notageek

The /? key restored in place of the right windows key, the boyfriend sweetly asleep, accidental salsa for dinner, and Ani loud in my head.

Poll: what do you do when you hurt?

I finally bought Ani DiFranco’s self-titled album, because I’ve been listening to a copy of Corrie’s since my freshman year of college, and because the only song on it I’m not fond of is “pale purple”. Wyvern claims his balls are showing no sign of shrinkage.

rush hour: I expected summer to be there in the morning/I awoke to the alarm/she was out of arm’s reach. My summer is my happiness, and I wake to every day’s morning expecting it there, but I think I am learning that it cannot come except through being. There is no trying for happiness, there is no fighting the depression. You can smile and cry inside or cry inside and outside, and you need both before a real smile.

Life is a fruit: a grapefruit, full of juice but oh so bitter; a cranberry, red and light and beautiful and sour; a mango, sweet and succulent and biting through to the stringy toughness at the center. Green, hard, lush, blooming, falling, fading. A sweetness made constant only by memory; a taste thick and furry and acid.

I will be myself again, but never in the way I was before. I will not grow out of myself, I will not accept my depression as “my curse”, I will not fold up into a pharmaceutical receptacle. I am not a chemical machine; I am a bleeding hurting human, finally angry enough to wrest my psychic and psychiatric care away from anybody to whom I am not precious.

My reckless cooking experiment this evening yielded something like a lightly-cooked tomatillo salsa over quinoia. Tomatillos were on sale, cilantro and lemon juice go on tomatillos, and garlic and onions and salt and pepper go in almost everything dinner-like. So there. And quinoia is good: it’s like a slightly-crunchy couscous, with little spirals wrapped around it.

Albeit slowly, I am coming back. And I am wearing my boots.

That’s where I’ve had it up to with practitioners who think Hormonal Birth Control Is Best, and with deceptive labelling, and package inserts that don’t tell you a damn thing, and with misleading google text ads that point to an Ortho Tri-Cyclen ad site, and people who purport to know what’s best for my body and my life.

Poll: how pissed am I?

Velex, if you’re reading this, you’re welcome to the three packs of Loestrin they gave me, though they’re probably too low-dose to be of use to you. Duxup, you might want to cover your tender little ears.

And the rest of you, the vast majority of whom aren’t on k5, and who are comprised largely of medical practitioners: don’t you read the prescribing information for birth control pills? Whoever wrote the prescribing inserts, why the fuck is severe depression not a contraindication? How can you hand out Ortho-Cyclen like it’s candy? How can you give me Loestrin, claim it’s “lower-dose” when it has 6 times the progestational activity of Ortho-Cyclen and only 5 micrograms less ethinyl estradiol? How the HELL can you tell me I “just need to give it a chance” when hormonal contraception so OBVIOUSLY exacerbated a pre-exisiting condition last time, and all I need to do is throw my life to the hormonal winds, three months at a time? And you, the FDA– Why the fuck have you not approved Gyne-fix, the best-tolerated IUD in the world?

Everybody who ever lectured me about “not ruling out birth control possibilities” when I said I didn’t like hormonal methods–you go take my pills, get so depressed you can’t get out of bed, try every night for a week to throw yourself off a bridge, go cut yourself open to try and make it stop hurting. Go cry and cry and cry because nobody believes you when you say your pills make you feel like shit. Go listen to them tell you you just need to do it again and again and again and again until you’ve found the right one. Go feel like shit even when you’ve found the right one. Go gain 30% of your body weight and be weepy and depressed and get put on antidepressants that give you rashes and make you feel even more like shit. Then see how you feel. Then come back and tell me I just need to find the right pill for me, and tell me I’ve got no reason to be angry.