The Lutheran Geek

(12:50:36 PM) Peter: mooooooo
(12:50:51 PM) Jy: Bark
(12:51:01 PM) Peter: Whinny?
(12:51:46 PM) Jy: SQUALK!!!!
(12:51:51 PM) Peter: yeep!
(12:51:59 PM) Peter: /fish?
(12:53:16 PM) Jy: Kek
(12:53:27 PM) Peter: /smile

Strictly speaking, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are not addictive, but trying to discontinue its use can result in a condition known as “discontinuation syndrome“. Of all the SSRIs, Paxil, or paroxetine hydrochloride, is the most potent, and leads to the most severe cases of this syndrome. I know this first-hand since I’ve taken it for over seven years to combat social anxiety disorder as well as mild depressive symptoms. When I started experiencing more depressive thoughts in the past month, I decided it was time to up my prescription to 40 mg from the previous low 20 mg dose I was taking before. Last night, as I went to take my dose, I discovered that the night before, I had used up the last of the Paxil I had on-hand. I knew this would probably mean bad things for me today… and I was right.

For me, even going 36 hours without a dose of Paxil can result in a great deal of extra depression and hyper-sensitivity to emotions. Just this afternoon, a simple thing caused me to spin out of control and to the point of tears. It was not a negative thing at all, not hardly, but it brought up some terrible memories, and caused me to spend an hour or so just staring blankly into space. It is incredibly frustrating to deal with these negative feelings creeping back into my life. Noone deserves this sort of mental torture I put myself through… and yet I do it.

One thing I talk to my therapist about is how I put most of the negative aspects of a relationship on myself. That is, I don’t spend a whole lot of time stewing over what others have done to me, but rather I tend to spend the time thinking of what wrong I have done to others. Even the act of apologizing doesn’t help – when it’s not received well, or outright ignored, I find myself simply befuddled and upset at myself. If only I hadn’t blown up that one time! If only I knew what to say to make it up to them. If only I wasn’t such a jerk. If only I wasn’t such an idiot. If only I wasn’t bad…

And so it goes, leaving me feeling like the worst person on earth. I’m self-centered, lazy, thoughtless, jerky. I’m terrible with people. I will always be alone.

I find that these thoughts just refuse to go away altogether, and they get amplified when I am low on my drugs. It’s just flat-out frustrating. Others have gotten through much worse thoughts and situations than me, and yet I continue to wallow and tell myself how awful I am. Others have attempted suicide, some succeeded. I have had my share of thoughts, but never had the guts to act on them. I’ve never been quite depressed enough to really be truly “depressed”, so instead, I just feel lazy. I get scared, I feel unable to interact with anyone. I am a failure of a human being.

…see, but I’m not. I cognitively know that my struggles are the same ones everyone goes through, from the shyest guy on the block to alpha-males like Donald Trump – everyone has doubts, fears, that sort of thing. Days like today, though, make it feel like I’m the worst person on earth.

Work was going fairly smoothly today – I was getting a lot done and was feeling pretty happy. I brought some nice clothes with me to work, which is a bit unusual – normally I just wear jeans and a T-shirt to work (though I was also wearing a sweatshirt since the temperature was 6 above zero this morning…) – but tonight we were having our holiday party at Orbitz! I was pretty jazzed up and feeling pretty good about the day. It all started to get a little weird in the middle of the afternoon, though…

About 3:15, as I was coding away finishing up some last-minute changes for the little product I’m working on, I started hearing a bunch of sirens. Unusual, I thought – must be a fire or something around here or in the Loop. (I work just a couple blocks west of the Loop proper – an area usually called the “West Loop”.) A few minutes later, I see a strobe light go off. Now, close by me sit the IT people who are kind of wild and like to be a bit crazy, so I thought maybe at first it was just a desk toy. I glanced up, and saw that the strobe light was actually the fire alarm system. I started to get up to prepare to evacuate when I heard a voice over the intercom: “We have an emergency situation. Please stay on your floor, lock the doors, and do not leave your suite.” Uh-oh – this sounds dangerous. My boss, when she heard that, immediately commented “Someone’s gone postal.” Unfortunately, we didn’t have the slightest clue what was going on. People started milling about, looking outside as we saw the emergency vehicles (whose sirens I had heard earlier) congregate outside the front of our building on Madison St.

