That Other Me
That Other Me is a series that explores the immediacy and intimacy of various mental health episodes I’ve experienced throughout my life. 2016 I walk and walk and walk, taking a roundabout course from my home, unable to settle thoughts much too quick to be contained or moderated, the agitation from their mania pulsing through my body. Is this it? That’s a question growing increasingly prevalent in my forties – to have emerged from five years of severe agoraphobia, decades of anxiety and all these other mental health challenges, only to be here, much more capable in some ways but mentally unstabler in others; circumstantially unsatisfied, physically debilitated with chronic…
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I lay in bed, growing so stifled a fine sweat forms across my brow. I shouldn’t be sweating – it’s not hot – and when I push the covers down to my waist, I immediately feel the cold. Now I’m in two different climates: from the waist-down, I’m too hot, and from the waist-up I’m freezing. Here’s a side-effect of the Aropax – hot flushes. I’m only thirty or so, and struggling to reconcile what Aropax does to me. There are so many problems, but before I started them I had crippling OCD, and had been agoraphobic and living effectively as a shut-in for five years. This is the trade-off.…