Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Taking a Break
I've been thinking a lot...I need to take a break from keeping this blog. I could share what I'm going through ad infinitum, but that wasn't really what I wanted with this project. Instead, I wanted to give ideas for getting through this. But at this point...nothing I've done has helped ME get through it, so I feel entirely unqualified in trying to help anyone else get through it. All the strategies seem to stop working with a few weeks, and while I'm on meds now, and they've cut the worst out, all that means in practice is that I'm more stable. I'm less likely to break down and cry, I'm less likely to fall apart randomly, my brain isn't chugging on anxiety nearly as much, and I'm less likely to have suicidal thoughts. What it DOESN'T mean is that I feel any more optimistic about my outlook. I still feel like nothing I do really matters worth a damn. And while I feel that way, I can't think of anything that I might have to say to others that'll be of much use. Thanks for your help, ya'll, and I wish you best of luck with your own struggles!
Monday, May 28, 2012
Medication
I don't really know what to say today, but I felt that, given the events of the past week or two, I really should.
Three weeks ago, still not feeling better, I realized that something had to change, and that I couldn't continue as I was without help. This was followed up soon after by my therapist saying that I had crossed a line and really should be on meds. I was really busy earlier in May, but I finally got around to making the appointment two weeks ago, and last Monday I went to a shrink. I've never been to a psychiatrist before, but it was an interesting experience - noticeably different than going to a psychologist. It was much more like an interview with a doctor - she asked a lot of questions about my past psychological issues, such as whether or not I'd ever had an eating disorder, what was my family history of psych stuff. She also pretty much only listened, whereas my therapist and I have more like a conversation (some of this is different approaches, though). Anyway, when all was said and done, she felt I was a good candidate for medication, and prescribed me Wellbutrin (well, the generic). She also mentioned that it can make people feel "jittery" and so she also prescribed me some Lorazepam, which is an anti-anxiety medication.
I read about both on wikipedia and ended up feeling pretty comfortable. This was really, really hard for me over all - I would never have decided to go the medication route if I hadn't reached the point that I simply felt I couldn't manage any more without help. And I think that's what made this most recent week so hard. I really needed something to make a noticeable difference immediately. This hasn't happened AT ALL. In fact, this week has been one of the worst I've had since the depression really kicked in last January. I've spent a lot of time thinking about EVERYTHING, and I managed to channel some of that time in to thinking about WHY this week has sucked, and I think it's because, first, I'd really gotten my hopes up that the meds would help; and second, the tendency of the wellbutrin to enhance "jitters" and anxiety has made me feel worse - ie, that I haven't actually felt more DEPRESSED this week, but rather I've felt much more ANXIOUS, and since my anxiety tends to express itself in my brain simply not shutting off, and my going round and round and round about issues, I've just done that even worse than normal - and since the things I currently go around and around about are things that upset me a lot, I've felt more depressed.
Vicious cycle.
The week stunk on ice. Last night, I finally decided to try the lorazepam, because I couldn't face another night of crying myself to sleep. It didn't seem to do anything at all, either.
So all in all, my early exposure to medicines is leaving me feeling really defeated. The wellbutrin has done virtually nothing that I can tell, except given me headaches and sporadic dizziness. The lorazepam seems to have done even less than that.
Yet, in a strange way, since Saturday, it's had a funny different effect too. It's like it's finally, finally dawning on me fully that there is no help coming. No one is going to rescue me, nothing is going to change unless I change it. This feels awful - if I felt like I could do this alone, I wouldn't have been depressed in the first place. Yet, clearly, that has to change, and on Saturday, and again this afternoon (but not yesterday, and not this morning, and not any other day in recent memory...) and I'm actually starting to finally have moments where I feel like I can overcome this crap.
Maybe that's the wellbutrin. Maybe it's not. I guess I'll just have to see over time.
