At this point I’d settle for it not feeling like everything is screaming.
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If you want details I’ll relate them. But in a nutshell I had to make some severe, hard choices to get the actual yelling (you know, other people) and the mental yelling to become managable. If you wanna talk privately PM me any time.
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I am a little bummed for the first time in my adult life I haven’t shared a v day with an actual human, as in all day.
Colin Meloys dulcet voice will have to do. And the cat, who has really become friendly and affectionate.
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Well, to a certain extent my life is shit too. A lot of people think their life is shit. Sometimes it is, sometimes it just seems that way. From what you say I can’t argue that your life is shittier than mine, so thanks for making me feel better about myself.
Is the crux of the problem your vision? If that can’t be fixed then you shouldn’t be living rural, since it means you are trapped at home. There are legally blind people in my neighborhood who cope just fine, but, I live in a city, with good public transportation. Find a way to get to a decent-sized city. Pack up what you can carry, sell some belongings, hitch-hike out of your prison-home, live in a homeless shelter if you have to.
It sounds rough, but (and this will sound patronizing) people survived Auschwitz, people survived Siberian prison camps, people survived all kinds or worse BS than what you have now. Watch “Touching The Void” or read “The Gulag Archipelago” for some perspective. Is death better than what you have now? If so, then what do you have to lose by taking a crazy chance?
Or, you know, join a monastery, Buddhist, Franciscan, Eastern Orthodox, whatever, you don’t even have to believe, just fake it-- it may not be your ideal life, but what is life anyway? We’re here one day, and then we’re gone, hopefully there’s some pleasant stuff in between. At least you won’t hear anyone yelling in a monastery. Like Voltaire said, “just tend your garden.”
Hope that helps. It’s hard to know what to say when we don’t have all the details of your life. Also, I’m a little drunk.
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Right on, brother. Wasabi peas. A tip of the hat to whoever invented those.
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BTW, anytime you wanna talk, let me know. I’ll give you my digits, but the opening greeting must be a pun 
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Trying is good, to try is to demonstrate the will to live. Sometimes, trying is also holding on to things.
Sometimes, when things get tough, I stop trying all together. Oh sure, I do what I have to do. I do my job, put food on the table, but I give up on the pretense that there’s a point or a purpose to it all and just let force of habit take over for a while. Somehow, just letting go of the idea that failure, success , happiness and misery are options available to me and simply do things because they must be done is… To call it liberating would be missing the point.
Somehow this post wound up someplace completely different from where I wanted to take it so I’ll stop here, just hoping to send some good vibes your way.
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I didn’t know such a small amount of medication could make such a big difference. On 60 mg of Strattera, I don’t see that much of a change from without it - it’s really difficult to concentrate and I completely zone out of conversations. People can get a bit annoyed at me for that, and I’m a bit less patient with them. 70 mg, and those symptoms get better - I’m more focused and relaxed, more patient with the kids and more in touch with my feelings. I can switch between tasks without losing momentum. If I have work to do, it’s much easier and I can finish on time for a relaxing evening. Everything’s good for a week, then I start getting really stressed out and obsessing about a topic too much to even sleep properly. I can’t seem to stop thinking or talking about stuff that I don’t actually need to worry about. At 80 mg, I have a slightly better first week, then in the second week I’m visibly shaking and grabbing on to people because I’m too insecure and paranoid. There just doesn’t seem to be a way to effectively deal with the issues I already have without making my life all about completely different issues. 70 mg would be good in theory, but I don’t have consistent enough work at the moment and my brain isn’t going to let me relax or only focus on things that are worth focusing on.
Speaking of which, I could really do with some work soon. I have three companies who have accepted me for interesting and well-paid contracts and seem really happy to have me on board, but all three of them have failed to send me anything in a month and a half and I don’t have much work to do apart from this (I had freed up my schedule because I had been told that the work would be coming from the start of this year - indeed, I had a lot of work on the first week of January). I really need to find the right medication at the right dosage so that I am able to do quality work (I’m currently on 60 mg), and then actually start getting some work from these companies. The problem is that my mental state is going to be very different with and without something productive to focus on - while the one really busy week I had was great on 70 mg, I have no idea whether I could make this a regular thing and avoid the negative side-effects.
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I think it’s important to know that everything changes, sooner or later. It could be that the situation changes, or something in you changes, or both, but nothing stays the same. That’s good news!
Sending good vibes to you from Minneapolis. (I too kind of wish you were in a big city—so many services available, and so many possibilities for finding peer groups. But I do think happiness is possible regardless of conditions.)
It sounds to me as though you’re in a situation of ongoing verbal abuse. I highly recommend checking out The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense by Suzette Haden Elgin, if you aren’t already familiar with it. She was a linguist and a professor. She teaches how to recognize and counter (or avoid, before it escalates) verbal attacks (for English-speaking people). What I learned from her books almost-literally saved my life in a very bad work situation.
There are many books/titles by her on the subject—the first one I read was Success with the Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense, which is geared toward dealing with verbal put-downs in workplace situations. Other titles involve other specific areas (like for health care situations, gender differences, dealing with teenagers, etc.). But as far as I know, all of her books on the topic will give at least an introduction to identifying the specifics of verbal abuse and learning ways to deal with it. If your public library has any one of her titles on the subject, I think it would be well worth checking out. Here’s a pretty good look on Google Books.
