Happenings

Lots of little (or maybe not so little) things this week.

I got a prescription for Prozac- I'm going to try it for a couple of months and see how it goes. Haven't actually received the pills yet but should this week.

I made the plane reservations. For about an hour I got really really excited about this trip, and it made me so happy. I feel very few moments of joy or excitement in my life, but experiencing them makes me want to work to be able to experience more of them.

I'm still feeling, overall, extremely anxious about this trip. But I'm also able to see that I'm willing to take risks because the life I'm living now is one of fear and sadness, and I don't really feel so excited about another 40 years of that.

I've made some decent progress at exposures on the cold and flu front- fall and winter months are certainly good for that.

Considering Medication, Part 2

Despite my reasonable success in exposures, something doesn't feel right. I still carry around a sense of doom a lot of the time. And I have an underlying level of mild (moderate?) depression that I can't quite shake.

So I am once again considering medication, possibly at a dose that deals with the depression, if not fully the anxiety. I'm pretty sure a lot of my past reaction to medication (which I took twice for about 2 months each time) was placebo, as I react within days, at a very very low dose, but I guess that's cool, too.

For now, I'm hoping the "threat" of medication will motivate me to more full exposures, but if not, I might be ready to go there. More on this as it arises.

Happiness?

I have a good friend with bipolar disorder, and we talk "mental health" a lot. Yesterday we had a conversation about happiness. As in, neither one of us feels a lot of it. So much of our energy goes into making it through the day, and it's exhausting. But of course, we can never really gauge how much happiness other people experience as a comparison. I know in my pre-OCD days, in high school, I had a lot more fun in my life. But again, I had almost no responsibilities in high school, and a lot more time for fun.

In any case, while I have some small moments of pleasure in the course of any given day, mostly I feel like I'm just surviving. Sometimes it makes me think this is a sign that I should be reconsidering medication, but I'm not quite ready to go there. But I feel like a good measure of how well ERP is working in the long run, is whether it can shift me from surviving to living a more fulfilling life.