Still, we had no clue what was happening. Around 4 PM, I got a message from my friend “Kavel” in Panda Attack (and like a noob, I’ve forgotten his real-life name…). He linked me to a story on NBC 5′s web site that said there had been a shooting on one of the upper floors of our very building! Details at the time were sketchy, but it seemed my boss was right. There was a report that the gunman was still at large, making us all a bit more nervous. I spent the rest of the afternoon checking the Chicago Tribune web site, which had a running story with details as they came in – some people shot, taken out on stretchers from the building to Rush, one guy shot in the head… yipe.

Finally, about 5:00, we got the all-clear that everything was under control. The party still went on, but I was kind of out of it at that point, plus, I’ve been pretty tired this week. I grabbed a beer, and kind of nursed it while walking around looking at a whole lot of people I didn’t know. I grabbed a few things to nibble on, but ultimately I just wasn’t in the partying mood, and so I slipped out at about 6 PM to grab the next train home (by that time, the Metra trains had started running again – my building is also a terminal for three of the Metra lines).

So an odd day, to say the least. Glad it’s over – I just need to relax now.

OK, on to geeky stuff again, finally. The big Patch 2.0 is dropping in WoW next week. This means free respecs for everyone, including my prot warrior. Here’s what I’ve come up with for a spec. I’m gonna miss the +5% crit that comes from Cruelty, but I’ll deal. Focused Rage should make my hate generation a bit better across the board by reducing the rage required for all my abilities; in particular, Revenge should drop to 2 rage! I skipped over Imp Sunder since I’ll only be using it enough to get 5 sunders on a target, then switching over to spam Devastate. Imp Defensive Stance and Shield Mastery will reduce my damage taken significantly – the former will be even more useful in later end-game encounters where a lot of the damage is magical in nature, not physical. And after wiping repeatedly on Huhuran the last few weeks with Djörk, I think the 2 points in Imp Shield Wall will definitely help us out a lot when every second of survivability matters. It’s just too bad Improved Disciplines is so deep in the Arms tree – that would be a very, very nice thing to have for everyone, including us Prot warriors.

Oh, and one thing I just noticed! Last Stand is an 8-minute cooldown now, not 10. That’ll make it a lot handier to use. Fun stuff! I’m looking forward to next Tuesday – well, at least for the talents, not the likely server instability…

…to those people who’ve been sending me supportive notes lately. I appreciate it more than you’ll ever know that, wow, I actually do matter to some people! I mean, it’s not like I’ve every been totally abandoned. I have an amazing family with a mom and dad that have done nothing but love me and care for me all these years… yet I get stuck in these moments of depression. It just goes to show you that depression isn’t about whether or not you’re smart or thinking straight or whatever – it’s dictated by plain old biochemistry.

I’ll be seeing my therapist again on Saturday, and we’ll work out the next steps on fighting this stuff. While I have been feeling much more cheerful (and much less sick!) these last few days, I just want to be careful and not assume that everything will be fine forever.

So again, thank you all.

Well, let’s see:

• Lack of energy and motivation
• Reduced appetite
• Changing sleeping patterns
• Almost complete lack of sense of humor
• and, of course, lots of sadness

I’m no psychiatrist, but it certainly sounds like I have clinical depression. The sickness has caused me to be in isolation for a long, long time, and it’s finally starting to affect me in profound ways. I’ve been having flashes of good moments, but I can’t seem to perpetuate them. The worst part is trying to explain myself to everyone I know. My friends and family mean well, but they try to reason with me, and it’s clear that I can’t be reasoned with.

I’ve also thought about suicide more often in the past week or so than I usually do. Mind you, plans never seem to come to mind, although I did even start making plans last night. I never get any farther than thinking about it, though – it’s as if a mental block sets in preventing me from going any further, protecting myself. Believe me, I’m quite grateful for it.

