Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Part of a weird, disconcerting, sometimes terrifying world

Facebook just reminded me that eight years ago I played King Triton in a big, splashy (ahem) production of The Little Mermaid and made my first appearance onstage on a wheeled platform with a Botticelli shell and nothing to hold on to for dear life.

Oh—and my doctor and I decided that playing a principal role in a show that involved being wheeled onstage on a small, Botticelli-shelled platform was the PERFECT time to wean myseof off the demon drug Cymbalta.

If you've never been on Cymbalta, I do not recommend starting. If you've ever stopped taking Cymbalta, you know that doing it in this context was just bonkers. I was always unsure of what exact direction I could find gravity. I was in a constant state of thick, memory-clouding fog. I got what everyone coming off of Cymbalta calls "brain zaps," which is the best attempt at a collective name for an impossible-to-describe colleciton of alarming things happening in my head.

And it didn't help that practically every entrance I made began with me angrily shouting ARIEL! and then struggling to remember what came next.

I barely felt present the entire run. You might say I was notter under the water. But you shouldn't. Nobody should ever say that.

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