Privilege bubble

So, I've recently come across kiva.org (via the route of "grazing off each educational series on YouTube, landing on CrashCourse, landing then on the vlogbrothers, and then browsing through their entire humongous archive".).

Kiva is a website for microfinancing coupled with crowdfunding. While the borrower (usually in some 3rd world country, but potentially anyone is allowed) still lends his/her microcredit from a bank in their home country, you can share the credit burden with that bank (and multiple other loaners), usually at portions of 25$.

The awesome part: Since you're technically a "shareholder" of that debt, you get the 25$ back after the borrower has paid it off - and you're free to reinvest again. It's like donating, only you get to donate over and over again. And the risk isn't that great - at best, you get your money back after a year or two, and in the worst case, you have lost 25 bucks - enough to annoy you, but not enough to hurt you even if you aren't exactly rich. (and that probability isn't high - microfinancers usually have really good repayment rates, way past 95 %)

It's totally satisfying - you lend out your money, have a good chance to get it back AND you help some other person better their life. Try it, if you haven't yet.

The interesting part comes to you after browsing those extensive crowds of families and budding entrepreneurs. Each loan comes with a little blurb telling you who this person/group is, why they're borrowing that money, and a photo of them at home or their workplace. People want to buy seeds for the next crop (or rent labor to work the land), buying goods to refine and/or to sell (such as clothes, in bulk, or wood to work with), or pay medical expenses, connect their houses to electricity, or very often, just a damn toilet that isn't the same place you get your drinking water out of.

Browse enough of those people, and you start to lower your expectations. After about an hour, I came across Shufaa, a Kenyan woman wanting to buy clothes for resale. Her blurb tells me about her:

"Shufaa is a married mother of four children, all of whom attend school. She lives in her own house that has electricity and piped water. Her greatest monthly expense is food."

After all those other people wanting to exchange candles to solar led lights and upgrading their shitbuckets to latrines, I'm all "damn girl. Electricity AND running water - you got it MADE.".

...And then I realize: I'm sitting at my computer in my 60 m² apartment in Germany, sipping my espresso latte, and feeling suddenly very, very fucking privileged to be a white male in a developed country.

Does this remind us all that the world is an awful, rotten place? Hell yes. But even without leaving my privilege bubble, I can make this sucky world a better place - one tiny step at a time.

Drug Test - Part II

So, the post "I went of my psych drugs was followed by an immediate hole in communication for about two months. Does that mean something went very, very wrong, as the whole internet was already predicting for me? Well - first of all, you clearly haven't checked my posting habits over the last decade, second of all - while that experiment was not of the "crash and burn" variety, although I have to say, BURN was a significant part of the experience.

Turns out, I'm lucky about the "antidepressant" part of the thing. I've felt a little listless now and then, but overall, at least at the moment, I could probably live completely without it, so the years of psychotherapy weren't completely useless! Hooray! Now, if it weren't for all the rest of those pesky side-effects.

As I've already mentioned, the pills have additional anti-histamine and sleep-inducing properties, so I was prepared for withdrawal on that side. What I hadn't counted on: I happen to have a hiatus hernia. So far, so unspectacular. I actually had almost forgotten about the heartburn, mainly because I found out about said heartburn when I visited a lung doctor about a seemingly never-ending bronchitis a few years back.

Short version: Stomach produces way waaay too much acid, said acid gets stored in the stomach part above the diaphragm instead of under, then gets evicted when I breathe, and flows a) into my lungs, and b) towards my mouth and nose when I sleep. Which then blossoms into minor heartburn, and what feels like a nasty cold.

Now, what happens when you stop your heavy anti-histamine medication cold turkey? Turns out, the my stomach acid producers decided to kick things into overdrive. About a week after stopping the stuff, the reflux was so severe that I almost completely lost my appetite, and my whole esophagus was feeling like it was on fire - not to mention I was completely hoarse and sounded like I had a severe bronchitis. And "trying to sleep in the evening" just completely didn't work unless I went to bed at 20:00 so I would actually fall asleep around midnight. 

I could have lived with any single of those effects, but the combination was wearing me down, even though the rest of my body was feeling better than ever. And - losing so much of my appetite that I didn't even want to eat anything in the morning? That was definitely a knockout criteria for me. So, I  swallowed my pride and restarted my drugs - on a 25% dose so the upcoming side-effects wouldn't hit me with a mallet.

That worked for about three days, very well. On the night to day four, my rebelling digestive system that really needs to get back in line, was evidently thinking that It NEEDS Its Precious, Precious Shipwreck Of Drugs, and decided to rev things up, and for the surely upcoming input of Sweet Merciful Mirtazapine, all other unclean substances must go. Aaaand we better skip the gory details and fast forward to the next afternoon, when I told my Mom to haul my completely dehydrated carcass to my doc and he shall fix my intestines by FORCIBLY REMOVING THEM. Okay, there may have been a teensy bit less dramatization on my part - I'm crazy, not stupid.

Thankfully, instead of harping to me he was supportive of my decision to go off medication - he knows my antidepressant-side-effect-conga I endured for the last four years, and more importantly knows that I don't do stuff simply because of the spur of the moment. I have new prescription for my stomach acid (stronger than the last time I took that stuff, but without the nasty headaches and sudden surprise diarrhea! Science does march on. Yay!). But - I look forward to both a colonoscopy AND a gastroscopy in the near future. Uuuuurgh.

BUT: I never went and upped the dosage after that - I had no need to. And, by now it's the 16th of May, I have now completed the 6 weeks adaptation phase, with reduced side-effects. Oh yes.

