Day: 29-30

day twenty-nine:

felt perfectly normal all day long


day thirty:

feels as day twenty-nine, which is to say as normal as I have felt in recent memory--yesterday I wrote a short piece that was written in the way I wrote premed, that is, it was written from a place of imaginative flow--and this is a very different sense than the first twenty-eight days--again this morning, although I have not written, ideas are flowing again, imaginative thought is again occurring, not exactly as before, but to flow at all is a significant positive step--virtually every side-effect, to the best of my awareness is, to one degree or another, in retreat--sensation on the crown of my head, however, remains consistent

in order to understand change, a basis must be established, a consistent theme, a baseline upon which any variation will be self-evident--reading, the way I read, my relation to words, to sentences and paragraphs, to works as a whole gives me that opportunity--as my creative imaginative ability has slowly started to return I have also noticed a return to old reading habits--individual words are important again--plot is not or I should say less so--appreciation of the beauty of prose is returning--reading pace has slowed--ideas again are emerging within the reading--the urge to buy books, to own them, has returned as too the desire to spend time in a bookstore

this evening, for the first time in thirty days, listened to music and felt, what exactly I can't pinpoint, but I felt something that before was not there--and it felt good--I can only describe the feeling as a sense of recovery, of return, of finding what had been lost, of tasting again the first fresh fruit of summer--but the feeling is also one of relief and gratitude, to know music as a gift, not a given--and there is too a sense of humility but not so much humility as what I would call the opposite of hubris, which is often seen as humility but the feeling is more subtle than just plain humility and feels more like the utter absence of hubris and in that absence something else flows into the vacated cavity--exactly what that is, something close to humility, is what is experienced

likewise, the idea of a tear, of crying, seemed possible, as a response one could have--I say this because in the last thirty days, not only could I not cry but I could not conceive of crying--so to have the idea emerge and to think it could be possible is again something new, different and welcomed as a return to feeling fully human, fully alive, fully capable of engagement--for the record, I didn't cry nor was there an urge to cry, but the idea is there that it could happen, an idea beyond the basic academic sense

I don't know how to explain it--all day today I have felt like a kid in a candy shop--ideas, creative ideas have been occurring all day long--I have envisioned several different chapters--this is the way it used to be--and today, for the first time since starting meds, I have seen my mind work on a creative level as it did before meds--again, for the record, dosage has not been altered or changed--I cannot tell you how exciting it is to be able to think, to have thought happen, to branch, to mind map naturally--to have again a sense of flow in thought, a sense of melody, to be able to think lyrically--this is how it was before--for thirty days I've lived with that ability absence--to feel it return, as it has today, all day long is just beyond my ability to describe--grateful joy is perhaps the right way--and I have surrounded myself with wood--knocking and knocking and knocking