Lowest saturation points

A couple of months ago I went off my antidepressants. Anyone who has been on any kind of medication that messes with your body chemistry (i.e. all of them) knows that the weeks after you go on and the weeks after you go off are hurly-wurly fuckin' shit storms of moods and flashes and discomfort in your own skin, which is the worst kind of discomfort. I got a lot of headaches. And moods. And piss-poor body image. And consequently a lot of people got hit with the bitch end of the Inari stick. Did they deserve it? For the most part, I think so (sort of). I won't pretend to apologize for the content because, lack-of-drug-addled as I was, what I felt was what I felt and I think I've progressed pass the point of apologizing for honest-to-goodness feelings.

Having said that, should I have swung as hard, harshly, indiscriminately as I did? No. To a couple of people, I felt I was unmerciful in my approach, displaying the kind of selfish brat behaviour I abhorr in other people. A lot of my negativity, I imagine, left residual damage. I went off on more than a few rampages to Lo about my sheer hatred for hipster culture and on people that we knew, when really what I should've done was narrow the range of my bombs and go off on inauthenticity, insincerity and the general lack of understanding and belonging I felt towards most things at the time. Hating yourself makes you look at the world through shit-tinted glasses so many of the judgments flying out of my mouth were reductionist at best, totally unfair and untrue at worst.

So why am I saying all of this right now, so long after the fact? Because, honestly, I didn't want to earlier. I'm not in the habit of being articulate and super emotional at the same time and sometimes I just don't know how I feel. But I look back on journal entries and blog posts and old conversations on MSN and I realize now that, for a long time, I was super reactionary and very unhappy and now, I think, is a good time to go back and give all of that some context.

The last thing I want to tell people that they have to change who they are. If there is anything I'm allowed to judge, it is actions alone and, in some of the cases, the people I've railed against didn't do anything that I wouldn't have understood had I been practicing the empathy that I like to preach. That doesn't mean that when someone hurts me, I turn the other cheek. I ain't Jesus Christ and you aren't lambs to the slaughter. Like I said before, this isn't an apology for the ends, just one for the means.

-I


Confused? Me too.