Career Goals, Stability, and the Balancing of Both Priorities

This past month has been packed with medical appointments in addition to the weekly Ketamine Infusions and routine mental health care. In spite of this busy month, I have managed to find the time to write my screenplay. I started the outline for this screenplay two years ago and took a long break from it to focus on my health and figure out how my skills might translate into other fields. In the last several months, I’ve found learning fiction to be easier than I expected. A lot has changed since I was a college student studying to be a screenwriter. One of the most notable changes in the entertainment industry is that many books are being adapted into limited series. As much as I love a good big screen epic movie, I think that these trends in storytelling could open up doors for a lot of writers, including myself.

While I feel optimistic about the possibilities ahead, the current health challenges remain time consuming. I recall being in a mental hospital nine years ago and feeling a lot of social anxiety. One psychiatrist on my treatment team thought maybe Clonidine would be a good medication to try, but they opted only to change my antipsychotic and send me into an outpatient day treatment program for nine months. In hindsight this program did not help. I then spent another eight years in the care of a psychiatrist who kept trying different combinations to treat my anxiety and depression. Neither the program nor my previous psychiatrist ever thought to try Clonidine, but in the last several months, my current psychiatrist has put me on it. It is making a positive impact on my anxiety and productivity. I wish that at some point in the last nine years, an outpatient psychiatrist had tried this medication. It probably would’ve saved me a lot of stress.  There are still a lot of big decisions to be made because Ketamine is expensive and unlikely to be covered by any insurance in the near future. As my anesthesiologist has confirmed, it is unusual for a patient to be getting an infusion every week. If I were to be asked last year if going off Ketamine was something I could realistically hope for, I’d have said no, but I now have a psychiatrist who thinks a high dose of Lamictal may be a good replacement. 

I am hopeful that my psychiatrist may be right about this as I have heard before that Lamictal is good for bipolar depression, but the process scares me. The hard part for right now is keeping my mind focused on work and staying tuned in to my physical and mental health symptoms. Slowly, but surely, I am finding balance between these two tasks. I know that many of these questions won’t be answered overnight and can only hope that at some point I will have financial stability and mental stability. Next month, I will be starting group therapy again. This time, it will be Dialectical Behavior Therapy. I have never had this type of group therapy before, but I hope I learn many new tools from it that I can use to find balance in my pursuit of seeking work, having a better social life, and maintaining overall health.