For over a year now, I've been taking these pills that are supposed to do what no other pill has done, i.e. make my anxiety go away. And, by the way, just in case I get depressed, they'll toss in a little bonus magic for that too. With a few short breaks when the anxiety of paying for them really got to me, I've stuck with them. I was brought up to believe you get what you pay for, so I've been figuring that even though I've noticed nothing other than a big dent in my wallet, the effect must be cumulative and very long term. Sometimes you just have to be patient.
Apparently I misunderstood the directions; I had the dosage and the delivery method all wrong. If I had wanted the pills to help rid me of anxiety I would have been better off taking all thirty of them at once, still hermetically sealed in the bottle, and throwing them directly at the source. Okay, it's a moving target, but at least I would have had a chance, and I might even have avoided a year of pesky side effects. The dizziness and increased appetite I could live with (I've always been a glutton and a bit off balance), but the fatigue was becoming a bit inconvenient. Falling asleep on my laptop in mid-sentence or even dozing in a movie were bad enough; constantly fighting the urge to suddenly slip into a coma while driving is another story. With the blessing of my doctor (affectionately known as Dr. Happy Pills), I am weaning myself off the little poison capsules. For a mere twelve dollars a minute (thankfully I'm only there for fifteen; we don't want my anxiety to become incapacitating), he flipped through the little manual and confirmed that the side effects I was experiencing are indeed at the top of the list. I think I could have told him that. Damn, I should have been a doctor.
The anxiety has already lifted as I fantasize about what I will do with the money I will save every month at the pharmacy drive thru, where, every month, the clerk appears to need some kind of electric shock therapy when he sees the price of my purchase. "It's cheaper than heroin," I once told him. He looked at me like I was nuts. I get that a lot.
Anyway, now that I'll have all this money left over, I'm thinking I want to go on vacation. But if I'm going to enjoy a vacation, I need to look good. You never know who you're going to meet. Which brings me to the problem of the purplish brown dark circles under my eyes, which have grown to look like bruises from a fist fight where one of us -- namely me -- had no fists.
No longer trusting narcotics of any kind sold in the drug store, I opted for a more holistic solution and ventured off to Whole Foods. After a few laps around the store, I managed to locate the "eye cream" aisle (the only section I'm familiar with is "prepared foods;" who knew they actually sold groceries?), and stood mesmerized by all the options before me. I read every label, assessing each "miracle" product by the extent to which the brand sounded appropriately clinical (pH should always appear somewhere in bold letters) and the extent to which the label design looked pharmaceutical as opposed to sartorial. Anything referred to as serum would be a front runner. Sale items were out; if folks aren't willing to spend their life savings on the stuff, it can't be good. No, I have not forgotten about the anxiety pills; I simply misused them.
After careful study, I went with the stark looking tube of serum made from extract of green tea leaves and cucumbers and specifically billed as non-irritating. I was being particularly careful about reading labels given my year-long snafu with the prescription pills, and I didn't want to make any more mistakes. Non-irritating sounded good, but I suppose I still need a tutorial in label reading because, once again, I misunderstood. Apparently, what "non-irritating" really means is "this stuff isn't merely irritating; it is so caustic that it results in blazing redness on contact and causes a sting so painful you want to cut your head off." All this medical jargon is so confusing; maybe it's a good thing after all that I didn't become a doctor. I can be shitty at bedside, and I am definitely not smart enough to charge twelve dollars a minute.
I'm not going to write off Whole Foods the way I've written off the drug store. I'd starve without their prepared foods section. But I'm expanding my horizons there a bit, venturing into produce to stock up on cucumbers. Get your minds out of the gutter kids, I know what you're thinking. Sometimes a cucumber is just a cucumber -- something to be sliced into little soothing circles to place on your aching eyes. And I suppose I can toss the rest in a salad, once my drug induced appetite decreases and I can tolerate a little light eating.
Clear eyed and svelte, I'm gonna look good on that vacation I'm planning. And there will be no sunblock from any drug stores, no decision on whether to PABA or not to PABA. I'll just wear a hat.
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