The Raven's Roost

It was certainly a big help for a portion of my life, but now I'm glad I've stopped taking that anxiety med. It's remarkable to me how many things it was causing, and how little it was helping.

Obviously I am still going to occasionally have anxiety and worry, I'll get nervous, or have periods of depressive moods. But so much of what I've been suffering from for years now was apparently being caused by the medication, and I find it hard to believe that I had just resigned myself to no longer being happy, at peace, or able to focus for long on any one thing. I guess the most succinct way to sum it up is that I no longer give a fuck about a lot of things.

I don't wake up with my brain already racing ahead, I can easily ignore things that don't matter, and drop worrying about things I have no control over. The obsessive thought spirals I'd get stuck in are either gone, or easy to get myself out of. It was exhausting to get stuck thinking about some made-up or partly-made up scenario and think, "I don't want to be thinking about this, I wish it would stop." I'd try to distract myself, and my brain simply wouldn't leave it alone, leaving me anxious, angry, and depressed. This was especially disheartening as it would often come up when I went to do something I ought to enjoy, like yoga or running. Even meditation wasn't enough to defuse the situation. Now I notice one of those trains of thought starting up and I can consciously dismiss it ... and it actually goes away. My normally vicious and vitriolic self-talk has improved greatly, too. Making a simple mistake was enough to prompt my brain to tell me something ranging from "For someone who's supposed to be smart, you sure are fucking stupid" to "You're literally the worst person in the world, it's a wonder you're still alive."

In unrelated news, it's been a busy week. Jeremy came over Wednesday and we started the tower upgrades. Back a couple of years ago when Hurricane Michael blew a tree down across the guy lines and pulled our old tower down, we were unable to get sections of rohn-20 to repair it, and made do with some old rohn-18. We put those weaker sections at the top so they'd have less strain on them. We started by removing those and replacing them with 20s, so basically we took down two sections and put up six. We're now at about 130 feet, and the top of the tower is easily visible from a lot of different spots around the neighborhood when you're on the ground. And the view from the apex is remarkable - you can easily see much, much further than before. They also mounted new, upgraded radios and other equipment.

That took two full days of work with just me, Fox, and Jeremy. I was sort of a gopher, general helper, and I was normally on the tag line, helping to guide tower sections as they were raised and keep the them from banging into the tower or getting tangled and hung up. Saturday, Fox went up again to replace the grounding wire and get us more or less safe from lightning again, and remounted the weather station. We have several yards of extra copper wire on the bottom, so we're going to just bury it for extra grounding. So, none of this was quite what I expected to do with my week but I'm not mad about it.

And in health news, I have been concerned about my consistently higher than desired blood glucose readings, and I wondered why if I'm low-carb my numbers weren't decreasing. Turns out my meter is one that tends to be outside of the +/- 15% range and may be skewing high. I was reading up on it this morning and it's a model that's not really recommended so ... hmmmm. I've stopped obsessively testing anyway and will just stick with LC-HF and see how things go when my next lab draw is done. If it's still higher than he wants I'll ask to get referred to a sports dietitian, since adaptive glucose sparing is a thing. I might even mention that to him when he orders the bloodwork and see if he'll add a test for circulating insulin.