preparing to do this in front of the class that there was no way in hell I was going to be able to do this. So I pretended to look in the mirror, which was actually the audience, and then I sighed and then put on some makeup. I was thinking that maybe I was pretending to think I was ugly or something, like this was a moment where I was insecure about my looks. I thought that might be an okay thing to do. Trouble is, I just got so damn nervous, I thought I was going to have a repeat of the near-faint I had during my speech last spring. I was shaking and I thought it might be visible. In the middle of the performance I suddenly said I was done. For some reason I think that maybe my shaking wasn't as obvious as I thought it was, but I don't know. The teacher seemed kind of surprised and said ok that was short but ok. Anyway.

So I felt like I failed. And now I'm wondering how I am going to pursue my destiny when I get so nervous in front of people. Like, how am I going to be a public figure. Because I am going to be a public figure.

I'm having trouble getting people to appreciate the parts of my book that I want them to appreciate. So, I rewrite it. It almost seems like a lost cause sometimes, but I persist because I know that it has something that if I succeed at making other people see it will be a big deal. Trouble is that I take for granted that I understand it so well, that it is not obvious to me what parts people might not understand, so I don't necessarily explain those parts.

One of the psychics at the holistic fair said it would happen, and that I would be a speaker at places bigger than that place, meaning bigger than the holistic fair. She told me something else that I think is going to happen, but that's something secret. She was also the one that advised me to meet literary agents in person. That was good advice, despite the fact that I have only heard back from one of them, and that was a no. But I didn't have high expectations for that particular literary agent.

Anyway, so for now I just have to deal with the horrible crippling anxiety.

Anxiety: It's a Dilly of a Pickle

I did my monologue for theatre the other day. While I'm sure I got a good grade, I feel like I failed. I spent time beforehand practicing, making faces at certain parts, and making specific descriptive motions. I had it down, man. But when I got up there in front of the class, anxiety took over. Sure, I remembered all my lines (thus why I probably got a good grade) and did most of the motions I practiced, but I feel my anxiety held me back and rendered my performance unconvincing.

They say the only way to get over your fears is to face them. The thing about this is, it only works if you face them and then have a positive or at least neutral experience. So if you're afraid to drive, then one day you take out the car and crash it and kill seven people, that's not going to help your fear of driving any, it only makes it worse. Trust me, I beat myself up over what I deemed was a bad performance, because beating myself up is what I do. I can't help it. I do it with a lot of things, where I think about them over and over again and cringe and say spirits (my calming word).

So there are two problems here, two forms of anxiety, neither of which respond to logic. My anxiety doesn't do me any good, at least none that I can see. It only causes me problems. Yet, I can't just turn it off because things don't work that way. The first form of anxiety is my fear of people. The second form is the beating up of myself. I could have focused on the positives, like how I remembered all my lines and made good gestures. But I focus on the negatives.

So this leaves me in a dilly of a pickle. I really don't know what the solution is. Facing my fears reinforces them, doing nothing does nothing. And drugs won't even work! Because the drugs that kill or ease anxiety lead to drowsiness and slurred speech, two things that will also kill a performance.

I could give up acting, that wouldn't be a problem, except that I know that my anxiety problem will do more than just hinder an acting career. If I were to become famous for my book, and someone invited me on a television show, I would be too nervous to do a decent interview, especially if it was filmed in front of an audience. Any social encounter in which I have a vested interest in making a good impression could be destroyed by my anxiety.

So that's why I can't give up. Therefore, I will take acting again next semester.