It’s been a week of cutting down my daily Xanax dose and the brain fog feels like it’s clearing and I’m wide awake in the morning rather than feeling sedated. And that would be awesome if the time I was spending aware and awake was not also time that I was spending feeling like I was vibrating out of my skin and grinding my teeth into powder. Everyone is different and everyone metabolizes drugs in different ways so I’m hoping that this intermittent frenzied panic that I’m battling is just a side-effect from coming off the medication and that it will pass, but I worry that it’s just how I am…that it’s the person I was underneath that made me start taking xanax in the first place.
And that sucks because then I’ll have to make a choice between being too terrified to live comfortably in my own skin or to being too zonked to be aware of being too terrified to live comfortably in my own skin.
I have hope that this will pass.
I have hope that I will get better. Or that I will adjust. It’s not faith…it’s hope. And there is a difference.
This weekend I left my house and Victor and Hailey and I went to the park and I ran out all of the excess energy burning up inside of me. It’s the first time I’ve voluntarily run in years and I felt both relieved that I had the energy to do it and also embarrassed about what I was running from. That I was running to make myself too exhausted to fight myself. That I was running from me. That I was running toward a normal that I don’t know exists for me.
Hailey and I ran through the dry creek bed and at one point I found myself on one side and she was on the other. The bridge had washed away long ago. The path was gone but I could see the other side.
I can still see the other side.
I’m just looking for the path.