Lower Meds

So far been at a lower dose of antipsychotic meds for four days. At first things were trippy. I used to take 4 pills, now I take 3 pills a day. According to my meds nurse this puts me at the low end of a theraputic dose. 120mg of Geodone.

The first day I woke up and the thoughts in my head were loud. I mean loud, and it lasted all through the day. I was thinking too much and at such an insistent volume, I thought I was going nuts. But it was tolerable. And nothing I thought was weird. Just ordinary ruminations. Songs going through my head. The second day I woke and everything was blessedly normal. Since then, the volume of thought in my head hasn't gotten so loud again. Or if it is loud, it doesn't last for very long.

What I've noticed is that creatively I'm more aggressive. Pictures form more easily in my head as I plan my future canvasses. Where once the canvass had been gently gradating color, now it is swirls of color like Van Gogh's starry night. I want to put color everywhere. I look at work I've done a month ago and say "shit, I should have blended more colors into that." I can see more complexity than I was capable of.

My basic design of the oil painting I'm working on was set by a drawing months ago, but over the past several days ideas come to tinker with what had been the plan, for instance, instead of one row of green diamonds across a man's shirt now I paint two rows. Flat blank spaces of color will not remain that way, I want to decorate everything, even if it is just with the common dot.

The enhanced creativity makes me really, really happy.

Also I'm not suffering so much after I stop painting. While I used to paint and then be in mental pain, now I just run out of willpower and have to rest. Two days ago I painted for three hours, up from my normal of two, and I've been hovering around two and half to three hours every day, I never dreamed that my concentration could increase on a lower dose of medication. Two days ago, after I painted for three hours, I lay down in bed, and while being perfectly still with my eyes closed, I felt like I was flying. Tired but euphoric. Went for a walk and came down from my high, but I felt weird and cancelled on my peer support group. I had no interest in seeing people. Plus I felt weird. Not anything I could put my finger on, it just seemed prudent to take it easy in the evening after the strange high of tired euphoria in the middle of the day.

I've noticed that I'm more sensitive to my husband's emotions. They seem very loud to me. His alarm clock dropped on the floor and he beat it a bit because it stopped working. The frustration with with the alarm clock not working affected me negatively, I didn't like my husband very much for making so much of a fuss. He seemed childish to me and I got mad at him and ignored him for a bit. The reverse is true too, when he's happy I cringe inside because it is like the sun is shining too brightly. His enthusiasms, about news stories that concern him, mostly geeky tech and computer and science things, aren't my enthusiasms, and it is hard to tolerate it when he goes on and on about them. I should be happy because he's happy, but this hasn't been the case on a lower dose of medication. Its funny, he hasn't changed, but on a lower dose of medication he seems different, and I'm not good at tolerating it. Usually by the end of the day I'm tired and cranky. Mostly I just stay silent, because to unload my negative reaction to him would be mean. This isn't much different from my normal crankiness when I get overwhelmed, on a higher dose of medication I regularly say "moron" in my head, its the one word that pops into my head when I'm pissed off at him. But saying it out loud would be mean and might constitute emotional abuse.

I know that I was emotionally abused as a child and have to be very careful not to fall into patterns of behavior that I witnessed as a child. There's that old circle of the abused becoming the abuser - I don't want that to be me.

So, no mania, no depression, no psychosis yet. My husband still loves me and thinks marriage is a boon to his life so I must be behaving myself well.

Two nights ago he had a dream where a woman named "Rose" committed suicide. She was no one he recognized from his real life. When he got to work, and looked at his computer, a picture he took of me several years ago came on as his screen saver. It was my head surrounded by roses. He then connected the woman's name "Rose" with me. So the dream was a worry dream.

I talk to my therapist tomorrow. I know, after only four days, that I don't want to go back on the higher dose of medication.

I'm too happy with the creative boost.

What every artist dreams about, a creative boost.