Ok, what’s about to happen doesn’t take effort.
I know, that’s not what you want to hear from a writer, so I will lie: I’ve struggled my whole life so that the profundity of these sentences will alter both of our perspectives. Ain’t that the truth, I’ve been struggling the past 15 goddamn years for no good reason.
I’ve mentioned somewhere else online – irrelevant to this article -, so I will mention it again – I’ve been titrating off my medication. So let’s everyone be very, very, very concerned.
I can feel the madness gripping me!
Actually, that is called rationality, disillusionment, and post-mortem depression.
Really, I feel fine – psychologically, anyway. When you aren’t taking copious amounts of drugs or stopping medication abruptly (as in, overnight), psychotic symptoms aren’t always as common.
And, well, you get far enough down Hospital Drive when you start realizing that the medications prescribed are causing you a lot more by-product ramifications than might be worth the issue at hand.
Including:
Breast Enlargements
Rip Van Wrinkle Syndrome
Fatosis
Non-Male-Pattern-Baldness
Mental Retardation
And wow, hell, I never noticed any of them until now, because, when you’re sedated, gaining 40 pounds isn’t that big of a deal for some reason.
I’ve always been sort of anti-medication, and time will tell if they tie me down to a bed and I end up a nice, straight-jacketed Christian boy again. It does worry me, such a nice boy, writing such things that don’t align with what I want to hear.
Well, anyways. I’m roughly six months out and have lowered my medication 1.9 milligrams (5mg down to 3.1). And…It will supposedly take two more years to get off this shit entirely, if all goes to plan, which it won’t.
Aside from stating that I was being prescribed a benzo unknowingly, and that I like my psychiatrist so much that it’s not his ass that is going to burn for this, what is really jarring is the time frame of how long I have been in The Mental Health Industrial Complex.
I was talking with my therapist about how, to a pretty good extent, I am a good example of what the pharmaceutical industry hopes for. Some kid with some weird tendencies, who ultimately can get hooked on all sorts of prescriptions long-term.
I have spent the last ten years of my life explaining to psychiatrists and therapists why there is nothing wrong with me, while they tell me why there is something wrong with me, explaining that I need to take medications or unpack the Oedipus complex so we can continue to discuss this crap, for the next ten years.
First off, my problems don’t exist. They, at the place where they stand, are so masturbatory that I wish I had some real problems.
When a straight man is psychoanalyzing his acute gay tendencies, inventing the narrative that his mother treated him as her stand-in husband, and that he just doesn’t remember being sexually abused as a child, the problem is in the industry, not the individual.
None of that stuff is accurate or is necessary to anything relevant in an essential human experience.
Not to mention all the side effects that come along with it.
At some point, you have to say, like, I don’t think this is really helping me. I don’t think I’m “gay,” or crazy, or if I am, I don’t care enough to be gay or crazy enough figure out why. I don’t need to pretend to call that actualization when it is really just masturbation.
I don’t think my therapist is the problem; I don’t think my psychiatrist is the problem. The problem is the institutions that their profession are in, which are reliant on people victimizing themselves so that they become a product of this mental health phenomenon.
The patient spends years and years on therapy, and money on pharmaceuticals, that make them dependent, and tired, and then there are all sorts of further adjustments, corrections, rehabilitations, IOPs, or god knows what.
Like, it’s not a great feeling to have been caught in your own web, that someone else spun for you.
Now, the bad news is, I am withdrawing heavily from my medication. So, please forgive me for 1. Being a general asshole to be around lately. 2. Not writing as much as I wish 3. Some bad podcasting 4. All of my sins.
When your body is going through withdrawal, when it is under pressure, it will start to change the way that it thinks to compensate for the pain it is in. This has made me realize how privileged of a concept God is. Someone who can spend their idle time on the philosophy of moral goodness, has too much time on their hands and not enough of a real struggle.
So sorry God, I’m gonna be slothful, and gluttonous, and lustful, and have wrath, and I guess you just have to kill me and I will go to hell (don’t worry,I knocked on wood, that’ll keep the evil spirits away).
My whole life I’ve been operating under the guise of God, because it’s a cool vehicle, but right now, that can’t be my operating system. That, would be irrational right now. And I think that is what gets those psychotic types into trouble – self-imposed rules that they can’t live up to and then are too hard on themselves until they break and have to start the ten-year clock all over. It’s not that I don’t believe in God, I just don’t believe in him right now. What do you want me to do, lie?
I write all this to say, writing tonight, doesn’t take any real effort because I am finally one month out from my last titration, so the withdrawals have subsided until my next lowering. I can think and write again.
It’s really hard when you want to write but you can’t, or when you don’t want to write but you really wish you did. And then you think that you are the problem, that you need medications to solve it, and then, maybe you would feel better.
The last four weeks have been hell creatively, and I couldn’t’ve scribbled you a sentence if my life depended on it.
It is the strangest phenomenon when you know how to do something, know what you want to say, but your brain and body are literally incapable of doing it.
It is hard to explain to yourself that watching YouTube and eating ice cream is better for you than anything else. And I’m sure it is hard to understand on your end, too.
It hasn’t been crazy, it’s just been slothful compared to my usual. I can not write, and it is not because I am lazy; it is because I am debilitated.
someone made this art
One quick thing while we are here. I find it very interesting that the world right now is obsessed with conceptual pedophilia.
Drake, Epstein and Trump, Diddy. Who, yes, did it in practice.
It is a strange phenomenon that seems to be in focus right now, although nobody is actually naming it. They are naming people, and are very willing to burn these witches, but not really address the underlying pattern in our culture.
And yet, Bill Belichick (gross), Leonardo DiCaprio, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bradley Cooper, and thousands of other men date women half their age, twenty years apart, or who just turned 21.
The grossest thing is that our society reveres certain men in certain circumstances doing essentially the same thing that they convict others for, give or take a few days.
I’m not here to justify it. I am here to acknowledge that it seems to be the nature of men to be attracted to younger women. That…appears…to be a….characteristic…of “men”.
And many people would agree. But instead, there is some invisible holier-than-thou person acting like they would never take a look at a boy or girl who is 16. Believe me, they would. Oh sorry, 18.
I’m just trying to say it’s more common than I think you’d like to admit. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying there is a pattern. And I think that there is a bigger conflict at hand than these individuals. I don’t know what it is, but similar to the essay above, it seems to be a problem in the “industry” rather than with these individuals alone.
I wish we could acknowledge it instead of turning it into a moral high ground. Like just being irate at a few dudes who were in the foul zone (not trying to diminish what they did) isn’t going to help us understand where the actual conundrum lies, and maybe how to correct course as a culture or species.
The imbalance of power of these individuals, or the power in general, seems to cause a sexual culture in a society that shames the person rather than the culture that these monsters are born into.
There is some irony I can’t see. Maybe it is black and white, and these meds are making ask questions, or say things I shouldn’t.
Also, sure, I’m kinda gay, but I prefer older women, too.
Ben Bonkoske 