needtogetthisout

IMPORTANT: No doctor has formally diagnosed me with anything. A 10 minute session with a 25 year old internet doctor resulted in valproate being prescribed, then a 1 hour session with the next doctor resulted in him declaring I have adhd and prescribing guanfacine, before I eventually convinced him I have asd too and was prescribed aripiprazole. I asked him multiple times for a diagnosis letter and he refused one, but he specifically said I was *not* bipolar. The new doctor doesn't have a formal referral letter so is just going on my prescription history, and my prescription history is *not* based on a diagnosis history.

01:53 (5 hours sleep already) 

Man why can’t they see that this is the same cycle as alcohol?

I guess they’ve never been trapped before. But this is a case of the cure being the poison. This is a case of the things that you put in there making you sick. This is Stephen fucking King’s Misery and the hobbling has happened with the feet being held in broken shape.

And all that I think needs to happen for the feet to heal properly is for the fucking braces to be taken off.

I feel like when I was a child all the trauma of the violence at school - the sheer regularity and unpredictable nature of it - broke my bones. They fused together into the wrong shape but I somehow managed to walk, with great difficulty and struggle.

Aripiprazole has re-broken them - re-broken my soul - and they are setting in the *correct* formation. I am empathising with my family and am calm and listening to even the hardest of things with an open mind and open heart and the emotions are no longer getting trapped in my crippled and warped mind; they are flowing through me and I can accept and release them.

But these drugs.

I am basically being forced to drink alcohol every day, minus the buzz. Valproate acts in a very similar way to alcohol, but only on the GABA system. It holds *everything* down. That… is not what I need.

All I need to do to recover properly is to stop taking it, I am sure. And I have a mountain of it in the cupboard precisely *because* I had stopped taking it; I could see how bad it was for me. Why did I not explain that to the doctor? I can’t blame the kids for that. It’s because I’m too happy about what has happened and the fact that this might actually be an adhd-reset which can be replicated for other people.

But the doctor doesn’t have the notes from my previous places. She hasn’t seen that valproate is a relic of a 10 minute session with a 25 year old internet doctor who glossed over ptsd. She hasn’t seen that my second doctor, for all his flaws, specifically said he doesn’t think I’m bipolar and instead thinks I’m adhd.

And I want to build a good relationship with her because I recognise that I *might* be any one or many of these things. But people manage them without medicine. I managed them without medicine for my whole life until I found that body.

Man. What to do. Do I just stop with all doctors? But then what if I need one? I think it’s too early by a long shot to say that I am out of the woods. I certainly do have some version of audhd, even if it’s a super weird one.

But this med. Valproate. I spent 4 years struggling to quit alcohol and then 4.5 years dry now. And I can *feel in my bones* that this drug puts me in a similar mindstate to booze, just more surreptitiously. It just numbs me and makes me snappy and I don’t want to be numb and snappy; I want to be alive.

But then the doctor is saying she ‘we cant be sure whether’ aripiprazole was part of my natural rhythm. Which is just… insane.

That experience was like nothing I have ever… I have done all the illegal drugs, apart from LSD, and aripiprazole was more intense than every one of them. More addictive than all of them. More painful than all of them. More crazy than 2 ounces of mushrooms with 2 mitsubishis. Just… it’s not my natural cycle.

My ‘natural cycle’ was one of overexertion and burnout due to self-loathing and a cranked dopamine system. My natural cycle was to come out of winter feeling worthless, but to have lined up a race in anticipation of this worthlessness and then the plan my training *to a tee* until the end of the season, and stick to the plan like a god. I would invariably push the boat out a little further every year, and it was sustainable until it was not, and then I would crash into 2-3 months of burnout and depression. But even within the burnout I would be snowboarding and snowshoeing and cross training and *active*. I would just feel like a piece of shit.

This is not bipolar. Bipolar is the other way round; you don’t have 9 months of super productivity, 2 months of burnout, 1 month of feeling better and then 9 more months of training for a race which you have planned for *a year in advance*.

This cycle is the cycle of someone with undiagnosed audhd just dealing with life.

Well it feels better to write. I did a little bit of knife in the dark. Knife in the dark! Ha. I am feeling annoyingly awake now but I’m sure I’ll go back to sleep easy enough now this is out of my head.

I feel like I need to change this system.

All those old women in the previous psych waiting room; everyone going to their dealer. Some of them will be on the right drugs but most of them will not. They will be like me. They’ll have gone in for one thing and been given a medicine which causes another, and another, and before you know it you have 3 meds which are all causing the problems each of them claim to solve and you’re stuck in the chemical version of a looped thought, unable to escape.

This is what I saw. I will not become one of them.

So… sorry new-doc. You’re nice. And I’ll take it slow. I’ll not just go straight to zero like I want, though I know I can. I want to maintain the relationship. So I will halve it again, and we will meet in a week, and you will hopefully see that things are improved or the same, and I will go to zero after that.

And if I do have bipolar disorder, as the current sleep-and-mood tracking, and my haphazard stuff over the last 5 years, suggests I *do not*, then we can find another medicine. One which actually fits me. There are loads of them around.

Valproate is alcohol without the dopaminergic hit. And it is fucking bad for me. It’s why I have a cupboard full of it: I wasn’t fucking taking the stuff.

Either they will listen or I will walk because nobody is going to force me to drink again.

/jb202508130209