Energy

I don't have any.

Well, obviously I do have a little bit, otherwise I wouldn't be typing this. I don't have very much, though, and I'm starting to grow tired of being tired (see what I did there?).

It's hard to get on in life when you need more sleep than the average house cat. I find that, if I get out of bed before midday, I have to take a two hour nap in the afternoon just to face the evening. That's not normal, is it? And it disrupts my life. I'm not working right now, but when I do have a nine-to-five job, I feel like a zombie by about 11am, and go through the rest of the day on autopilot, boosted by frequent coffee breaks, until I get home in the evening and pass out. This is why I tend to go for jobs that don't require much thinking.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't always like this. My anti-depressants are the culprit. I started taking them at 17, and ever since then, my body doesn't work like it should do. I didn't do nearly as well in the exams I took at 18 as I did in the ones the previous year, because I was too tired to study properly. And I know I could have done better at uni, and probably not dropped out, if I had been able to get to my 9am tutorials without wanting to cry just from the effort of hauling myself out of bed.

For this reason, and a few others (notably, weight gain), I've recently been thinking about weaning myself off the medication. This is a terrifying prospect for me. I'm staring into the abyss. My psychiatrist originally suggested that I should take the anti-depressants for six months - instead, they've been propping me up for over eight years. I have no idea who I'd be without them. The reason I've put up with the tiredness and the weight gain and everything else for so long is that the medication makes me feel safe - it wraps a blanket around the darkness inside me, it keeps me sheltered. But I suppose I always knew I'd have to give it up some day.

I want to be a teacher. That's my ambition in life. And teaching is tough. I've done a little TEFL teaching, which I loved, but it also taught me that being a teacher requires stamina - it requires energy. And if the medication is going to get in the way of my ambitions, then unfortunately, it's going to have to go.

I wish I weren't so scared.