I spent the next two weeks trying to build stamina for working
by writing and submitting a couple of philosophy papers. Those two weeks fitted
the hope that I’d had four months before of what sickness leave might be. I
realised, for example, what I ought to think about Wittgenstein’s On
Certainty for the first time in 30 years. (Quite often, in philosophy, it does not seem that one has had an idea or made a choice but, rather, one spots the action at a distance of previous embedded convictions. Hence one simply sees what one ought to think or to have thought all along. One experiences ‘the because’.)
I returned to a second attempt at a phased return a little
before starting a fourth mood altering drug: Venlafaxine. Two days into taking
it I woke feeling madness again: a slippage from direct contact with the world
of facts and feelings. It was immediately obvious on waking that I wasn’t the
same, sane person. (‘Oh God, Lois, I've gone mad again!’) But then the next day the clouds cleared and I felt sane and
almost quite happy for a week before new side effects started: exhaustion
prompted by a tiny run and lasting 10 days and the physical illness of jetlag:
no appetite, tiredness, nausea, temperature dysregulation and the sense of a
body as lumpen rather than a source of agency. Still, I’m not mad. I’ve been
able to think philosophy and even be imaginative.
(This, sadly, undermines a theory I’d had that male libido
is an expression of Kantian reflective judgement: a concept-less seeking of
conceptual form. The ‘ability to judge an object in reference to the free lawfulness of the imagination’ in
which there is ‘a subjective harmony of the imagination with the understanding
without an objective harmony’ [Kant 1987: 91-92] I can currently manage Kantian
reflective judgement. But the other…)
Waking up in the morning is now even more of a struggle than
it has always been. Exhaustion always encourages anxiety, perhaps mediated by
the thought that I would not be ‘up’ to managing challenges that arise. So, via
its side effects, the drug also causes the very symptom I’m taking it to
relieve. While it produces a kind of wooziness, it is the nauseous wooziness of
jetlag rather than the wooziness of a too early but somehow justified G&T before
lunch with an elderly aunt. On a bad day, it also makes me simply physically sick. I don’t even feel immune to anxiety: just a slight reduction in
its hold on me.
I’d always hoped that medication would be a good thing. I
had thoughts of soma in Brave New World. But it seems a Faustian pact.
If I take a drug that makes me feel like this, a little less human, a little
less alive, fundamentally physically sick, perhaps I can carry on working. But is that right?
A PPS here.
