well I'm back from the "lab".. just one of a dozen names I use for the psych ward at Borgess hospital here in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Actually I've been out for two weeks. Spent five days in there after my last entry here.. the Ward, the Lab, Shithouse, the Locker. whatever you want to call it.

The friend who turned me on to Icarus mentioned that the community here was not so much about being on meds. I dont know if this is necessarily true since I have not explored the website completely. Still, I ended up coming out of the Ward with a shitty Prozac prescription of all things, following two years since my last time in the hospital in which I had not actually gotten a prescription filled yet.

Once again the doctors failed to take my "command hallucinations" seriously. I think the main reason is that, (although I thought of this too late to mention since I had gotten discharged already) unlike the patients on the South hall of the Ward, I am very able to separate myself from the voices and hallucinations and discuss them. But I dont care.. the hell with those doctors and Prozac. They should have listened. Fortunately, I got hooked up with a better psychiatrist on the outside who changed my prescription to Zyprexa which she said would work on not only the bipolar but the hallucinations as well.

I dont really know what I'm trying to get across by writing this, maybe just facts: that I feel completely flat, that I can't cry, that I have no motivation, not even the motivation to die, that I have no job now and still cant stand to be around people for too long.. that I sleep well into the afternoon no matter what I do. That I feel my madness squirming inside me still and know that the only way to keep it at bay is to keep taking these meds.

I just want to live, work, paint, write.. I want to be in love again. Where is the balance going to come from? Will I have to be on medicine forever just to keep living? I know this is not the best way to say it (nor is it the best way to end a journal entry) but ask yourselves this as I know you have and as I have: What the fuck is up with our lives?