I began to compose this as a private message, but instead chose here. As always, the Mods should move as deemed appropriate.
I wish to extend my sincere apologies to @Stranger_On_A_Train , and to the rest of the board. Stranger, I am sorry for my dumb, ignorant, and frankly embarrassing comment, directed towards you in a thread about RFK, Jr., for which a warning was well deserved.
By way of explanation (but certainly not excuse), I must confess some personal information, despite a pervasive reluctance. As I imagine is true among many people who occupy online forums, my life in the real world is quite volatile. I don’t come here to dwell on any struggles, and haven’t regaled you, for example, with stories of my divorce, or ongoing cannabis addiction, or even about my lost cat (and the alligator I suspect to be the cause). Work provides anecdotes, but here is no place to belabor its stress and tribulations.
My comment, however, has betrayed that effort to stay stoic, as it arose because of a lapse in medication.
That sounds like such a sorry excuse when typed out, but I have been on antidepressants for some 25 years (and can recognize depressive symptoms since my earliest childhood). In a recent attempt to embark on a better path, a psychiatrist increased my dosage, and added a 2nd pill.
That has not settled my anxiety; I’m still stuck in a rut of my own making.
But it has made me ‘addicted’ to the pills.
My shrink, when I said that to her, blanched. “You’re not addicted!”
Really? Then explain the withdrawals.
After about a day, I get a headache and an inability to focus my eyes. My ex-wife said I would react by furrowing my brow like Nick Cage (and therefore would tell me I’m “Caging” if I missed a dosage). I start to get a little nauseous, too.
By day two, suicidal ideations (always a passing thought, despite my abiding fear of death) become more prominent. Usually, it’s a fixation on how to hold the gun (something I don’t own; by design).
But it also manifests with very troubled outbursts, for which I feel deep shame; such as spewing invective against a long esteemed Doper. (Other examples are telling friends – I really only have 2 – that they should stop contacting me; or composing a text to my ex-wife telling her my son shouldn’t visit me anymore).
So, that’s it. On day 3 of no Venlafaxine. Suicide of the metaphorical kind. It’s also why I told @Aspenglow that I would never post again.
It’s very frustrating to be in that moment. I know that my thinking is disordered, but I also feel that it is ‘who I really am’. And, to be sure, ‘who I really am’ saves the worst for himself. It’s a self-loathing that I usually don’t want to believe in, but without medication it grows into a self-identity that feels emotionally fulfilling.
I’m disturbed to think that these thoughts are only kept at bay when I take pills each day, or to realize that all of my thoughts and feelings are really just chemical interactions. My consciousness isn’t really as profound as I’d hoped.
Ideally, I’d use that as a springboard to a better, truer self. I certainly aspire to better things. But as you all got to see, I really hold just the thinnest veneer of respectability. At 46 year old, I’d like to think I would have grown up by now.
So I’m not sure that I should post all that much. I find myself to be boring, and that may be in part because I read here when I should be in my environment.
Nevertheless, I am sorry for my actions. They were wrong, and knowingly so.
(As for what I was thinking? If you read the post in question – I’m too embarrassed to link to it – @Beckdawrek had posted in the RFK Jr thread that RFK Jr had ‘issues’. I quoted her to make a really dumb joke (‘He has more issues than Time Magainze’). Stranger then quoted my quote with a response from Shakespeare, listing a litany of insults.
I was not familiar with the line, but google gave it to me, along with the beginning phrase that Stranger had omitted. That beginning phrase was something like ‘why would you converse with somebody who was…[that litany of insults]’.
My addled brain read that as Stranger castigating me for quoting Beck, by basically saying ‘Why are you talking with that [insulting descriptors]?’ I read it as bullying her by suggesting that others should ignore her.
That gave rise to my response, which I knew to be wholly improper as it was written, that I could converse with who I wanted, and that if he didn’t like it he could leave).
To wit: