Progress Note

This is more for my sake than anyone else's, and also because I forgot to do a post yesterday (oops).

Regarding my progress five days after starting on the anti-anxiety medication "Buspar" and my progress five months after starting on the SSRI Prozac.

I've never had more general hope for where I can take my life than right now. My mood is elevated and stabilized in general. No suicidal ideation, haven't had a mope-in-bed day in months, and my self-image has improved somewhat.

The main side effect I've noted is tremors in my hands and, to a lesser extent, the rest of my body. Originally, I had thought it was simply a one-day thing that I was going to get over, but after the last two months or so, the tremors have not gone away. Fortunately, they don't seem to have gotten any worse either. It's not a debilitating condition by any means. The dexterity I've worked on for years has helped to combat most of the problems that would normally be associated with hand tremors. While this means I may not be able to be an expert marksman anytime soon, I don't find that I'm terribly limited in anything I do normally. I've noticed very rare eye tremors and the inability to accurately focus my sight on a spot, but this only happens during periods of heightened tiredness.

The second it gets bad enough to the point that it affects my typing, I'll start to have serious reservations about continuing.

The discovery that my anxiety was not linked inexorably to my depression was unfortunate, but not surprising. It makes sense that my anxiety was its own beast that had simply helped to reinforce the depression. However, the immediate sensation I'm having is that my anxiety has not dissipated. Of course, it's only been have days, and it takes up to a month to take full effect. Still, I'm becoming more intimately aware of my anxiety ticks. Each time I bite the sides of my fingers, every obsessive thought I have about something that is neither my concern nor something I have control over, every second that I can't get someone out of my head, every detail that I can't figure out, each self-criticism and self-doubt I experience. I catch every single one, and I'm at once critical of the behavior and scared that it will persist, which of course, is a fear brought about by the anxiety itself.

Theoretically, the symptoms of anxiety may "worsen" in the weeks leading up to the end of the first month. I am 0% looking forward to that if it hasn't already started to affect me (which, again, is a valid concern)

I have been presented with a rather large bag of mixed emotions lately, as my zest for game philosophy grows, but so too does this sudden desire to settle down with someone. I fear greatly that I will have the propensity to make irrational decisions based even partially on such an emotionally-laden drive.

Hmm...