This is something that has only recently started to dawn on me.

The olanzapine has an effect on my brain where, I no longer get nicotine withdrawal. After almost ten years of anywhere from half a pack to a whole pack of cigarettes per day, on average, I am suddenly no longer addicted to nicotine.

And while this should be a wonderful, amazing, glorious thing, and well, it is, it is also bothering me. Despite now being able to easily quit blowing through money, staining my teeth, coughing up mucus every morning and raising my risk of cancer, it bothers me.

And when I try to figure out why it is bothering me, I realize that after over a decade of unmedicated BP 1 with mixed states galore, I am addicted to the experience of relief. Relief is what I have been chasing my entire adolescent and adult life.

I am used to feeling crazy and miserable, but then smoking a cigarette and feeling relief, getting drunk and feeling relief, getting high and feeling relief.

But proper medication like this Zyprexa prescription takes away the chaos and most of the misery, so that there is no longer the experience of relief. I feel fine, and then I smoke a cigarette, and I feel no different.

I'm trying to just give it time, I figure it's going to take me a while to get used to this new way of existing. But I've realized just how huge this type of cycle, of misery and relief, has been in my life and my psyche. I've learned throughout my life to equate relief with "happiness" or "feeling good". I am still wandering blind and clueless trying to figure out what actual happiness and feeling good is like.

It's weird.