Anyway, I’m going to call my therapist today and leave a message with her. If there’s anyone out there reading it, I have one favor to ask of you. Please just write me a little note or something – comment here on this blog, email, something – letting me know that you’re out there thinking of me. The largest distortion in my mind right now is that noone cares if I live or die; my life matters to noone. I know it sounds selfish, but please remind me that I matter.

Too often over the last few months, I’ve found myself obsessing over someone. Not in the sense of “oh god, I wish I could be with them”, even though they have invariably been women, but in the sense of “wow, they’re so amazing, I need to remain friends with them”. I meet these people and then get it in my head that, unless I remain close personal friends with them, I am somehow less of a good person. Well, I intend for that to change as of now. Whenever, I get the urge to obsess over someone, I’m going to direct my obsessions to Drew Barrymore.

Seriously, why not? She’s pretty, funny, got a great smile, and would totally date me if she knew me. I can cook up elaborate fantasies about me and her and never have it be awkward, since the probability that I will ever actually meet her is about 0. No harm done. Easy as pie.

But yeah, that’s my goal. Last night, as I was mulling this over in my head, it seemed to work out so well. A lot of clouds were lifted from my head and things seemed fairly easy to deal with now. My hope is that I can perpetuate this feeling and not have to worry about future obsessions… hopefully.

This morning, I woke up, and for the first time in a week, I didn’t cough until I was nearly choking. It was a good way to end what had to be one of the more harrowing days of my life. Funny that the simple act of coughing a lot can make you fear for your life, question your existence, and just make you want to crawl in a hole and die.

Yesterday morning I awoke to yet another of my coughing spasms. Again, I feared for my life. Perhaps I was being overdramatic, but I had never had such a coughing spasm before this past week, when I’ve had several of them. I called my doctor and tried to get in to visit, but they were totally booked. They did, however, order a chest X-ray for me, which I promptly went up and had done. They’re pretty painless these days: you throw on a robe, and you literally hug a bulky machine for one angle and hang from a bar for another angle. All in all, it took about a minute – most of my time was spent in the waiting room and trying to find the check-in counter at Evanston Hospital.

I spent the afternoon at home, playing World of Warcraft and not napping, because I knew if I laid down again, it would just bring on another spasm. The doctor’s office said they would try to get me in that afternoon, but they never called back, leaving me hanging on my fate. I trudged through a little WoW that evening, fearing the fact that I would eventually have to go to sleep. I was also becoming more and more depressed, sending messages to my friends about how sick and unhappy I was, and generally feeling completely alone. My parents were available at least, so I was able to speak to them several times during the day. Mom, being the ex-nurse, had good advice on how to deal with my coughs and such.

Inevitably, however, 11 PM came. I sat up and finished a book I was reading, then reluctantly laid down to sleep at about midnight. Not 5 minutes later, I had a return of a cough spasm, leaving me wheezing and bug-eyed. It passed, but I was left feeling spent and scared. I called my parents to tell them about it, and my mom urged me to drive to the emergency room. I was reluctant to do so, but I did. You think of an ER as a place to go when you’re having a heart attack or you’ve been shot, but my own health problems were obviously such that they needed to be tended to right away, not after a night of sleeping and a likely replay of the coughing fit.

The ER was pretty quiet for most of the night. I arrived at about 12:15, where I was checked out by a nurse and then sent to a room at about 1:00, where I waited… and waited… and waited. Turns out they were short-staffed that night, with only one doctor on site. I could hear babies crying, saw a person on a gurney outside my room with an IV, and realized there were several people who needed help too. Since I wasn’t dying, I assumed that meant I would have to wait… and wait I did. Finally someone came in at about 2 am to give me a cursory checkup, asked me about my symptoms and such, then left again. More waiting. Finally, a nurse came in with a breathing apparatus that had me breathe in some sort of atomized medication – I assume it was steroids or something of the sort. That felt like it helped to a small extent, but when the doctor finally came in, I told him I didn’t quite feel it yet. He assured me it would help with the cough and such, so I acquiesced and hoped for the best. They gave me some pills of a steroid and an inhaler – first time in my life that I’ve had one. I went home, propped up my head on some pillows so as not to lie flat, and went to sleep.

