I haven’t been writing that much the past few weeks.

Dealing with this medication change and adjustment has been pretty brutal.

Very brutal.

I’m starting to come out the other side slowly, but I feel like it’s taking an eternity.

But it’s only been a couple of weeks.

I know I need to just be patient, let everything settle in and start to work.

It’s just so tough to rest sometimes.

I feel like every day goes by and all I did was sleep, again.

But it is what it is.

I can’t do much of anything and I need to just go with it.

I’ve noticed that mental illness hinders my capacity to live my life.

My ability to think and function is not what it once was.

I have to give myself more time to comprehend things, more time to process through whatever the speed bump is for the day or week.

I can’t do what I once was able to do.

And that’s not just physical things either.

The bulk of what I mean is mental capacity.

Even though some of that I deal with is physical.

I can’t squat or bend my knees anymore.

I can’t lift anything with my bad left shoulder.

I can’t run, I can walk, but not for longer than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time.

I can’t stand for very long anymore.

Mentally, things like word games are a lot harder than they used to be.

Memory games are very difficult for me.

So is comprehension in general.

Conversations are more intense to try to follow than they ever have been.

Reading practically makes my eyes cross and I lose track of what’s happening so quickly anymore.

A lot of things in me and in my life have changed with my psychotic symptoms and my physical ailments, and that was a hard pill to swallow at first.

Granted, I think I’ll always be frustrated about these unavoidable changes.

Some of the changes were so gradual, I didn’t realize what I could and couldn’t do until years later, when I was more stable.

But it’s really fucking weird to wake up one day and realize I can’t do a lot of what I used to do.

I can’t keep going at the same speed because my mind and my body quite literally can’t keep up.

And sometimes – a lot of times, that gets old.

Socialization in general is difficult for me anymore too.

I get easily overwhelmed by noises and conversations.

I’ll hear people talking about me and I can’t tell where it’s coming from in a crowd.

Then I feel like people can hear and see my thoughts and my anxiety and paranoia quickly gets ramped up.

I can only go out to eat at off hours, missing the major rushes in a restaurant.

Being in public is getting a touch easier as time goes on, but it’s not close to where I was before my psychotic break a couple of years ago.

I can’t do what I used to do.

I can’t be where I used to be.

And some days, my inability to be in public places fills me with dread and doom.

I’ll be honest, I’m having a hard time putting my thoughts together with this entry.

My medication changes and adjustments have been really difficult this go-around.

I don’t feel like I’m ever going to snap out of it.

My capacity for life and living is even less than it has been.

I feel like I’m running on fumes.

My ability to think has been dulled with everything.

My thyroid levels have been off again and I have to do another round of blood work at the end of the week.

If my lab results are similar to the draw last week, I’ll have to go up on my thyroid medicine too.

But I’m hopeful that if my thyroid medicine has to be tweaked, it’ll only help, because it’s very likely that my wonky levels are helping my exhaustion run rampant.

– Keren