Supermoon
I’m all alone with my thoughts
It’s just gone midnight and I’m lying here unable to get to sleep, unusually for me. I normally sleep for nine or ten hours as my brain mercifully repairs itself overnight amid undramatic dream content. Not so this evening. I have a cold but that is something I am actually enjoying. People sympathise with the nuisance of it, and right now I’m marvelling at how effective the decongestant I have taken is at clearing my head and allowing me to breathe normally. I’m grateful and comforted by having this medicine available beside me and for all the people who have worked to put it there. It’s more complicated when it comes to mental health, though. It’s been a bad year. Trauma and rejection and trying to reduce the dosage I take led to me tipping back into psychosis and ending up having the dose I take doubled by my GP. What is this substance doing to my brain? No one knows, and no one will ever know, since I am not part of any study into the long term effects of this drug. What I do know is that it stops me being psychotic, but no one knows why, since it is an antidepressant. Despite being officially a mood stabiliser, it doesn’t help me feel any better with the feelings of impending dread and the slow painful torture that have plagued me for as long as I can remember. After a lifetime of masking this pain, and pretending I am fine since no one can see anything wrong with me, I am physically and mentally exhausted. And so tonight I lie here, the people I love around me in their rooms, bathed in the silvery moonlight, my heart like a burnt out building.