Your Brain on Drugs

One of the things I've learned in recent years is how much we are creatures of our chemistry. It's not just people I know who have found near-salvific life changes through anti-depressants; it's also the fact that I myself go from fairly even-keeled in my ordinary life to hair-trigger homicidal (in my mind) while pregnant.

To my shame, I have twice made little scenes at the grocery store, both times under the influence of progesterone. The sources of these conflicts have been trivial and absurd: the price of cereal (not as posted on the shelf because "that price [was] for the future") and a clerk's insistence (in response to a polite question about whether I could make a change to my self-checkout order) that if I didn't sign the credit card machine, the store would leave my credit card open on that machine "FOR. EVER." and the machine could no longer be used by anyone else because it would be frozen there, waiting for my signature, for eternity. It's not like I started screaming at anyone, but whereas I ordinarily would have been annoyed and maybe a little amused, I wanted to take somebody hostage and demand justice, or at least an accounting of the sheer absurdity of what had just been told me.

You wouldn't believe what goes on in my mind in response to things like the electrician gouging our new laundry-room countertop, or Sam's cousin continuing to spam her whole Facebook list with vaguely worded messages about "business opportunities" in spite of pleas from all her friends that she stop. It's as if the superhuman sense of smell that I have developed (tormenting, because as it turns out, the world mostly does not smell very good) is accompanied by an equally acute sense of personal injury and grievance at all manner of minor insult and not-directed-at-me inconvenience. I badly need to get some actual perspective, or take some kind of sedative, cocktails being sadly out of the question now, when I need one most.