Just desserts

 Day 7 of Wellbuterin, and I wish I'd done this sooner.

I have avoided "drugs" all my life, because of the bogeyman they represented; my mother's fears about loss of self made manifest in her children. I remember my first time "driving" for a significant other on MDMA, and when he told me he loved me, I asked the next day if that was him talking, or the drugs? Who am I without tinkering with myself? Am I still me? It's an Odysseus' Ship problem, except on a more abstract scale: you could argue that the animating intelligence is what makes a person, no matter if their appearance, limbs, even organs, change. It's much less clear when you're tinkering with that intelligence, when what you're changing could materially affect how one thinks and perceives the world. If you are behind the wheel, but the drugs are driving, are you really behind the wheel?

So as I sat listening to music on the beach and Incubus came on, song that I rolled my eyes at in high school because it was "too popular", the line "let the fear take the wheel and steer" hit me like a poleaxe. I have been so afraid of letting the drugs steer, that now I find that, somewhere between 12 and 20 years later, that it hasn't been me per se driving, but my fear and anxiety.

It has been like realizing that you've been putting up with intense, grinding tinnitus for years and years without realizing it. It's like finding that you'd been carrying around a leaden weight for all these years, and like in a dream-state, been unable to look at it, put it down, or speak of it to other people. Suddenly, thinking about my relationship doesn't fill me with dread and terror. 

TikTok in loco parentis, TikTok in lieu of therapy; there are so many genres of self-help on the app that it's always amazing to me when I find something that makes me sob. And so I've been thinking about what happened to me around 2008, and I've been thinking about worthiness. I sobbed over a DnD NPC video where the barkeeper hands me the key to the tower room because I look like the kind of person who's not very good at letting themselves rest and I scribbled onto a post it note:

Why do I feel like I don't deserve:

• rest
• care
• to say no
• to ask for more
• to feel better

Sometimes catching the fleeting thought is an important part of acknowledging what hurts. I was in the middle of unloading groceries, thinking about the last time I felt like I could be sexually free, when it struck me: The last time I felt free was followed by horrible horrible times, and I felt I was being punished for something. An unjust breakup, a divorce, a housing situation falling apart, a job loss. Over the next year I rebuilt my life entirely, and closed myself off to many things. And while some of those things crept back into my world, I never fully uncircled the wagons, so to speak.

It's pretty shit, you know, when you're raised with these ideals of Karma, and how they're supposed to release you from a Judeo-Christian god-guilt. And yet, and yet, I felt like I had taken too much, and much must be taken from me in order to balance the scales. What rubbish. And yet here I am unable to truly fathom that things might go well for me without them also having to go poorly.