Interesting to observe the mild chaos of my body's reactions, chemical and behavioral, as those pills start to drain from my system. I'd forgotten that there are also (brief) side effects to stopping the medications – my biochemistry that has rebalanced to handle the toxic garbage being ingested and injected for the past few months is now thrown off balance by its absence, in the other direction, as it were.
This is especially bizarre across two days of big classes, meetings, and tutorials – two of my busier days for the past two months. But I hacked my way through, as if with a machete; and it was made easier by the increasing sensation of being lighter, being more awake. I even came home from today's stretch of activities expecting to simply go to sleep for six hours or so, and then... woke after an hour and a half, feeling almost – normal.
Observing these experiences is fine with me, too. I have gradually, without thinking about it very much, developed an assumption over the years that the Western wish to be drugged into a zombie-like daze when one is anywhere in the ambit of illness, madness, misery, toxic treatment or death is one of the stupider innovations of our modern science – it's a bit like those science fiction stories where people who are ill or old are quietly whisked out of the view of the pretty, doll-like populace of the futuristic city. And it's probably one of the things that screws us up the most of all our cultural errors: we are taught to treat a whole range of physical/mental states as so infinitely unbearable that we can't even experience them at their nearest and mildest edges.
In any case, now that I've written about it, I'll remember this flash of counter-toxicity. And in fact, though at points over the past eight months I've been embarrassed by my own rather theatrical reaction to this not particularly dangerous treatment, I'll allow that it's really valuable – because in a way I've been experiencing some of the illnesses and despairs of the past twenty-five years, some of the sense of panic, some of the sense of imminent death and disintegration – both retrospectively and also prospectively.
Because, of course, this means that when I am here again, or even considerably deeper into the territory of bodily panic and misery and collapse, it will be that much more familiar: and I will keep my wits about me... like an old soldier, unfazed by anything you can shoot at him.
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