Goodbye, November.

Hello, November.

I turned 1 year older in November.  Tick Tock.

I also had a million inner monologues.  I don’t really talk to myself.  Have you ever talked to yourself? like, out loud? It’s not for me to do, I’m very silent.  Sometimes it’s the opposite and I think I have said a lot of things when I have been silent all the time.  I rarely pay attention to the information that comes through the way of hearing.  I am visual, all images and symbols, which are images.  But sometimes thoughts are not images or symbols, most of the times they are nothing.  But I still contain them in a visual structure.  Confused? I’ll try to explain.

Short Circuit

Psych doc appointment yesterday.  I’m back on medication.  My psych doc looks like Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, so I’m going to call her that.  Sally keeps trying SSRIs on me despite my protests that they have been tried and don’t work.  This time Paroxetine + Fluoxetine.

Plus a new member, Seroquel.

I’m not trilled about having to take medication if it’s not going to work.  The last time I was in an antipsychotic I lost my ability to sleep on command.  Sleeping has always been my preferred way out and without it I don’t know what to do.  Apart from that, there was no change, it was like eating candy.

Sally frustrates me a lot.  It’s all the same to her.  One month she tries one thing, the other month she tries something else.  If these meds don’t work she’ll just change them again.  I’m not sure I can afford the luxury of waiting.

When I go to her I feel like there’s a lot I want to scream about but it doesn’t go through.   She’s been seeing me for over a year and she is still clueless about me.  We don’t communicate.

This time though, we finally talked about something different.   Something I have been researching for a while.

Electroconvulsive Therapy.

I have been reading a lot about electrical stimulation.  If SSRIs are not working for me it probably means that the problem in my brain might not be solved by the mere increase in the availability of the neurotransmitters.  After all these years there is probably deeper damage, on a cellular level.

I’ll elaborate later, I’m very sleepy right now.  Here’s one of the articles. It’s not only about ECT but other electrical therapies for Treatment Resistant Depression if you want to read a bit about this.  I’ll come back and put more links later, I’m off now.

My mind is still working

Last night I had a guilt dream.  People shouted at me “Go to work lazy! work! work!”.  Then somebody took me to military service but it consisted on selling Pepsi from a truck.  Later I got compared with overly successful family members, and the family members actually came home to scold me.  The strange part was that I didn’t feel bad, instead I smiled and agreed with everyone and then people hugged me.  Ugh.  I’m surprised we didn’t sing kumbaya.

When I woke up it felt like I had escaped one of those Grimm Brothers horror tales I read as a kid.  You know, some evil witch smiling at me while singing sweetly “love of mine you are worthless except for your nutritional value, now show me that little finger“.

I should have known it was a dream when my oldest cousin grew 4 meter long arms.

Anyway.  Now, I’m awake and safe.  My back and the left side of my body are in pain for some reason, but I am not particularly disliking my current state of mind.  I’m thinking fast and a lot, even when sleepy.  I have a new notebook which I’m filling with all sorts of ideas about life, the world, societies, psychology and logic.  Nah, it sounds better than it is.  Nothing of it makes much sense really.  Nothing is pointing anywhere useful.  But I’m really excited about feeling this way.  My brain has been so slow lately that I was starting to think it was going to stay that way forever.  I don’t have a good point to blog about now but I wanted to register this.  Despite the guilt being renewed by the dream, I don’t want to overburden myself like I have done in the past.

Unrelated note: Here I was worrying about not getting my IELTS results. Well, I finally got them a couple of days ago!  I thought I was going to blog about it but I didn’t get around to do it until now.

I got a band score of 7.5 (scores are 0 – 9).  I explained a bit about the exam scoring in the middle of this post.

I think the results accurately graded what I did in the exam.  Yes, I think I can do better writing than that, but my error was in time management.   And of course the speaking test failed me but it was a really lousy interview so I was actually expecting something worse!  I have no comments on the listening part, nothing was hard to understand but I, uh, spaced out a lot while hearing the recording (I think I already ranted about this).

