I imagine this is how other people feel all the time, but I know intellectually that this is not true. Too many speak of the pleasures of Zoloft, too many people are afflicted with anxiety, for this to be the case. But when I take clonazepam it’s like the world shifts and I want to re-embrace it.

I don’t know what I want to do first, read, write, talk to my wife, go see a movie, fuck around on the computer composing 2,000 word journal entries. Anything to keep my brain engaged and my feelings focused on the present moment. This is why reading’s out most of the time. I don’t want to escape this feeling, this relaxation of anxiety, don’t want to miss out on it while I inhabit someone else’s world. I want my own world, transformed by sheer lack of hard-driving fear and self-hatred. I can almost literally feel the hand that had been gripping my skull relaxing itself, and I wonder why so many people I encounter on the web have come out against milligrams of all kinds. I know that my life has improved dramatically through the introduction of a large amount of medications and I wouldn’t have it any other way now.

I may occasionally threaten myself with discontinuation for reasons I can never remember just a few days after I have the thought. So goes the bipolar mind — always thinking that everything’s either all right or permanently fucked and nothing in between. But clonazepam allows me a brief window into that time when things don’t have to be black or white, when there’s a nice grey zone of neither here nor there in terms of mood, a respite from the spikes I’m prone to. I feel less lonely on clonazepam, understanding that I can always get in touch with any friend I wish to at a moment’s notice. But I normally don’t, which is a topic for another post.

Bipolar seems to have this way of robbing you, when you’re not manic, of decent conversational skills. One day you’re doing fine, talking to everyone you know, having a fucking ball, then the next you’re barely able to smile when you’re supposed to. The people around you get that particular rhythm in their conversation — they pause, ever so imperceptibly, for something from you. And of course it never comes from you, because it can’t come from you because you’re feeling like this, so incapable of speech.

My doctor calls it self-censorship, but I think he’s wrong again and think it’s something deeper. I think there’s a biological component to this lack of speech; verbal portions of the brain are shut down during depressive bipolar attacks. People talking circles around you, stunning you not so much with their wit as with their capacity to access phrases, and even words, at the right time and pace. No amount of milligrams seems to have protected me against this deficit. This is where the drugs have let me down the most.