All our strength and all our sweetness/Lord I miss you

I am listening, as I write, to the Rolling Stones, whose oeuvre from the 70s and 80s is a window into an oft-neglected vein of lyric-writing: seduction by nagging.  To how many beds have poets gained access by whining about their suffering in absentia?  Not too many, I hope, unless the speaker manages to be either mocking, as in “To His Coy Mistress“, or indicates that the object of desire is preferable even to a number of Puerto Rican girls just dying to meet him, as in “Miss You“.

This observation, which I first had some years ago, is just one of many to return to me in my new state of being differently-drugged.  (As an aside I’m not talking about the cold and flu drugs of which I’m now happily quit, nor the hayfever meds which I have to take twelve months of the year, such is my otolaryngological fragility.)  The short of life on Citalopram, I told my office mates last week, is that I panic about different things.  In this I was not being entirely flippant.  Unexpected phone calls fill me with a new alarm, but I can look deep into the eyes of my dogs without sensing the sad note of their mortality and mine.  My short-term concentration is much better and my days more efficiently filled thereby.

Life however, has lost some of its sense of wildness under Paroxetine, the feeling that, just beyond my sight and hearing, waves were crashing against some old sea wall.  I think part of my new panic comes from the loss of this continuous sense of looming threat, just outside the bounds of my quiet life.  The succeeding complacency has made me suspicious of my perceptions, and probably more anxious overall.  I am thus, as I tell the señor, still a bit mental, but in a different way.

I miss therefore Paroxetine, my familiarity to myself on it, the way it gave me a functioning adult self where before it was nothing, just ashes and hotspots, really.  I’m still learning to regulate when I’m tired and when I have energy on the basis of my new alertness, my lack of wariness.  I feel disconnected from my earlier sense that my functioning self was so hard-won, and my pride in this.  If Citalopram can simply make me feel alright–by turns calmish or a bit uneasy, neither particularly happy or sad–then to what end was the previous struggle?  I console myself that if the señor are successful in our reasons for the change, then the minutiae of my deeper psyche will be far less on my mind, and if not, there are other things to do.