Since I last posted, I’ve been in a depressive episode. I somehow made it to a psychiatrist appointment on December 28th with another new psychiatrist – the third one of 2025 – despite being so mentally unwell that it tipped over into something physical.

The appointment led to a medication adjustment, which meant I spent New Year’s Eve in a sedative state of near-nothingness, watching fireworks through a window covered in scaffolding and netting.

It became an accidental metaphor for my state of mind: being aware that life is happening, but experiencing it through layers of obstruction – unable to see it clearly or feel part of it in the same way.

The Absurd Presents Itself When You’re Seeing Your Third Psychiatrist

I didn’t like my last two psychiatrists. They relied heavily on interrogation techniques, which made me feel like I was there to prove I wasn’t guilty of a terrible crime, rather than to ask for help. I already struggle with guilt for things that are not my fault, so this approach left me feeling defensive and small.

One of them even interrogated my son – during my appointment – asking him to prove he had hypermobility despite already being diagnosed by the NHS, and making him perform physical tests on the spot. It was my appointment. Why was he being put on trial too?

Because of those experiences, and fuelled further by my depressive episode, I worked myself up into a right state before this appointment. The anxiety spilled over into my body. I developed painful spasms in my diaphragm that made breathing – and even standing upright – incredibly difficult. I had to keep stopping to bend over just to make it there. Looking back now, I genuinely don’t know how I managed it.

When I’m in an episode, I struggle to leave the house at all. I cry at the thought of going out. Mind you, I cry at the thought of doing anything. I desperately want to isolate and be left alone.

But somehow, I did make it.

There was, of course, a mix-up. A different doctor confused me with another patient and assumed he’d called the wrong person in. I cried in the waiting room at how broken and absurd everything felt. The absurd presents itself most clearly in waiting rooms – especially when you’re on your third psychiatrist of the year and don’t even know the name of the person you’re supposed to be seeing, so you’re not sure whether you can correct them or not.

When I finally saw my psychiatrist, after bracing myself so hard I’d practically braced my lungs shut, I prepared for the 42 Years of Trauma TED Talk. Instead, she was happy with the cliff-notes version.

I wasn’t interrogated. I was listened to.

She congratulated me on my weight gain – something I had completely forgotten was an achievement. In my head, because I’d eaten less over Christmas due to my depressive episode, I had failed as a human being and achieved absolutely nothing this year. Depression likes to lie like that.

She suggested increasing my antipsychotic medication and prescribed extra so I could start immediately. Increasing quetiapine will almost certainly make further weight gain less of an achievement and more of an uncontrollable inevitability, and I was afraid of that. But my overriding sense of I cannot go on like this took over, and I agreed to take it that night.

Normally, I would have waited until after New Year’s Eve – tried to be part of it first – but I was desperate. All I feel when I think of 2026 is dread. Every time I saw “2026” on the TV, I felt panicked, like I didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to be part of another year, didn’t know how I could survive living like this for much longer.

Starting the increase immediately meant that, hopefully, I would be more stable by January 13th – the anniversary of losing my best friend, WeeGee.

The Liminal Space of Quetiapine

When you increase your dose or start new medication, you land in a kind of chemical purgatory that can last weeks, sometimes months. People often expect medication changes to make you feel better immediately, but that’s rarely how it works. There’s nothing you can do to speed it up – all you can do is wait out the side effects: the worsened mood, the sedation, the strange nothingness that makes even basic tasks feel impossibly hard.

Suddenly you’ve forgotten how the coffee machine you use every day works. You open your phone and wonder where the home button has gone, despite iPhones not having one since 2017.

It’s incredibly frustrating. Add irritability – helpfully dialled up as its own side effect – and you end up irrationally angry at things that would usually be trivial. Like forgetting a map in The Long Dark that you know off by heart, leaving you lost in a blizzard in Ash Canyon and moments away from hypothermia because you’ve temporarily forgotten how anything works at all. Real-life blizzards should absolutely be avoided. So should busy roads. I have a tendency, in this state, to forget to be careful.

I also struggle with words. I’ve stuttered more times than I can count trying to talk to my son. Thankfully, he always seems to understand anyway. He never asks me to correct myself – he just replies with, “I know.”

Then there’s the liminal space of having an empty brain. Usually my thoughts are deafening – like walking into a Wetherspoons where the noise is so loud and overlapping you can’t make out a single conversation. But instead of fifteen thoughts at once, there’s nothing. Or maybe three, at most. It’s quiet. Quiet enough to actually hear my tinnitus.

Sometimes it’s too quiet. But it’s a relief all the same. The same mechanism that makes me forget iPhones no longer have home buttons is also being applied to everything else – my depressive spirals, my anxiety, my dread.

Of course, the medication won’t actually work on my depression or anxiety properly for a few weeks. So I’m both deeply depressed and heavily sedated at the same time.

