Due to an error in communication, my disability has been ended here in Florida. I've filed an appeal and it remains to be seen if it's accepted. If not, I have to leave Florida. I have no clue how but I have to have my medication and cancer treatments and those are impossible without my disability insurance. I have no idea is this is Ron DeSantis "new conservative sheriff in town" or not. If so, it's evil. Ending disability for someone who's thoroughly disabled is murderous. That a representative of the evil United States government, whether federal or local, would do this does not surprise me. Granted, I don't know if this is true or not.
Last month was my birthday and my SSA disability payment came in so I was able to survive. That means both buying food and paying bills. My food stamps and smaller SSI payments were discontinued last month. If my appeal is rejected, an emergency response from me and my family is imperative. I can't last two days without my medicine and I can't pay for it without my disability insurance.
I've tried to use this time of great turmoil and emotional upset to do some extreme, extensive therapy work. I actually cut out using my anti-depressant for a few days as it triggers my mania to a slight degree. I greatly overused anti-depressants in college in the 90s and feel I am still dealing with the effects it's had on my brain. So I thought going cold turkey, like the drug is cocaine, might be in order. However, my depression is so profound that I could only think of death and choosing homelessness during this time rather being a continued economic burden on family. I've been ready to go ANYWHERE as long as it's not in this world. So I took my anti-depressant again and it's gotten me out of my funk. When I'm depressed, I not only want to die but I choose death. When I take even a small amount of anti-depressant, my fighting spirit and instinct to live return. So I have to accept the positives and negatives of the anti-depressant. It treats my OCD and severe depression. I have to ride out the bouts of mania with my mood stabilizer and anti-psychotic. I just checked on my mood stabilizer and I run out in a few days. I have a doctor's appointment in 6 days but no means by which to afford the drugs. I'm not sure how much Lamictal costs but it's in the hundreds and my family will have to pay out of pocket. As they've failed me repeatedly over the years, I have no doubt this big picture won't end positively for me. They'll help some but not nearly enough. The only possible answer would be moving to North Carolina to live with my Mom and Father-in-Law but my mother has rejected this in the past. What kind of a mother rejects her disabled son? Mine does. If end up living there, I'll probably go back in and delete this part. If I don't, I won't.
So not being on my anti-depressant for a week or so has opened up some old issues and I've journaled about them. All the highs and lows of a time where everything was going wrong. In trying to stop it, I only added to the problems. I tried to drug my way through only. This was 1992-1996 when I was completely ignorant to psychology, psychiatry and mental illness. America does not teach it in grade school or even HS and that has a devastating effect on the mentally ill community. If we don't have doctors in our family, we're completely ignorant to our own troubles and it will be virtually impossible for us to help ourselves fight them. That was me in college. I had fully formed as a human, even though I realize now I was suffering severe effects from OCD and, a little later, bipolar. Life is stressful and I was being forced to live it as a normal person. This had devastating effects on me. My development is skewed from having two major brain diseases that manifested in HS. My sexuality developed, in a word, crazy. I'm now a sexual shut in and my gratification comes from porn, fantasied and autogynephilia. That is, essentially, being your own sexual partner. As the people in Wisconsin hated me when I moved there, I was forced to look inward for everything as there was no healthy outward course. I am not ashamed of this at all because it was a path forced on me and I coped and adjusted in the only way possible as I am a loving person. If there's no one to love outside, you have to do it inside. I also developed transvestic fetishism to cope. I became my own woman to please the man I am. I look back now and consider it a wonderful coping mechanism. However, you're also doomed to live a "not normal" life. This is apparently on the transgender spectrum and I did experience a bit of occasional gender dysphoria, though I now feel that came as a result of intrusive thoughts. I'm a man and have always identified as such. However, when you're kind of crazy, your mind strays and you can convince yourself of any lunacy at various times. I noted that when I first stared taking my anti-depressant, these feelings and behaviors ended. I'm still attracted to it but I don't do it. This is why I'm against "gender transitions" for kids. Some of these kids have homosexual OCD and will be mutilated before they figure it out by an out of control medical system. I find classification labels extremely silly. I'm not "this or that." I'm a crazy person who coped as best he could without understanding what was happening. I just lived and did it.
So back to college. I felt CRUSHING anxiety at age 19 and didn't know why. I'd also started to party and get drunk once a week for the first time in my life. I feel that contributed to a growing depression and exhaustion. I hadn't taken drugs until half way through my freshman year. That year was GLORIOUS. The best year of my life. I'd been an all-area baseball player in my senior year and was sort of basking in the afterglow of that triumph. I'd adjusted to college infinitely better than expected. I had new friends, a sort of girlfriend (splitting duty between me and another guy) and I was never more socially happy. I felt I'd finally made it, finally overcome the total social rejection and abuse I'd suffered every day for three years when I moved to Wisconsin at age 10. If I only knew those problems would be dwarfed by what was to come. But for one year, I was happy.
