Mental Constipation

(nice visual, eh?)

Over the past few weeks, I’ve started to wonder (fear, actually) that I might need my meds adjusted upward. Anxiety has crept in. A general cantankerousness has joined my normally happy demeanor. I’m not excited about my life. And most of all, I find myself engaging in a thought script that involves a lot of doubt about myself, my life, and my choices. All of these are big red flag type indicators that something is amiss. But I’m only now spending the time delving in. Why?

For one thing, I’d be lying if I said pride wasn’t a factor. Yes, I might be on an antidepressant, but I’m on a low dose, and have never needed anything more than that. Pretty stupid, huh?

Beyond that, I have a case of fear-based “what if”s. What if I raise the dose, and that only helps for a brief time before I start tumbling again? What if I am *gasp* irreparably broken? If so, why fight? Why not just accept? Well, there is that teensy issue that life quickly becomes not worth much if I do give in.

Finally, I realized that if I’m needing a dose-boost, perhaps that means that there are non-medication fixes that I need in my life. Okay, not “perhaps” there are, but undoubtedly, there are changes that I need to make. And the biggest change I need to make is that I must — just must — get thoughts out of my head for processing more often. I rarely write any more, and when I do, it’s not of much substance, just a quote and a quip.

So, here I am, with a brain full-to-bursting of ideas, thoughts, emotions, and writing material. Why am I not writing?

Self-censorship.

This is a big deal, one that I’ve touched upon before. Wow, how much things have changed since those days, huh? What remains true is that for me to write well, I need to allow myself the freedom to write whatever strikes me, without worry about who’s reading. Does that mean I should just journal privately? Well, no — I don’t think so. Part of the fulfilling nature of writing for me is in having feedback (even the absence of feedback is feedback)!

Crap. I realize now, I’m censoring myself even in writing about censorship. Crap, crap, crap.

Moving on (since I’m a bit stuck), I moved to my current town (and it IS a town — only 20k people give or take, and an hour+ drive to Santa Fe) in February. As a result, while I have a few “friends” those friendships are more of the acquaintance variety. And, I do have a few very close friendships I maintain remotely, but how much do I want to dump on those folks with what’s in my head? At least one of my good friends, I’ve come to almost develop a complex about how much I’ve used her ear as I’ve struggled (yes, struggled) through the last two years. Yet, just the way my mind works (truly, I am very much an extrovert in how I process information), I must get thoughts out of my head in order to make sense of them. If I just think things over, it’s as if my brain is scratched CD. I’ll move on to other thoughts, just to have my current issue grab me again. If I write thoughts down, I can swim around in them a bit, picking them up and examining them one at a time, rearranging them until they make a modicum of sense to me. I can find patterns rather than being stuck with details. Telling my thoughts as a story, the story starts to take shape. I have a somewhat cohesive (if confusing) whole rather than a million discreet bits of mental debris.

But, if I write about my husband, he has this address. If I write about my beliefs regarding religion, it feels like I alienate people whom I love dearly, but who I know are believers. And in some cases, I have people I know in real life who read, but might not have the maturity of tact when sharing my thoughts with others.

Is it time for a new blog? What does it mean to be authentically myself, complete with the ugly parts and inconsistencies, and how do I balance that with kindness and compassion?

Whatever the answer, I need to find an outlet for all of this clutter that’s in my head. It’s making me crazy.