working out how nortriptyline killed my creativity
2017-05-16
since i have an appointment with the neurologist in two days, i’ve been trying relaly hard to figure out how i can articulate the way that nortriptyline killed my creativity, even as it made me more functional than i’ve been in years.
(of course, as i write this, i realize that i don’t actually have to tell her about nortriptyline bc she didn’t prescribe it and has no way of knowing that my family doctor did. i can just complain about topirimate and ask for the last medication as if it were my second choice, not the third.)
but i’ve also been struggling to articulate how my brain felt while on nortriptyline and why i didn’t like it to my betrothed.
it occurred to me today as i saw a tweet with some content that got my brains spinning off in a few different directions. i don’t think i actually ended up tweeting about it bc i got distracted.
but it was precisely that moment that nortriptyline killed. that moment when i experience something and it causes me to think. to some extent a lot of the writing and thinking i do is reactive in nature.
(its not really an accident that all the books i’ve managed to finish are ones where i’m reacting to a particular book. almost every post i write is inspired by something i saw and me essentially documenting my reaction to it.)
nortriptyline basically emptied out my head.
i would experience a thing but no thoughts. nothing for me to document and, thus, my recent return to blogging died but so did my presence on twitter. even during this really long period of writer’s block, i’ve at least been tweeting. even if it is really mundane shit.
for me, language is everything. bc i got aphantasia all conscious thought for me is via language. loosing this basically left me with very little conscious thought (which is why i talk about how it turned me into a zombie). combined with alexythemia this means that my internal world was silent in a way that i don’t think many people could understand.
since i don’t really notice or feel my emotions, i’m emotionally flat a lot of the time. but this doesn’t mean i’m indifferent or apathetic to the world. instead, i think. i rationalize. with words in my head or words that i write down to share with everyone else.
in a way, as much as i joke about being an emotionless robot, with nortriptyline that’s pretty much all i was. sure. i could go to the store without a second thought because i didn’t even have the first one.
and now that i’m off the nortriptyline…. idk. the world around me feels like it has a clarity to it that wasn’t there before.
i hope the next med is the best one. bc otherwise, i’m going to end up on nortriptyline. unless i feel like dealing with pain all the time. which… idk. maybe that is the choice i’ll make. although, i do have to say, it was really nice to be able to do things like make dinner or work while i’m at work.
idk. i guess we’ll see.