Back in the Whirlpool

I had forgotten, I guess, what it's like to tinker with the Topamax dosage in a significant way.  Joy indescribable.  There is a reason you have to wean your body from it.  I cannot even imagine what it would be like to stop suddenly, to go from 200mg to nothing.  I think I would probably and quite literally shut down.

I'm writing this because I literally can't focus on anything else right now.  I hate this stuff.  How can anything be such a dual-edged sword, at one moment cutting through the pain in my head and letting me function and at the next slashing my most basic ability to process the world around me with any sort of reason?

Maybe I sound okay as I'm typing this to you, but you would not believe how much the little normal everyday words look wrong, how often I'm getting errors, and how frequently I'm having to stop to pull my eyes away from things in my classroom that suddenly just look....I don't know...miraculous?  Out of place?  Startling as if I'd never seen them before.  And this is when I can get my eyes to focus through the dim halo everything has, that lovely refraction that usually presages a migraine of epic proportions but today, just thanks to the damn Topamax, everything is graced with, a heavenly glow as if angels went around last night and rimed the whole world with rainbows just for me.

And then there are the long lost moments where I come to myself and I've simply been...away.  Someone walked by me this morning and asked me if staring at a particular spot on the hallway floor was a good way to make the day go by faster.  I don't know how long I'd been there in that pose.  Long enough to be noticeable.  I was not daydreaming.  I was just...not.  Perhaps my mind is in there somewhere, slamming bleeding hands against a thick glass wall and screaming, but all I'm hearing is echoes....

I suppose this is some sort of free psychedelic experience maybe, and I should be a good poet and enjoy it, but I don't.  I can't.  My mind is not in good order and not fully under my control.  Some portion of it seems to be out of focus like a lens that needs to be adjusted just slightly to get the picture clear again, but I can't find the right way to do it.  If you've never been in this situation, and really, I'm hoping for your sake you haven't, I don't know if I am getting the frustration of this across to you.  I need to be mentally sharp to do this job well, to feel myself.  My brain is not working, and I can't fix it.

The only consolation I have right now, my only mantra is, "Three More Months."  If I can make it three more months, and I can already tell they're going to be fantastic ones, if I can make it with a minimum of headaches (only 6 in a month!  I was having 2 per week...), then I don't have to have this crap in my life anymore.