This is a photo of my large drawing of a place in Tuscany named Palazzo Podere or as translated, “Castle Farm.” I only uploaded a small file…Sorry… the details are fuzzy but them’s the breaks.

Things have been up and down, but the last two days were better than before. Largely because of an art therapy session that I found amazingly cathartic. It involved my being asked to make a “three dimensional sculpture” from a sheet of paper, a pair of scissors and some clear tape. I had no idea what to make, nor what would come from it. In fact, I dithered for a while, stymied, rolling a bit of the blue construction paper into a little tube and taping it, desultorily, waiting for inspiration. Nothing. Then suddenly it slammed me. YES! I was making, YES! a bullet for, YES, my very own Glock 9 semi-automatic handgun.

I proceeded to craft a crude gun with a bullet or two and a clip of ammo until I was finally satisfied that I had what I wanted. When I was through, Margaret, the therapist, handed me a sheet of paper on which she had written, “I am” five times. She asked me to look at my paper gun and ammo clip, at any angle I wanted to, and complete the five sentences as I wished. Well, I won’t  tell you in great detail, because my answers were were rather gross and violent, what I wrote, except to assure you that when I was through, and it took a while, she asked me, How do you feel?

I had been somewhat tearful as we talked and earlier in the week had been extremely upset and angry, but I now looked at Margaret and with a little surprised smile said, well, you know, I feel…better!

And I did. In fact, when I saw Dr Angela the next day, she noticed the difference immediately. Whereas before I had been nearly screaming, and not looking at her, now I could smile and make eye contact for the first time in months.

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Progress on the medication front: Am off all Abilify. Now am dropping the Geodon, slowly. Down 40mg from 160mg. Will be dropping 40mg every 2 weeks. I think. Unless that feels too fast. If I run into trouble , I will slow it down, but Geodon never seemed to do much of anything for me…Maybe I am wrong, it could be I’m unaware of what it does. But in my experience it did little positive for me, and so it should not be too hard to get off it. I just need to be careful not to stop anything too quickly, no matter how eager I am to be off all meds.

I still take some small amounts of Ritalin and Xyrem for narcolepsy, though hugely reduced  now that I am not so sedated on antipsychotics and antidepressants and only take 200mg of Topamax. I dunno about that last. I may try to stop it too. But it depends on the olfactory hallucinations and whether or not my migraines are under control.

IN the meantime, I have been busy hiring people to stay with me 24/7 come January, in the event of a crisis, which I have to assume will happen since it always has…So long as I know people will come in and prevent a hospitalization I feel okay about it. Otherwise I would be panicking, thinking that I would ever have to go through such torture. NEVER would I let them do what they did to me at Yale or the IOL again. I will kill myself before they get their hands on me another time. But it won’t happen, because  i have aides/nurses/various people hired to help me out now in my own apartment, and they will take care of things so no hospital will be waiting in the wings to torture me. The only thing I need to be sure of is that who ever it is that is going to be with me, they MUST be on board with the NO MEDS thing. NO ONE is going to force meds  on me in my own apartment — I don’t  care who they are. If they don’t agree with that, if they have a pro-medication agenda, then they are not going to be part of my plan…