Paradigm Shift

The first thing I noticed was that I laughed. I was in the living room with the baby watching cartoons. We were watching a rerun episode of The Amazing World of Gumball, and it was the episode "The Authority" which I had already seen 3 or 4 times. I did not laugh out of surprise; I had watched these scenes before. I did not laugh because I had suddenly gotten a joke I had missed before; I understood it all the same. I laughed out of empathy for the characters, and out of the pleasure I felt for experiencing that empathy. The feeling the character expressed was rage, but it went so much deeper than that. I looked into her little animated soul and felt a kinship and spontaneously laughed. I think it surprised Jesse almost as much as it did me. He looked at me from the kitchen and said, "What's up?" At the time, the best I could express myself was, "Ah, the cartoon..." But in my mind, I was already writing a full episode analysis, like I might have done for some kind of cartoon literary theory class in school. Even when I changed the channel, I found that I could more fully appreciate even shows that I did not normally watch or enjoy. It was like everything I watched was in sharper focus. Everything seemed to have merit and purpose. I felt as though I was peering into the brains of the people who created those shows.

After the baby was in bed, I played Minecraft, a favorite pasttime of mine. It used to just be a form of escapism, but since joining a server and playing with other people, it has become a treatment for my chronic isolation. The isolation isn't so much a consequence of my mental instability, as it is a stressor that exacerbates it. It is simply a result of inconvenient circumstances, such as living in a rural area and being homebound by childcare duties. I do not have to drag through awkward conversations in a strained effort to bond with my playmates; we simply play together, and the bonding is a natural consequence of that play. And the friendships that develop there between players are just as real and significant as any other social bond. Even when not playing the game, lots of players use MineChat to talk to and socialize within their cliques.

But even when playing, something felt different. After perhaps a week or two of feeling lethargic in my gameplay and not very motivated to work on any projects, I suddenly felt a drive to work on something. I reached out to my team members to collaborate on a project and worked for several hours. And when I was done, I did not find myself hunting for new things to do or finding more things to distract me on the internet. There were certainly more things I could work on in regard to the project, but I felt as though I had finished the chapter and was comfortable placing the bookmark and setting it on the nightstand. I had not worked on the project so late that I was falling asleep in front of my computer, and I didn't feel particularly exhausted. But I felt like I was ready to sleep. When I laid down in bed, again, I was able to fall asleep readily.

I was awoken in short time by intimate demands. The differences I noticed were not so much in myself and my mood and my pleasure, but in him. He was more present in our interaction, not to mention more sustainably aroused. But it was the presence that really surprised me. For us, there is often a mental disconnect in our sexual interactions, where we have intimacy and experience a carnal pleasure, but our minds are not really there. For him, the absent-mindedness of his sexual acts is sometimes so profound, that I am sure he is engaging with me in his sleep. After climax, sometimes there is nothing I can do to capture his attention, short of violently shaking him awake. And even if I do that, it is pointless, since he is completely unaware that any intimacy occurred. Which, in turn, neutralizes any actual intimacy I may have perceived in the act, reducing it to a simple biological imperative, which may as well have been mechanical in nature.

But the intimacy we shared this morning was truly intimate. The pleasure I experienced was emotional, physical, and mental. When the act was through, I clung to him and whined when he told me he had to go and drop my mom off at work. I did not want him to leave, and I did not want the moment of intimacy to come to an end. It seems as though the changes I'm experiencing mentally are not just part of my subjective experience. I'm not just imagining the difference this new medication is making. It seems as though he has picked up on something as well, and it has drastically altered our interactions. It's possible that he has been reading these blog postings, though I had not overtly invited him to do so, and the changes are a result of clearer communication. But as far as I know, he hasn't read anything (or at least if he has, he has not told me), which leaves me guessing as to the precise cause of this drastic shift.

The improvement of symptoms has not stopped there. After he left, I felt awake and rested, though I had not slept for very long. I also felt hungry, with a motivating appetite: extremely unusual for me, even on good mornings. I was already working on this blog posting in my mind, and usually when I get to thinking like that, I am too much in my head to pay any attention to these primary needs. The obsessive project of the moment becomes my sole motivation, and all else falls by the wayside. But in this case, I was hungry and really wanted to eat something. I was a little distracted by the writing I was doing in my head, though. I prepared my pastries and headed back to my computer with the plate, but realized I had forgotten my drink. Then I went back to the kitchen to pour a cup of milk, and headed back to my computer, realizing halfway there I had forgotten my plate, and had to head back again to retrieve it before heading to my computer for a third time. Only then did I sit down and begin writing.

There is one other major difference I have noticed, and that is in my pattern of thinking. I first noticed it during the fight Jesse and I had yesterday. It was as if I split into two, one of me experiencing the moment, the other watching and recording. I was more acutely aware of my thoughts and feelings, as well as Jesse's, and sometimes overshadowing the more ominous voice in my head was another that read back to me what was happening, and was trying to find the right words or phrases to describe each detail. This voice is not normally present when I get into fights like that and am under a lot of stress. It was as though committing to writing as treatment has actually flipped a switch in my brain and I'm functioning cognitively on an entirely different frequency than usual. Moreover, the knowledge that I was going to write about the incident functioned as light at the end of the tunnel, it was the cheese at the end of the maze. Part of me wanted to get up that morning in order to write. Not only is this medication a treatment, it's a reward.