The email that began the blog

So as you know, I've stopped taking my SSRI prescription. My plan was to taper, but then I decided what the heck. Actually, being honest, I shared my taper strategy with my doctorfriend and sensed that her professional opinion was that it wasn't necessary to string it out in the complicated way I described.

Since it had already been a couple days sans meds, I decided to skip the tapering altogether. This afternoon, a Reiki meditation outside. Shared some of the energy with my environs, the trees, and a plant whose health has been failing for some time.


Before I go on...so you'll have some context. I prefer typing my journal entries to writing. I type faster than handwrite. So, instead of typing it just for myself, expect my old-fashioned email journaling to be up and at it again for a while. (ie. expect long emails to be the norm again, for a time, till I stop being fascinated and amazed with every little new awareness through the process.) PSYCHE--NO long emails...just this new blog now.


Before I can tell you the meaning of the subject title, I'd like to go short version on why I got on the meds when I did in the first place. I'd been ADD my whole life. The only difference in my late 20's was law school's set-up made it more obvious that I was using a whole lot of coping strategies to get through my day. Then, right after that, I took a job I never ever talk about, pursuing the title and money, with an "I'll-show-you" motivation 'cause I felt insulted by the meager raise offered from my then soon-to-be-convicted-theif-of-a-boss. (I left a near-perfect gig that would probably have me a big-deal dean about now on an impulse of anger. As the universe would have it, there was an even easier gig waiting for me.)

In that job born of spiteful revenge, the rules of the office changed everyday, my boss was an advanced alcoholic...it was hell for the ADD coping strategies I'd developed and mastered. I looked and felt like I couldn't do shit.

Taadaa.

The diagnosis.

The medication.

In an interesting counseling session, the post-traumatic stress disorder was added to my list of issues. It came out that soon after the Northridge quake, I, like so many others in the water-table area I lived on, were totally and completely freaked out by the experience. For me...I began to imagine a presence in the hallway. Moving through the hall I'd stood in to ride out that extremely long earth rock and roll was fine during the day. At night, especially middle of the night, I could only do it if my honey was home with me. One day soon after the earthquake, I actually had to call my mom to drive 25 miles to pick me up because I couldn't stay in the house one more minute with that "presence." What a Mom!!! She did so without making me feel any crazier, dumb or embarassed than I already felt. No complaints, either. And poor honeyofmine...I insisted he change his work hours because I couldn't get enough sleep for my day job when he worked his crazy night shift. Not only that, since I'm laying it all out, I moved the bed to the dining room until he changed his hours because I couldn't sleep in the room, through the hallway, where I'd experienced that crazy quake. As luck would have it, though we'd spent nearly every night together from the day we met, on the night of the earthquake, before we had married, he spent the night at his sister's house because he felt he'd been neglecting spending time with her when she was the one who'd taken care of him all the years he'd been in the states...till he met me.

In other words...I was madly in love, first night alone, and whamo! I actually had made my peace with God during the earthquake, so certain that the building was coming down, I expeced that hallway door jam was gonna be my swan song.


So back to tonight.


Of course, being the google gal that I am, I totally looked up the possible side effects of cold turkey. Dizziness, insomnia, stuff like that. Sure enough come 11:00pm, I am nowhere near sleepy. Which is also part of my natural rhythm when I can wake up on my own terms, at my own hour...which I did this called-in-sick morning. I try chamomile tea to get sleepy.

With an 8am dentist appointment, I hit the sack and hoped for the sleep. I meditate in bed, first. I've got one of my crystals pumping up my etheric bodies. Yeah, in retrospect, shooting for sleep while coarsing energy through my etheric bodies does seem a bit counter-productive.

I manage to fall asleep, but my head is spinning. To try to describe that sensation would be paragraphs and paragraphs in my current 3:00am inarticulate understanding. Suffice it to say, I'm ready to pop a pill to get some sleep. Not the same pill I'm giving up mind you...but yes, a pill. Baby steps. Larger goals. Dentist appointment at 8am and I don't want to be anxious and moody from lack of sleep. It took two years for me to go back...which is three times faster than usual.

Here's what happens...
My head is spinning. It feels very, very uncomfortable. I decide to go take a sleep-aid. All the tea did was send me from my warm bed out to the restroom several minutes prior.