The side-effects gone are:

•  the extreme vertigo that imprinted on my elbows and legs in the form of bruises because I simply walked into doorframes instead of through them most of the time
• the oppressive aversion to sounds of all kinds - as soon as there were two or three different sounds (such as, traffic, music and conversations), I had problems concentrating on anything, because my brain was screaming TOO LOUD GET AWAY I WANNA GO HOME. During those times, you notice that our world is just very, very noisy. Also: Train stations? Fun times. Not.
• the scatterbrain part. Getting groceries is way less fun if you have to stop at every ware, check your groceries list twice, and still wind up with weird items because they happen to stand in the same isle.
• the loss of concen....whuh? It's like the effect of about two coffee I won't have to drink. And I can calculate stuff in my head again! Sure, I'm still abysmal at it, but that's more the lazyness and out of training part than a "too ples to issssss - foive, I think maybe?".

the side-effects which are still plaguing me include:

• the brakes on my creative juices. I have to literally force myself right now, because while I'm still able to write, all the fun of it is sucked out of me. Baaah. On the plus side, that probably means the world is save from yet another collection of horrible, horrible fanfiction stories. For now.
• something which sneaked up on me during the last three weeks - the munchies are still there. Boooooo. Oh well. At least my weight isn't spiking as fast as before - gaining 5 kilos in 2 weeks, with no sign of stopping is kind of scary if you're used to be skinny as hell.  I'm still not anywhere near obesity, but my skinny body is now interrupted by a very ungainly lump in the middle - I feel I look like I swallowed a large pumpkin. 

*Le sigh* Maybe I really need to diet again. Hm. Oh. Hey! That would be the perfect, poetic revenge to my upstart digestive system. Mwa ha ha ha ha!

Drug test

Soooo....I am potentially in the midst of doing something very, awfully, fantastically, monumentally stupid.

As the large majority of you readers know (yes all two of you - and the twenty webcrawlers periodically visiting), I'm the not-so-proud and definitely not-happy-about-it receiver of an affective disorder (the unipolar kind, not the rollercoaster kind).

My own personal brand of insanity comes in two flavours:

1. I tend to see life rather in a negative outlook, and people, the outside world or everything requiring effort is actually requiring MASSIVE amounts of effort everyone else is casually shrugging off. This is a permanent effect, called dysthymia. 
2. If there is a sufficiently bad trigger (a loved one dies, a workmate from hell, a dark and cloudy winter, or just many small things cumulated over a longer period), I get hit by a depressive episode on top of that dysthymia, also called double depression. Which has all the symptoms of the former, amplified a lot, and simply makes your waking hours akin to living hell. Not that you can escape by sleeping, because either a) you can't sleep at all or b) you want to sleep all the time - which also falls in the direction of bad ideas, since hypersomnia can worsen your symptoms (though on some days, you'll do it anyway, since flopping down on your bed or couch is literally the only thing you can manage. For the non-depressive people - it's simplest to imagine a fate like this. (Warning. This link goes to TVTropes, and will spawn numerous tabs and murder your freetime.)

My worst episode was back in 2014 and actually put me in a hospital for a few weeks. My last episode (a mild to medium one) started in about October (it was, sadly, of the "dying relative variety and thus kinda justified), and has been gone for a few weeks now. (Sunny spring weather certainly helped with that). And on Friday morning, I realized - I accidentally went off my meds for two days.

Well, whoops. Usually, I get withdrawal symptoms fairly early in the evening, telling me I'm supposed to take my mirtazapin / remeron. Said symptoms include twitching, vertigo, and a heavy inclination to stuff your face with carbohydrates - it takes quite a while to figure out the connection "if getting the munchies --> take your sleepy meds". In my case, this "a while" took me about 10 kilos of body weight. And that? Is on the LOWER end of the spectrum with this drug, so I'm thankful it didn't went further.

Not so this week - I was on a chain of business trips, which all took longer than expected - and I fell facedown on my mattress on Wednesday and Thursday. Which apparently distracted me from any probable drug symptoms or the first withdrawal shit. And this is probable the first time my hell-job was actually doing me a favor.

So I took the Friday afternoon to look around the Net for anything resembling "discontinuation of mirtazapin", or NASSA (this is the class of antidepressives I'm on). Mainly, the educated response on the internet for stopping your meds suddenly is broadly categorized as "Just don't", "No, Never do this" or "YOU GO TO HELL. YOU GO TO HELL AND YOU DIE! AND YOU WILL BE ASS-RAPED BY GIANT PORCUPINE PENISES!!1!1!!"

There's just that one thing: So far, I'm coping quite well. Sure, I have the sniffles, and I didn't sleep so well last night (since I stopped a drug that mainly has antihistamine and sleep-inducing qualities, I'm not surprised much). So, I went to my parents and my sister, told them what I had in mind, and to watch me if I'm behaving episodal. Also, I made myself big honking post-its on my monitor to remind myself every night to watch my own behaviour (that's trickier than it sounds, but after years of psychotherapy, I'm getting better at it).
I do know that mental drugs aren't that simple and the good mood I feel now can quite probably be a ghosting effect with an abrupt crash at the end. But if there are any clouds on the horizon, I will turn back to my dosage (that means 1-2 days of running into walls and doorframes, but hey, at least I can sleep afterwards) and will patiently endure my doctor's 'tsk-tsk'-noises, and all the horrid side-effects that goddamn crappy stuff makes me go through. For now, for today, though - I enjoy being free for a few hours or days.

So, Teshik - let's see if you survive a) the 3 weeks of flushing out the drug, b) the 6-8 weeks of adaptation, and most importantly c) the goddamn putrid shit life will throw into your face to drag you down again when you least expect it.

Let's also see if I'll be able to post about my progress in, say, a week... And anyone who has seen my posting habits can now safely expect my very next post somewhere around September 2019.