For the last two years I don’t think it’s too far off for me to stay I’ve been driven mad by stress. The Interupter, Bilbo, DS Luke et al can attest to the fact that I’ve had honest to gods hallucinations due to my insomnia. (Nothing too fantastical just movements out of the corner of my eye, really weird distortions of what I’m actually seeing, that sort of thing).
Sertraline, frankly, has been something of a miracle. It’s allowed me to gather my thoughts rather than racing from disaster to disaster. My main problem has been the difficulty of balancing my external life with my internal one. I have come to the conclusion that not everyone seems to need as much from their internal life as I do. I need to be able to think, to have conversations with myself, to be solitary with purpose as well as interact with the rest of the world.
I am not wholly convinced that everyone needs this, or at any rate to the extent that I do to retain my sanity.
The fact that it’s very much at odds with my other need for connection with people and desire to be a useful part of the world at large means that living without understanding leads to a descent into – well, madness. And stress makes it incredibly difficult to think. I can’t emphasise the amount which I am gradually realising that my brain is a place almost as jumbled (at times) as my house. Or it was, feels like I’ms tarting a bit of spring cleaning there.