We interrupt this program...

I'll start with an apology.  I had drawn up an Easter comic this weekend and intended to post it as my blog post for the week.  But, unfortunately, you'll have to wait for the funny, because I'm taking a moment to talk about something more serious.
I'll give a second apology.  This post is almost entirely just to get something off my chest.  There's something that I really want to talk to someone about, anyone will do, and so I'm talking here, since there's no one here in person, and since I'm really quite terrible at talking about emotional things in person anyway.
My third apology is that I'm going to ramble quite a while until I finally reach present day in my narrative, so hang in there.  If you're impatient, then I'll skip to today: I cried this evening for no good reason and I'm very very upset about that.  Okay, now I'm going to go back and explain everything.



So... it's kind of like this.  I've been raised (inadvertently, I think) to believe that when you have a problem, it's your problem and no one else's, and everyone else is on a need-to-know basis.  You don't even have to tell your immediate family if you don't want to.  I've always known this wasn't really right, but it's hard for me to break away from it sometimes.  But as problems have crept up, I've found that I really don't want to deal with things all by myself.  I don't really care if anyone else can help or not.  I don't care who's business it is to know about it.  I just don't want to be left alone with my problems.  They make for very bad company.
Back in July (holy cow, it's almost May now.  This has been going on for a long time.) I started having very painful cramping when I was, well, you know, when it was that time of the month.  I was lucky that it usually fell on a weekend and I didn't have to miss work, but a couple of times I did have to go home.  Finally, I had a day so painful that it scared me and I went to the hospital.  They told me nothing was wrong, just that things were very painful, which I was very relieved to hear.  (I looked it up recently, by the way, and it's called dysmenorrhea, aka, nothings really wrong, it just HURTS!)  I was put on birthcontrol, which is the usual way of dealing with it.
The effect on my cramps was almost instantaneous.  For a while, I thought I had found a miracle.  The problem, though, was that, a month into it, I started feeling lousy all the time.  At first I didn't pay any attention to it.  I just thought that, you know, my hormones were out of whack and it was taking the birth control a while to sort things out.  I thought I was getting worse before getting better.  It didn't occur to me that the birth control was causing it.
So a couple of weeks went by and I didn't feel any better.  In fact, I kept feeling worse and worse.  I started realizing that things were slipping.  I was eating badly, and I was tired all the time, and I was unmotivated to do anything.  And I could tell things weren't quite right, and that bothered me and made me feel worse.  Finally, one evening, my mom called me to tell me I had been late paying my credit card bill that month.  When I got of the phone, I burst into tears and I cried and cried and cried.  I felt like that was the conclusive evidence that my life was slipping away from me and I was incapable of handling things anymore.  I was failing at life and couldn't be trusted to live on my own as an adult.  The more I cried and wallowed in my misery the worse I felt until finally I was so miserable I actually frightened myself.  I knew there was no reason why I should feel THAT bad.  So I forced myself to calm down, but my emotions were such a wreck, and I was so frightened at how badly I was reacting, that I followed up my cry with a panic attack.  Fortunately, I had had one before, back around seventh grade maybe, and knew what it was and knew I'd be okay if I could wait it out and calm myself down.
In my life, there never seems to be a straw to break the camels back, there's a freakin' anvil, and there it was.  I told my parents and I told my doctor and I dropped those pills like a hot potato.  I was put onto a different pill that was half the dosage.
I recovered quickly after quitting the old pills and seemed to do fine on the new ones.  I made it two months, and then things went funny again.  I had my usual PMS moodiness, only this time it was magnified.  And the strange thing is, instead of feeling depressed, I felt paranoid.  I went all week feeling like something bad was going to happen and wracking my brains to figure out what it might be.  Was I forgetting to do something?  But I could never figure it out.  It finally climaxed when I spent an evening with a sense of doom and wondering if maybe I ought to go hide or something.  I felt like I was on the verge of panic.  The next morning I felt fine, and that day I started my period, and since then I've been okay, except I've been looking back on it thinking, "What the crap was that?  I've never felt like that before."  I've dropped those pills, too, and I need to call my doctor and tell him so.
That was about a week ago, and then today, I went all day feeling really... blah.  I came home from work, cooked and ate a good dinner, ate some pie, watched some good, light-hearted anime, and despite both the pie and the anime, I ended up saying, "I feel sad... Why do I feel sad?..." and the next thing I knew I was crying.  Am I still feeling effects from the pills?  Is the stress of the whole situation getting to me?  Am I just having an off day?  What if there's something actually wrong with me?
The truth is, I'm afraid of being sad.  I can't explain it.  But it's almost a tradition for me, whenever I feel bad, to start wondering if maybe there really is something wrong with me.  What if I don't feel better again?  I don't know why, but I'm afraid of heights, afraid of some kinds of dogs, afraid of wasps, and afraid of depression.  And my random day of unhappiness I've had today has got me way stressed out.  My logic is trying to tell me that's it's all the pills, but my fear is trying to convince me that there really is something wrong with me.
I don't really know what to do except just wait a while longer until I can tell whether or not it really was the pills.  And I don't even know what I'm going to do about the original problem, since even the low-dosage pills are messing with me.  I think I'd rather my doctor just write me out a prescription for a good painkiller and leave it at that.  I think I'd rather deal with the physical pain than the emotional pain.
Gees, I feel like I've just written a soap opera or something.  What a load of drama.  It feels good, though, to get it all written down and get it outside of myself.
And to anyone who actually read all that crap and made it here to the end, thank you!  You are a wonderful, wonderful person!  Thank you!
If anyone would be able to tell me how long after stopping birthcontrol I might still feel effects, I would appreciate it, although I suspect it varies very much from person to person and pill to pill.
Also, if anyone has advice on How Not To Be Sad, I would appreciate that as well.
Thanks, guys, I love you all!