Finally, I think whatever I got wrong in the reading test was not language related.  In one part of the exam there was this 1000 word text divided in paragraphs, and then they gave you about 10 tittles related to the text and you had to match the tittles with the paragraphs.  They were all very similar, so of course it took a certain skill to understand the language well enough to match them precisely.  But besides that there were a lot of cognitive processes to be done, and I guess some of them must have failed.  My opinion is that I probably would have made the same mistakes if the text was in Spanish.

Some people say this exam is so hard that even native speakers don’t get perfect scores.  Well, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s too hard, it means that besides understanding a language, acing this exam requires intelligence, reading comprehension skills, paying attention, and managing the time well.  In the essay you couldn’t just give a dumb answer, you had to really try to make your point.

Anyway, I think I’m satisfied.

I love the rain

these guys never fail to make me smile.

Shifts and Flips

Depressive thoughts have receded for a bit, even after some bad news from university that have been floating around in my head.  Instead I have been relaxed, I have been reading a lot and feeling excited and contemplative about things only nerds would understand.

The change was kind of sudden, and it was not my decision.  I did not sit and stare at an orange for hours using the power of my mind to get “happy thoughts”.  Something especially good did not happen, neither did something especially bad.  This drives me crazy, as if I had something to do with it, I would like to know what it is so I could gain some sense of control.  Instead I’ll just enjoy this “up” while it lasts, and nobody knows when the whole thing will flip and send me back to a black hole.  That’s depression for you.

I have been thinking about these unintentional shifts.  In an attempt to explain it better (there’s a risk that you might get even more confused as to what my point really is, but I had to try), I want you to look at this figure :

It’s a Necker cube. It’s a 2D set of pixels in the screen that human brains seem to like to interpret as a transparent 3D figure.  Where is the front and where is the back of the cube? It’s not implicit in the image but I bet your brain has an idea.

Stare at it for a while though, and you might see the image flip and face in a different direction.  Keep staring and it’ll flip back.

Both interpretations are correct as this is an ambiguous drawing.  After all, the cube is not real, it’s only your perception.  I will make the walls solid in both versions to make it clearer.

My brain tends to like the first version and it requires certain effort to see the second possibility.

Some figures are even harder to flip in your desired direction.  I bet you have seen this one as it got popular in facebook and other sites as a personality test, it claimed to tell you whether you were predominantly right brained or left brained and all that yada yada.  It’s “the spinning dancer”.  Behold!

I  stare at it and I can’t flip it.  Can you? I see the girl spinning clockwise.  When I try to make her spin counterclockwise, I can’t.   But when I get distracted then, hey! She’s spinning counterclockwise although she tends to go back to clockwise really fast.  No wait, she just shifted again!

It’s the same image, it’s the same life.

Everything else is “just a perception”.

But not because of this it’s any less problematic.  Hell, it’s actually MORE problematic because of it.

*

Cool links on perspective stuff, visual stuff and all that.

The bear went over to the mountain.

This woman flips between being 30 years old and 70 years old.

This language

I took the IELTS almost a month ago. Although they said they’d send my results within 13 days, I still haven’t received anything.  I emailed them and they haven’t replied.  I have been procrastinating calling them, mainly because I really hate the phone.  I am waiting.

During the application process, I got asked where I studied English and for how long.  I answered something vague because I found out I didn’t know.  And, who reads forms anyway.

My mother language is Spanish.  I speak it everyday. I have never been abroad.  I went to a public school and a public university without much emphasis in language.  So how come I ended up learning English? To me it’s a little bit obscure, like if I hadn’t decided it.  I just woke up one day and realized I was able to communicate in this language, which was extremely fun and proved useful in more than one way.

Since then I just kept using it and by doing so, it magically got better with the time.

Fine, maybe not magically.  I know I can track it down… a little bit at least.