Three weeks ago, still not feeling better, I realized that something had to change, and that I couldn't continue as I was without help. This was followed up soon after by my therapist saying that I had crossed a line and really should be on meds. I was really busy earlier in May, but I finally got around to making the appointment two weeks ago, and last Monday I went to a shrink. I've never been to a psychiatrist before, but it was an interesting experience - noticeably different than going to a psychologist. It was much more like an interview with a doctor - she asked a lot of questions about my past psychological issues, such as whether or not I'd ever had an eating disorder, what was my family history of psych stuff. She also pretty much only listened, whereas my therapist and I have more like a conversation (some of this is different approaches, though). Anyway, when all was said and done, she felt I was a good candidate for medication, and prescribed me Wellbutrin (well, the generic). She also mentioned that it can make people feel "jittery" and so she also prescribed me some Lorazepam, which is an anti-anxiety medication.
I read about both on wikipedia and ended up feeling pretty comfortable. This was really, really hard for me over all - I would never have decided to go the medication route if I hadn't reached the point that I simply felt I couldn't manage any more without help. And I think that's what made this most recent week so hard. I really needed something to make a noticeable difference immediately. This hasn't happened AT ALL. In fact, this week has been one of the worst I've had since the depression really kicked in last January. I've spent a lot of time thinking about EVERYTHING, and I managed to channel some of that time in to thinking about WHY this week has sucked, and I think it's because, first, I'd really gotten my hopes up that the meds would help; and second, the tendency of the wellbutrin to enhance "jitters" and anxiety has made me feel worse - ie, that I haven't actually felt more DEPRESSED this week, but rather I've felt much more ANXIOUS, and since my anxiety tends to express itself in my brain simply not shutting off, and my going round and round and round about issues, I've just done that even worse than normal - and since the things I currently go around and around about are things that upset me a lot, I've felt more depressed.
Vicious cycle.
The week stunk on ice. Last night, I finally decided to try the lorazepam, because I couldn't face another night of crying myself to sleep. It didn't seem to do anything at all, either.
So all in all, my early exposure to medicines is leaving me feeling really defeated. The wellbutrin has done virtually nothing that I can tell, except given me headaches and sporadic dizziness. The lorazepam seems to have done even less than that.
Yet, in a strange way, since Saturday, it's had a funny different effect too. It's like it's finally, finally dawning on me fully that there is no help coming. No one is going to rescue me, nothing is going to change unless I change it. This feels awful - if I felt like I could do this alone, I wouldn't have been depressed in the first place. Yet, clearly, that has to change, and on Saturday, and again this afternoon (but not yesterday, and not this morning, and not any other day in recent memory...) and I'm actually starting to finally have moments where I feel like I can overcome this crap.
Maybe that's the wellbutrin. Maybe it's not. I guess I'll just have to see over time.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Holding On and Letting Go
This is my Facebook status right now:
I've finally come to understand that things are just things, and that I don't need them. That when all is said and done, I will be the sum of my experiences and the people I've loved and who have loved me, not of what I have accumulated.
Letting go has always been hard for me, and it's been a gradual process. My mother is borderline in to being a hoarder. She always wants more, and never seems to have enough. It doesn't matter how many projects she has the yarn for already, she always wants to buy more yarn for the new, shiny project in the newest issue of Vogue Knitting, ignoring all the many bins she already has. When that newest love affair doesn't end up getting made, she'll still buy more the next time. Or she'll buy all of the yarn for six projects that it'd take her a year to make, and maybe make one of them before getting distracted by something. And of course, when something is on sale, if you want it, it's okay. That's the mindset that I was raised with.
This got added to my own personality, a tendency towards collecting and trying to be complete and thorough and have ALL THE THINGS. When I was in high school, this was briefly a seriously problem, as it was the age of the Collectible Card Game, and I wanted to play the Star Trek CCG. But more than that, the cards were shiny, and I wanted ALL of them. I spent hundreds of dollars and all my allowance, and while I did end up with a zillion cards, I had no one to play the card with, and I still wasn't quite able to get all of them, though I got close. I came to recognize that this was not sustainable in the long term, and than my desire to collect and be complete was an issue. When I decided to play Magic: The Gathering with my friends, I did so under the express condition that I would NOT try to collect everything - a resolution which I kept. This was a useful lesson for me: I still wanted to collect, but I was able to control it. Definitely a win.
