Taking The Medicine

Ok so they started me on Diazepam. I've taken Diazepam before so I knew what to expect, but I don't intend to stay on it for long. Diazepam used to make me horny so I was secretly quite looking forward to taking it, but this time it just made me sleepy and I suspect that will continue to be the case. I'm already taking sedatives to sleep and they seem to do the job, so there's no need to start on one more. The real reason I'm taking Diazepam is because I'm having terrible trouble with claustrophobia. My mind is jumping around all over the place, desperately seeking a resting state that counts as an escape. And judging from the effects the diazepam has had so far, it probably won't help me out with that. So good old willpower it is then.

I need to resolve it soon, because it's leaving me too scared to get on the bus. It's nothing about the bus itself that's scary (I've been in bus crashes and suffered no adverse effects). No, it's the fact that once those doors shut, you no longer have an escape. It affects me the most in traffic jams, because you're constantly stuck behind cars or lights, and the next bus stop now is no nearer than it was when the doors were first shut. And when the bus is crammed full of people and screaming babies it's an absolute nightmare. But it's a nightmare I was always able to deal with, until recently. Only recently have I started to abort mission and get off the bus before my stop. Or, as was the case yesterday, get on and then get straight back off again! Something happened recently that wasn't so bad in itself, but it brought the phobia back with a vengeance. I thought I'd beaten it but clearly I haven't, and I'm clearly no nearer to resolving it now than I ever was.

Someone asked me yesterday whether it would really be so bad if I went crazy on the bus. Well, yes it would. This is my local bus, mostly used by women, children and the elderly. Their menfolk would soon find out who I was, as my unfortunate shock of ginger hair makes me more recognisable than I would like to be. I would be warned in no uncertain terms to leave the area or face a beating, or maybe get the beating first and then be told to leave. This is a tough working-class area, and tolerance of outsiders is low. And as I made clear in an earlier post, leaving isn't as easy as I would like to believe it is.

Sometimes I wonder whether all this is nature's (and gravity's) way of punishing me for not being "grounded" enough, and for daring to let my imagination take flight. And it seems that for now I am quite literally "grounded", in the sense that I can no longer take a form of transport that requires my feet to leave the earth. But the trouble is that whenever I bear all this in mind, it seems to affect me worse than ever. Of course I should just forget about it all and relax; but when you suspect that your resting state might be causing the problem, that's not exactly an incentive to relax. And when you're jumping around between different states of mind hoping that one of them will stick, you do grow quite weary of endlessly trying to relax. I'm sick of trying to change myself, and I'm sick of trying to escape myself.

So pills it is. For now.