(Some BBers might recognize Suzette Haden Elgin as an author of science fiction. Sad to say, she passed away about a year ago.)
Again, sending you best wishes.
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I may sound like a broken record, but this stuff is indispensable when I have a sinus infection:
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Oh hell. Sleeping at all? I only found out with my second one that babies don’t even have sinuses. It’s like the inside of their head is just one giant ear waiting to be infected.
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I sure know what this is like. My meds basically make me care less about things (so that I’m not too sad/angry to function). At 40mg I’m still on a very slow downward spiral towards major depressive episodes. On 50mg I care so little about the world and what other people think that I skip work, don’t worry about parenting my children, and walk out in front of traffic?
I have a friend who is on 10mg of the same stuff - which is a dose so low doctors tell them it shouldn’t do anything. They find it helps them cope, but 20mg (which is still so little the doctors don’t think it should help) makes them completely crazy.
Brain meds are so weird.
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I’ve been on and off a number of things, and much of it has been the same deal: a teeny bit too much and I get all the weird side effects but any less and it doesn’t do anything.
It’s hard to find the right one and the right dose, but (for me, anyway) it’s been worth the trouble.
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Brains are weird, too. I’m not always sure they’re on our side. 
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Good to hear. I’m not sure whether to quit or keep trying to find that sweet spot where I get more compliments about how I’m more present and engaged in everyday life and fewer “Who are you?” reactions. Interestingly enough, the thing that really made my wife and psychiatrist (who is also a young woman) think that I’d lost all sense of reality was when I asked my wife about the idea of “Schroedinger’s rapist” that was discussed in a thread a few weeks ago and whether women did actually feel that way. Apparently the US and Germany are very different in certain respects.
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Having somebody around that knows you really, really well is extra useful for getting help with spotting changes you yourself might not have noticed.
A small example: my wife noticed my pupils were two different sizes. I had no idea- and I’m not sure I’d have noticed. Apparently, mismatched pupil size can be a Very Bad Thing™ (though, happily, in my case it wasn’t).
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How do you feel after the meds wear off, or if you forget to take dose? (if you don’t mind me asking). I’m on 60mg of Vyvanse and sometimes it feels like the dosage isn’t consistent (or that the “time release” doesn’t work well). Also the constant feeling of exhaustion/insomnia grates a bit on the nerves.
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I had a Very Bad Thing™ reaction myself not that long ago (might have complained about it up thread). Not that a skin rash is that bad, but apparently as a side effect to certain drugs it is a sign of something possibly very bad. The doctor who saw me at the hospital told me that I was fine, but made the following analogy: You could walk out in the street and get hit by a car and walk away from it with nothing but a bruise, but if you didn’t get the message and kept walking out in the street it might not work out. One more drug I can’t take. He also - helpfully - told me that if I did have the syndrome they would worry about it wasn’t like they could do anything anyway except treat whatever symptoms I was having, for example, if my kidneys shut down they would put me on dialysis. He was very reassuring.
At the time I was thinking that I was batting .500 for life threatening reactions to brain drugs. Now that I remembered that my current medication basically puts my life at risk at a slightly higher dosage than I take (since I literally walk out into traffic) I should up that to .750.
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Yowch.
I’ve mentioned this somewhere around here before, but:
I have a reaction to Melatonin that’s usually only seen in elderly patients- I get hypothermic. Apparently it can cause blood vessels to constrict and that can cause your core temperature to drop. I was headed towards the low 90’s before I figured out what was going on. No idea how much worse it could have gotten, and I’m not eager to find out.
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It’s a 24 hour dose, but if I’ve forgotten to take it, the ADHD symptoms are generally quite a bit worse than they were before I started taking the medicine. I get really tired and can hardly focus on conversations at all, or I’ll realise I haven’t taken it when it’s the afternoon already and I haven’t done anything useful yet. Fortunately there are a few things I have to do first thing in the morning and I can incorporate taking the medicine into my routine. There are other people to remind me too, so it isn’t often that I miss a dose.
I get the same, although I find that I can avoid a downward spiral if I get enough good sleep. My work has been really irregular since I started taking the medicine (and not because of anything I’ve done), so I don’t know how long I can keep it up with a full schedule. Two times it’s been bad involved a really productive week followed by a week with hardly any work. Maybe my brain was used to that amount of concentration and found other topics to obsess about after I had run out of productive work to focus on? Or maybe I was tired after the productive week and that started the downward spiral?
I get this too, and often it’s not helpful as I have to care about a few different things. I have to study when I’m not working? It’s hard to bring myself to care enough to focus. MIL having a possible heart attack? Eh, she’ll probably be fine. (She is fine). No work for a while and suddenly I have a project to complete? I have other things to think about. It’s frustrating as I’m only taking meds because I was asked to, and often they seem to be a lot more trouble than they’re worth. Often I just get exhaustion mixed with a feeling that there’s not much of me left - my personality can change so much depending on my medicine dosage or just throughout the day that just trying to be normal or consistent tires me out. I have very little confidence in anything I think or say and it’s like everything that used to be normal is under question and no longer automatic. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does get very tiring and mess with your confidence.
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