Emotions - sweet or sour?

Amazing, this, the way in which a planned comedown from antidepressant drugs affects me. Now, before I bore, let me clarify the situation: I've been on prescribed Citalopram for over a year now and the depression's not got any better. In fact, the abject greyness of life lends, in itself, a more saddening existence than the mad roller-coaster of my erstwhile emotional palette.

Why amazing? I'm not entirely sure that the full extent of the emotional spectrum is something I'm used to dealing with anymore. Now, I'm normally one who believes that man's an adaptable creature and that, with a little application, changes can be turned into improvements, rather than retrograde steps. But, as it appears in my case, the monochrome filter was easier for me to work with - the Asperger Syndrome wanted normality, a mean mien, a sliced-through emotional stratum, a quantised set of responses, if you will. To coin a metaphor: the drum beat's no longer four on the floor, but heading jazz-wards and out through the door.

I'm scared. It's one thing to talk about feelings rationally, logically, perhaps, but how do you formulate a new frame of reference when the past, in colour, is a distant, whitish dot, vanishing into a screen of blankness and the only thing that made sense was the removal of hues and cries?

So what to do? I cannot go on denying myself the colour I desperately need and make sense of my new, recalibrated emotional state. To stay in the grey would mean suffering more of the Black Dog, realising that numbness did not eradicate the problem at all, did not make me well, but acted like a filter, a sieve, an analgesic, which masked reality and made it more difficult to comprehend than it actually is.

Depression is not about which drug cures me, it seems. No, I think it's more to do with living with the imperfections of my life and letting it all wash over me. I just need to reprogram for a colour-fast load, minus the spin-cycle, I guess...

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