Like I said, I woke up this morning and didn’t have a coughing fit – in fact, I’m starting to feel the phlegm go away. It was a terrible, awful day – I was coughing a lot, I felt completely alone. Today is another day. I still live alone, but hopefully I will be in better spirits.

A couple of my more observant friends have, in the past, made a rather frank assessment of me. Basically, they say, I hate myself. This, in turn, makes it difficult for them to be around me. Frankly, they’re right. While I’m not haunted with a constant depression and hatred of my being, it’s definitely there, under the surface. Lately, over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed this feeling become a lot closer to the surface. Ironically, it seems to come out most strongly when I’m around my friends. See, I’m blessed with witty, fun friends who love to talk and have fun. I enjoy the same, usually… at least when I’m at ease and relaxed. This really hasn’t been the case of late. I’ve felt like I needed to keep up and be sharp and perfect. Every mistake I make, every misstatement that slips out of my mouth is exaggerated to the point of being an unforgivable sin. As it stands, I tend to be a fairly passive personality, so when I feel like I’m stepping on toes, it’s my tendency to back off even further, cursing myself the whole time, telling myself how awful and stupid I am, and how everyone knows it. What’s funny is how this came up while role-playing: I didn’t realize that RPers tend to be very cagy in general, not willing to reveal much about themselves, saying things like “It’s nothing”. Of course, being the polite, respectful person I am, I hear that and think “OK, I guess they don’t want to talk about it” and let it be. Turns out that “It’s nothing” is an explicit invitation to ask more – I had it exactly backwards. I felt even worse about this, realizing I blew a good opportunity to talk more with my RPing friends, and instead assumed that they wanted nothing to do with me, true to my nature of assuming the worst about peoples’ attitudes towards me.

This continues on and on; eventually, I’m left with nothing but an empty feeling of utter worthlessness. It gets to the point where I wonder if anything I do matters. My job? Frankly, there are hundreds of programmers out there who could do what I do twice as well in half the time. So it would seem, anyway. Friends? Well, while I am unique, I tell myself I’m not that important to any one friend, and everyones’ life would go on without me present – witness how I have basically three friends left in the greater Chicago area, as most have moved away and gone on quite happily with their lives. The only thing I can’t disregard, even in my deepest depression, is my family. I am dear to my parents and the rest of my family and irreplaceable to them. That, at least, means I’m not 100% worthless in this world.

This is the crap I push through my head. It comes out so easily. Witness every time I make a mistake: “God Peter, you’re so stupid,” I say to myself. I MUST break this habit. I must learn to love myself. Dropping out of grad school made that hard – while I tell myself I learned a lot from the experience, a good part of me wonders if it wasn’t because of some fundamental failure on my part – laziness, hubris, somthing of that sort. How? Well, that’s why I’m in therapy. I will keep asking this question each week, and I’m hoping the answer will come to me eventually.

Till then, I keep on trying. And failing. But hopefully soon, succeeding.

Morning of 11 September. 5 years since I nearly drove my car off the Northwest Tollway on my way to work listening to what was going on in NYC and DC on WBBM. 99 times out of 100, I tire of WBBM’s rapid-fire, 500-WPM style of news delivery, but the style suited the fast-moving events of that day quite well. Strictly speaking, we were patched into a live feed of WCBS from NYC, but they have the same style. It was about 8:45 AM our time. The rumors were flying fast and furious. Was it a prop plane or a jet that had hit the WTC? How many planes were missing? Was there one heading for the White House?

Now we know the full extent of the truth. I was lucky enough not to know anyone who died that day, but two of my friends, Kris and Kat, did.  I cannot imagine what emotions they must be dealing with today. On top of that, it’s Kris’s birthday. Yeesh.

In any case, here we are. Besides the date, it’s actually a rather glum day. My co-worker is out of the office, so I’m pretty much by myself all day here. I’ll try to get some stuff accomplished, but it’s looking like a tiring, low-energy day. Eh.

In any case, just wanted to assure any of you reading this (all 0 of you, I’m sure :/) that I’m alive.