One night in the spring of 1992, I came back from partying that Thursday night with my girlfriend and experienced such profound exhaustion that she had to help me to my room. I'd never felt that before. It didn't come from the partying. It came from something else. Mom had split from Dad and was suddenly telling me all about mental illness in our family and all that. So I went to her local GP and a talk psychologist. That became my life of psychiatric drug taking. Psyche drugs are both a wonderful mental savior and a backbreaking mental burden. One drug can cause or exacerbate another problem and then you have to take ANOTHER drug to calm that down and so on and so forth. I started taking Prozac and Lorezepam, not having a CLUE what either did. I went solely on how I felt. If I was anxious, I needed more Lorezepam. If I was sad, I needed more Prozac. Prozac was indirectly treating my OCD and I had no clue of that. That was a benefit I didn't even know was happening. I always had an athlete's attitude about functioning. If I have a broken arm, inject me with something and get me back out there. For three years, I wasn't interested in learning about depression or anxiety. That was my fault. I needed to learn but wasn't having it. This being sprung on you at age 19 was a dirty, sleazy trick. I just wanted to take drugs if I needed them (miracle drugs I was told) and get on with my life. It was like popping a caffeine pill. Give it to me, let it affect me and I'll get on with my day and not think any more about it. As the internet wasn't a think yet, I can look back and cut myself a tiny bit of slack. If the net had been there from 1992-1995 as more than small curiosity, I would probably have eventually looked things up. I also wasn't even diagnosed bipolar until 1995. By that time, I was on three Prozac a day and three benzos a day. I've written in the past about that GP's psychiatric incompetence and misdiagnoses costing me dearly. I would love to say this name here and get him kicked out of medicine (he's now apparently working with children in Wisconsin) but I'll leave that one to God for now. I confronted him by telephone in 2000 and that's enough for me for now. I developed both full on, high level mania and experienced massive memory problems with the benzodiazepines, which I took daily for four years straight. I was not told of ANY of these side effects by the multiple doctors I had by then seen. The COVID tyranny from the medical community in 2020 makes it all come back to me like a nightmare because I experienced with psyche drugs decades before. It's the same old medical community BS. The drugs work miracles. They cure everything. There are no side effects blah blah blah. I was jumping out of my skin and was very suicidal in my thinking by 1993. I told this to the GP and he said, "It's you. It's not the drugs." The drugs were TRIGGERING these things. The idiot didn't know it. This error destroyed me for years. I began to identify with mania and OCD. "It's me, it's not the drugs," my ignorant self told myself. I began to think I was borderline godly. Memories of my baseball success still on my mind and having made it into college, I became an egomaniac. I perceived myself as some kind of dominant force because of the mania I didn't know I had. I was still fighting some intrusive thoughts at the same time, which I didn't know where a symptom of OCD. I began to identify with the intrusive thoughts which is VERY potentially dangerous because those can tell you to do all kinds of horrible things. I did some things I'm not proud of during those years. I treated a girlfriend of mine very aggressively in bed and she told me I hurt her. She kind of hurt me, too. I didn't think anything of this until afterwards. I honestly thought I was pleasing her. I look back on this now with guilt and just a sense of tragic despair. More than anything, I hope she's okay.
While I was taking anti-depressants in massive amounts to escape my depression, partying once a week became my lifeline. It was when I could lose my inhibitions and cut loose all my massive stored up energy. I'd dance at clubs, socialize like a madman and binge eat my way into a fifty pound weight gain. I suppose during this time I was entertaining. I was told I was. Funny thing is I was socially happier and had friends and girlfriends like I'd never had before. But my health was taking a terrible price. Funnier thing is I had convinced myself I was mentally healthy because I was taking drugs. "They've fixed all the problems," I said to myself. Meanwhile, my mania was crazy and storing up like a blazing hot hurricane in my mind. The benzos kept me stoned enough to keep me from flying off the handle so now I had too massive drug problems I'm still paying the price for. Those things do change your brain and do damage. I was fed the "miracle drug" and "good drug and bad drug" narrative by well meaning doctors and, as I said, I was not advised to side effects. I've since learned doctors DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THESE SIDE EFFECTS EXISTED. They were just covering their asses for legal protection. Sound familiar? Sound kind of like what happened with COVID in 2020? Apparently they're still engaging that. Experiment, deny problems and eventually admit to the errors. Now a mania and suicide warning are on anti-depressant prescriptions. If I served as guinea pig to help others with that, even though it was unwilling and unintended, at least that's something. I suffered so fewer people in my group would later.
That's all for now.
