Today is June 6th, 2016, and it’s been a year since I started taking Buspar. It has been perhaps the most incredible year of my life. I could never have believed life could be this good. For the first time in many years I feel I have come home to myself again. Opened to new experiences, and found myself again. My brain and heart, once dulled by sadness and pain, now seeks out beauty in each day.
I wanted to write you about all the things that Buspar has allowed me to do, but as I have thought about it over night, I have come to realized, half of what Buspar has done for me, is about what is gone in my life. Gone is the daily anxiety, the tapes in my head that tell me I am an awful and horrible person, that I will never be good enough, the thoughts of suicide, that all I do will just end in failure. For the first time, that I can remember, I want to live. I am eager to greet the dawn of each new day, not angry that I am still alive. I don’t remember feeling this good, at least, since before Oma died, when I was 7.
Buspar works a bit like water, it wears away and repairs the
bad stuff, drop by drop. Slowly your
eyes begin to open to things around you.
I feel like I have been asleep for at least the last 10 years, if not
longer. My PTSD, from years of abuse,
had left my emotions dulled. I have had
to deal with each new intense emotion as they surged in my life. I cry at the drop of a hat, but I don’t use
it like a weapon, like my mom did. I
smile. I am happy, truly happy with my
life. I fall in love with Mr. Jay, every
day all over again. It’s not that Buspar
has given me back my life, it has given me a life I never dreamed possible.
A year ago today, the computer I am typing on, sat in a
dusty bag. The desk it sits on, was
covered in junk, and I felt did not belong to me. The dirty clothes and dirty dishes were more
numerous. My grooming and personal
hygiene were subpar. I was terrified of
the next moment, not knowing when I would have a panic attack, or what the
cause was. I was a woman who frequently
denied or felt ashamed of her biological genealogy. I rarely cooked dinner. I had no energy to exercise, and back spasms
ruled my life. I was blind to the
problems in my life, big or small, and had no ability to think up how to fix
them. And I seemed to constantly be
seeking out people and animals to save, when the only person I wanted saved was
me.
Today I write you from this computer, no longer dusty, on a
desk I now claim as mine, above it a wall of inspiration for both my book and
my life. The dishes and clothes are not
piled up. The floor has been recently
swept. My nails are chipped, but
painted, as they are every week. My
grooming and personal hygiene are exemplary.
I am no longer ashamed of my biological genealogy, and in fact I am
quite proud of it. Dinner is already
defrosted, and I am thinking of how to cook it, and it’s not even noon yet. I am looking forward to my evening floor
exercises, and my walk in the morning. Now
when I see a project that needs to be fixed, it does not take me long to figure
out how to fix it, emotional, mechanical, or otherwise, as if my brain was
spinning at a faster rpm. Drop by drop I
am saving myself.
I find there are not enough hours in a day to listen to all
the music, read, clean, or write as much as I want to, but damn it I keep
trying.
In one year, not only have I increased my reading,
introduced new music in my life, have a cleaner house, but I think my greatest
accomplishment has been my writing.
Since August 2015 I have produced and posted over 95 articles to this
blog, and at last count 152,368 words give or take a few. My book currently has 17 chapters and 82,959
words. In less than a year I have
produced 235,327 words. This does not include plot outline notes, articles that
will not be published, interview notes, and notes taken from the self-help
books I read. Not to mention hundreds of
hours of research. It is a staggering
amount, even for me. Saturday, I
introduced myself to a new person and told them I was a writer, and for the
first time, I didn’t feel like a fraud when I said that.
When I picked up my pen, proverbially, to begin writing
again, and started my blog, I wrote incessantly at first, terrified it was just
a side affect of the medication and that all this would go away. I know now, it is not. My writing is here to stay.
I am ever grateful for all Buspar has done from me. It has given me courage to end relationships,
go on without people in my life I thought I could not, start and deepen new
relationships. I can’t wait to see what
the next year holds.
Ilsa
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