Update: Bad Medicine Makes For Bad Work

Howdy everyone. 

It's been over a month with no video and I'd better give an update on that and where I'm at. Simply put, I've been thrown off track for a while but have now returned to things back to operating as smoothly as they should come. Planned projects haven't changed beyond some little games batting their eyelashes at me.

So what went wrong the past month?

I said previously I was working on a Consuming Shadow video and that it was ballooning. Well, it blew up too much and the structure that I'd planned for it was no longer working at all. It felt unfocused and messy. Simply cutting things out didn't feel right, so instead I went and chose to just rebuild it from the ground up while approaching things from another and more targeted angle. It'd keep the word count down and keep things focused on the main meat of the video. This plan-of-attack was one month ago today, and was sadly not foolproof.

This year I've felt my mental health get the better of me more often than I'm happy with, impacting my work, my social life, and my ability to enjoy just about anything. It's been an ongoing problem that I normally manage through several areas including therapy, but it's been getting to be a hurdle that keeps climbing higher as of late.

Then a friend recommended a certain treatment that they swore by. It worked wonders for them. My own experience with medication (SSRIs, SNRIs, and others) has ranged from limited success to completely bad experiences, but they said other things hadn't worked for them too and this one did the job. So, whatever, why not, I pursued this and got a prescription filled almost exactly on the day I decided I needed to rewrite the script.

These two life events met like a T-Bone crash between speeding cars.

Without getting specific, the medicine wrecked me. I was expecting there to be an adjustment period, but what I ended up getting lasted over three weeks. I felt sick, weak, dizzy, unmotivated, drowsy and lethargic, it made my depression and anxiety worse than ever, and perhaps worst of all is that my brain was just simply barely able to think. It's a weird sensation to feel there's a hole in your mind and where you used to be able to think, remember, or visualise things, there's instead a fuzzy cloud in the head that swallows everything. Needless to say, work felt impossible in this period.

I wanted to keep up with this since it worked so well for my friend, hoping everyday that the worst would be behind me, but after over three weeks with no improvement, missing social engagements that I wanted to do, I felt it was best if I cut it out. More harm was coming from this than help.

So now it's been a few days after stopping and I feel much closer to normal. I seemed to return quickly too. There might be some kind of come-down-haze, but I feel I am able to safely take the wheel of a car again. Also, I finished two scripts, one of which is the revised Consuming Shadow video, which has also now been recorded and editing has begun (you'll see the other when the time is right). I am hoping to get at least something done this month.

I apologise for the delay, and thank you all once again for your support. While I probably still have to think about my mental health, poisoning myself like I'm a bedbound Victorian patient is probably not the way to go. I look forward to talking to you all again soon.

Stay safe,

-Jack