Sleepless on Seroquel

This is too true: taking Seroquel and still being an insomniac is horrendous.

My 100 mg dose (very low, but I’m extraordinarily sensitive to meds) knocks me out within half an hour of ingesting it, and I have a good solid eight hours.

The severe depression started coming on strong in February so my doctor put me on Celexa, which then kept me up all night. The groggy, staggering-drunk effect of the Seroquel was still operating, but I couldn’t sleep. A very special kind of hell.

So I stopped taking the Celexa. I also didn’t appreciate the anorgasmia.

What my day was like.

A while back I asked a guy I’ve been dating casually (“D”, for our purposes here) whether he’d like to see a particular movie with me: it’s a documentary by a couple of friendly acquaintances of mine about a famous literary figure which D likes quite a bit. He enthusiastically said yes. I wrote back a quick email, saying “cool” or some such.

By this morning he had not called or emailed. I texted him to ask if he still wanted to go. Nothing. Then I called and left a voice mail, saying please let me know because someone else would like to go if you can’t (a lie, because after all, I have no friends, let alone any friends interested in seeing this film). I am still hurt and angry and wonder why is it that I keep hanging out with men who are pretty much indifferent to me.

I was so angry that I sent an email not to him, but to L, the psychiatrist. I had written several drafts of long emails spelling out my grievances and hadn’t sent any of them. But then I was like, fuckit: Guys act like dicks to me and I’m sick of it. Within some twenty minutes of sending it I received what seemed like a heartfelt, albeit brief, apology. But I still feel like shit. It doesn’t really matter if he’s sorry because what hurts is that I was treated that way in the first place.

So I went to the film unaccompanied by a date. C was there with Y. N was there with R. I just look at everyone, all paired up, and wonder why I can’t find anyone who even respects me, let alone loves me. I started sobbing on the sidewalk, where C was on lookout for the last member of our party, who was late. Said I felt like garbage. He said I didn’t have to stay. This misses the point. Of course I know I don’t have to stay. That’s not the problem. The problem is that I want to throw myself in front of the train because I’m an absolutely worthless human being, and no one gives a shit about me, appreciates me, or loves me. It’s an empty existence.

I really wish I had the balls to kill myself, but I can’t let go of the world. I’ll bet it’s the kind of thing you can work up to — deleting a blog is practice for the ultimate letting go of suicide. I’m trying to work myself up to deleting my other, non-secret blog tonight.

Resisting the urge to be cruel

I last saw the psychiatrist in January. (That’s the psychiatrist I was *dating*, to be clear.) It was right before I started work and though I spoke to him briefly during the following week, I didn’t see him again. After the first couple of times we got together, last April, and then didn’t see him for a long while, I thought about him a lot. I wanted to be with him again. I was a little hurt and confused that he never called, but then again, I never called either, mostly because I assumed he was run off his feet at the hospital.

But the last hookup in January cured me of any longing I might feel for him in the interim. First of all, the sex was pretty lousy. He doesn’t follow instructions well, he has a small dick, and he doesn’t spend enough time on what guys call “foreplay” but what I call “sex.” Worse, he kept pushing his dick against my anus, even after I shifted away. Then when I told him I wanted him to use a condom for vaginal intercourse, he actually had the gall to argue with me, asking me what I was afraid of: after all, he had just been tested and was clean. I was pretty flummoxed by that. I guess I felt it would be gauche to respond by saying that he had no idea what *my* habits are, and if he’s willing to have unprotected sex with me, he’s probably willing to have unprotected sex with anyone. He kept trying to convince me that he was totally safe so I told him that I was afraid of pregnancy, and that seemed to satisfy him.

When I thought about the encounter in the following weeks, my resentment grew. I resented that my pleasure seemed to be an afterthought. I resented the pushiness, the willingness to trample over my boundaries, and I resented the fact that he wanted me to keep up a constant stream of dirty talk to turn him on, which I find exhausting and detrimental to my enjoyment of sex.

Today, out of the blue, I got a pretty long email from him, as emails go. It was stranger than it was long. He started out with some pleasantries about how he hoped I was doing well, etc. Then he launched into some incoherent fantasy he’d had about me that involved me squiring him around town like “arm candy”.

Then he said he wanted to see me again. He still fantasizes about fucking me, he says. I’m the only one night stand he wants more of, and happily, we’re both cool with keeping things casual (translation: I like you because you make no demands). Maybe we can experiment, explore fantasies, including sadistic ones. But the next time (arrogantly presuming that there will be a “next time”) I should “remind” him to use condoms because even though he’s clean, pregnancy would be an inconvenience.

Then, the finale: would I be interested in going to a sex party with him? It’s something he’s always fantasized about and been curious about, provided that the other people there are “reasonably attractive”, clean, and not too out there in their predilections. He provided a link, which I didn’t click on until I got home. It was not terribly enticing. Ugly do-it-yourself web design circa 1996, punctuation and grammatical errors, and vague descriptions of their services that don’t give one a very clear idea of what the space is like, what the other people are like, what to expect, etc. Their “rules” page was all about cleaning up after yourself and how not to rape people. (And by the way, on the topic of poor spelling, L’s email was 339 words, 31 of which were typos or incorrectly used. This actually made me wonder briefly — hi, paranoia! — whether it was actually his work.)

All day I’ve been going over in my head possible responses, from the short and pithy:

“Were you drunk when you wrote that? Or typing at the bottom of a dark cave?”

“Not interested, but thanks for asking, I guess.”

“I don’t think we’re sexually compatible.”

Then there’s the option of making up some excuse to avoid hurting his feelings:

“I’m seeing someone”, or “I’m too busy.”

Another option is to ignore the email entirely.

But the option I’ve expended the most mental energy on today is the detailed explanation for why I feel that he was out-of-line disrespectful. “and a place to experimet [sic] with trying out fantasies of indulgence an even sadism, but with a trust that we would stop the moment either expresses discomfort or needs a break.”

Well, when I said “no” to condomless sex he didn’t respect that, and argued with me instead. The anal play was something not explicitly negotiated and was (clearly, I believe) something that made me very uncomfortable, and yet he didn’t let up. Past practice is the best indicator of future behavior, and if he wasn’t willing to take my “no” as the final word before, why would I trust him as a partner in S&M scenarios?

I think my course of action will be to stew for a while, write some draft emails that I never send, and then just forget about the whole thing.