I get up. I walk to the medicine cabinet. I try to open it. It doesn't move. I freak out. I presume if I turn on the light I'll be able to see why I can't get the cabinet open. As some of my guests have noted, I'm not big on using lights. I walk through my home in the dark more than not cause I already know where everything is. In fact, since I'm putting my true self in print, I have an uncanny ability to see without light. In my home or someplace foreign, if I drop something in the dark, I can "pick-up" its location pretty easy with a little intention to do so. (In case you don't know that about me and were wondering why I didn't reach for the lights first.)

The lights won't come on. I see myself move the switch. But nothing happens. I momentarily wonder if there's some kind of power outage or something.

I return to bed.

And then I'd begin to realize that it was all just a dream. I'd never actually gotten up. My trip from and back to my bed had been just a dream. But it was sufficiently real enough that the spinning stopped.

It would stop long enough for me to fall asleep and then it would return.

This same unsuccessful dream to get the sleep-aid happened twice more over the course of what may have been 30 minutes to an hour. Each time, I grew more and more frustrated that the lights wouldn't click on and that I couldn't open the cabinet. I'd see myself sulk back in confusion to the bed, crawl in, and then realize my body had never left the warmth of the bed. I'd return to myself and then wake up. Talk about an annoying recurring dream.

Finally, after the third, enough is enough. I pull myself out of sleep to get the pill. The pill I didn't really want to take, but felt I needed to have a well-functioning 8:00am trip to the dentist.

Easy pleasy. I get up. I feel my feet on the ground. I double check I can really feel the ground. Lights come on. Cabinet opens...

Back to sleep.


(Then another vivid dream...but I'm getting too sleepy to weave so many intersections in one long email at this hour...so my mind has very kindly made it difficult to access the details of the dream that got me awake enough to come online and share this...)

Here's the beleagured point.

I believe I was doing a very basic out-of-body this evening. The part of me that was ready to get the sleep-aid got up to get it. My body stayed in bed. That's why I couldn't move the cabinet, or move the light switch, but felt like I was certainly and truly in that part of the room. I was. Some portion of my spirit self.

The same spirit self that allows me to see without eyes when I'm looking for something in insufficient light. The same spirit self that allowed me to know, a few weeks back, exactly where a client was when she had walked off--1 1/2 miles from home. I just honed in on her energy. Could practically see her walking down the street. Her mom and family friend had hopped in my car. I offered to help them look, confident we'd find her without random, fruitless street touring. A straight shot. To be honest, even as I was confident of my success, it still surprised me that she was exactly where I saw her.

It's kind of weird to be different...that way.

Which brings me back to my PTSD after the earthquake. Oh yeah, something I dreamt helped me figure this out, and that's when it all added up to something worth sharing...

The reason I couldn't walk through that hallway, the reason I got so overcome with fear and needed my mom to pick me up cause honeydear had the car and was at work, but I couldn't spend not another second inside that apartment...I think the resonance of my fear from that earthquake left the equivalent of a psychic scream footprint in the place I'd stood.


My overall point in sharing this experience is to publicly acknowledge what only my oldest buddy has heard me admit. I stayed on the drugs because it numbed me to my psychic experiences. They scared me. Not "to death" like that Northridge quake, but they always made me feel a little crazy. That my impulsiveness was supposedly muted was just icing.


The experience tonight resolved itself nicely when I could see that what, in the past, would have been hyper vivid dreams, was nothing more than an out-of-body. My PTSD, just a sensitivity to the echoes of my own fears.

One of the consequences of working with my crystals, doing Reiki and all my continued reading and delving into the metaphysical is having reached a level of comfort with my beyond-the-five-senses experiences.

In sum, the reason I decided I can handle getting off the drugs now is 'cause I'm not afraid of feeling crazy anymore.

Thanks, Sistergirl.

It was Sistergirl who made straight-out and clear that the reason I take drugs is because of other people's craziness, not my own. Basically, my fear of being different, of being judged, of being called crazy by people who can do nothing but doubt what my experience tells me is real.

The subject line: Now that I'm more tutored and learned in metaphysics, I no longer fear the label of "crazy" for the experiences I lend myself to in life.

So, that's gotta inspire some thoughts, comments. Share if you like. Or don't.