On New Year’s Eve, I watched the fireworks through the scaffolding and netting wrapped around my flat. They looked unreal – pixelated, misty, distorted. It became an uncannily accurate representation of how I feel right now: aware that it’s New Year, aware that time is passing, aware of the celebration – but unable to see it clearly or experience it fully.

Reality feels obstructed.

I usually celebrate New Year because I hate the passing of time. It’s been the antagonist of my life in the same way the chicken is to Peter Griffin in Family Guy. I’ve always wanted time to stand still. Celebrating it felt like defiance.

This year, though, I was too aware of how I’m being dragged through it – waiting for my medication to work properly, waiting for the side effects to ease, and realising I spent most of the last year in recovery while still dreading what comes next.

Take It Easy, Crave the Greasy

Food has become difficult. I’m struggling with making it, preparing it, and sometimes even thinking about it. If you ever want to know how convincingly your body can lie to you about hunger, try quetiapine. My body is acting like I’m severely deficient in greasy fried foods – because that’s all I crave, all day, even if I’ve just eaten.

Sometimes hunger and cravings are just a big (saturated) fat lie, despite the internet insisting that all hunger cues are sacred and that questioning them is “diet culture.” I doubt anyone needs Domino’s five times a day, Sharon.

I’ve made things easier on myself instead. I’ve gone back to soup and sourdough, protein shakes, and quark yoghurts – the same things I relied on when I had Covid. My burrito is too much work right now. I can’t prepare it without crying, and I can’t even finish it when I do. I want food to take two minutes and then be done – or I’d honestly rather not eat at all.

I do genuinely like pea and ham soup with wholemeal sourdough. It’s warming and comforting. Everything I eat takes less than five minutes to prepare, which means I can get back to the one thing that’s actually helping me at the moment: playing The Long Dark.

Despite my awful start in Ash Canyon, I somehow survived and kept going. The Long Dark is perfect for how alone and restless I feel. It’s a sandbox survival game – there are no tasks or demands unless you want there to be. I’ve spent most of my time decorating a house, like the most dangerous, moose-infested, hard-grind version of House Flipper.

Then I walk for miles, take photos of frozen waterfalls and lighthouses with a Polaroid camera, and risk losing health in -80°C conditions just to get the perfect shot.

The game strips survival down to food, water, temperature, sleep, and not being mauled by a cougar. Everything else is meaning you have to invent yourself. I’ve thought a lot about the developers adding the camera. It’s the end of the world – the quiet apocalypse – and my character is still taking Polaroids of her survival. She even risked her life getting the camera from The Far Territory. Creativity still matters, even at the end of the world. Despite permadeath she’s still marking that she existed at all.

That realisation is what made me step away from the game to write this post, despite my lack of words and dwindling humour. This blog is my own personal record – my own quiet medication apocalypse.

I’ve been taking it easy, as much as possible without letting my house turn into a disaster I’ll have to deal with later. The medication label telling me to avoid heavy machinery must also apply to iPhones, coffee machines, hoovers, and probably roads – because I’m still struggling with all of them I’ve gotten lost and confused more times than I can count.

Or remember.

Just Wait Out the Blizzards and Fog

In The Long Dark, if it’s blizzarding again in (un)Pleasant Valley, and when it finally clears you step outside only to find thick fog instead, the answer is the same: you wait it out. You stay warm in your decorated safehouse, make hot herbal tea and ptarmigan stew by the fire, and hope you don’t get cabin fever in the meantime.

Going outside when the weather is hazardous can be actively detrimental. There’s nothing you can do to control it – especially in the ironically named Pleasant Valley.

I think I’ve approached this medication increase and depressive episode in much the same way.

It was the right thing to do. I’d previously had to reduce my dose when I lost weight, because the medication became too strong. At the lower dose, it seemed to work even better – due to medication doses being tied to bodyweight – which led me to briefly question my diagnosis, something anyone with bipolar tends to do when their meds are working properly (or are hypomanic).

I hadn’t reduced it by much, just enough to make the worst side effects stop. But now I’ve gained weight again, and it’s become very clear that dose is no longer enough. This depressive episode has been a stark reminder that bipolar episodes can happen completely outside of your control – even when you’re doing everything “right” environmentally – if your medication dose is incorrect.

I’m still in the thick fog, and I will be for a few weeks yet. My psychiatrist wants me to increase by 100mg, but I’ve started with 50mg because my body hates the increase stage. If I go too fast, I get intense dizziness and sickness – even though my brain very obviously needs it.

Somehow, in the middle of all this, it’s now 2026. Two whole days of it have already passed. I can’t think about the year as a whole it still fills me with dread – day by day is the only workable approach right now.

It’s the same in The Long Dark. You might plan to go out and collect wood, only to run into a moose, spend the entire day defending yourself and harvesting it, and end up with less wood than you started with because you used it all cooking kilos of moose meat.

The sedation from quetiapine does, at times, feel a bit like being repeatedly run over by a moose.

Interstellar but make it The Long Dark –