Still, throughout my life, this has come up over and over again. Once I get in to something, I have the bad habit of starting to think of it more as a collection and less as a dynamic reflection of my interests. When I got very into reading manga, it wasn't enough to just buy the manga that interested me and keep the manga I wanted, I started to look at it as a collection, to think, "I should get this because it will fit in" not because I particularly wanted to read it, to keep volumes even if I didn't particularly like them because it was part of the collection as a whole, and to keep buying series that I wasn't enjoying very much because I'd already collected the first 5 volumes, and I'd spent the money, might as well see it through.
These habits started to break 6 years ago when I broke up with my fiancee. We had excellent collections of video games and roleplaying game books that we'd built together, using our joint finances. The battles that resulted when we considered how to divide these things led me to be much less attached to things in general. Yet the manga experience happened AFTER this, so clearly I wasn't "cured." I moved 8 times in 5 years, and every time I would go through my books and try to reduce the number I had to move, but I still had about 50 boxes when all was said and done, and it was so hard to figure out how to reduce them.
The bed bugs were the next breaking point. In March, 2009, my apartment got bed bugs, and when that happens, you have to vacuum EVERYTHING in your apartment, especially around the infected areas, crate it up, and let the apartment get treated. Since all of my books were in my bedroom, a primary infected area, every single book had to be individually vacuumed on each side and on the front and back. It's amazing what you realize you don't need when you have to go to so much work. The most painful part was that, because of the infestation, I couldn't risk donating the books anywhere. It killed me to just throw them away (well, recycle them) but I did it because there just wasn't any choice, I had to pack up everything I owned in 4 days in preparation for the exterminator, and it all had to be vacuumed before packing, and so I just made the cuts.
I've been getting steadily "better" about cutting out the nonsense ever since. I moved out of the bed bug apartment in October, 2009, and have lived in the same apartment since then, and every 6 months or so I've gone through everything and gotten rid of more. I would always stop when I felt like I couldn't get rid of more...but that always left a lot.
In my last post, I mentioned "letting it go" as one of my strategies for trying to get through days when I was down. One of the side effects of this I didn't expect. Some days, it helps with my depression. Some days, it doesn't, but EVERY day, it has left me nearly desperate to go through my belongings and find more that I don't need. It's amazing how good it feels to let go of all of this stuff that I've managed to accumulate. After all of the prior reductions, throwing away hundreds of books during the bed bugs, all the previous 6 month sort throughs, I've been able to reduce the books by almost another third. It's incredibly liberating. I think it's the kind of evaluation that would do a lot of people good. For books, the process for me is pretty simple:
1. Have I read this in how ever many years that I've owned it? Do I still want to?
2. Will I ever read it again?
3. Do I have a particular sentimental attachment to this book? (ie, was it my favorite book when I was six?)
Those are the only questions that matter. If I've been carting a book around for 10 years without reading it, why am I bothering? Sure, it might look interesting, but it's not like I haven't been reading OTHER books - I'm CONSTANTLY reading, which means that I AM reading what I want to read. If there's a book that hasn't been read, and that I don't have strong feelings about reading it (ie, I don't look at it and think, oh wow, I really wanted to read this!) then why do I still have it? Some books have guilt attached to them - it was a gift! I spent so much money on it! I really thought I wanted to read it! I've had it since I was a kid! But now, I've decided...none of this matters. If I haven't read it, if I don't intend to read it, and if I have no special sentimental reason to keep it...then I'm not going to keep it. I bet, in a year, I won't even remember which books I got rid of. And if I end up regretting one or two of my choices, then so be it - I can always replace one or two books, and the difference in the amount of clutter in my life will be epic. Furthermore, whenever possible I can replace them with digital copies, which will still mean I'm no longer moving crates and crates of books around.
For other types of items, I'm taking a pretty similar approach.
1. What is the function of this thing?
2. Do I ever use it for that function?
3. Do I still like it? (in the cases of, for example, decorative items)
4. And, of course...do I have a sentimental attachment to the item in question?
And again, if the answer is no, I'm going to just take it all to Goodwill. This isn't always easy. 5 years ago I got it in my head that it would be fun to collect shot glasses every where I travel. Now, I've got probably over a hundred shot glasses, and have spent a lot of money, and most of them sit in storage. Clearly, I don't need all of these damn shot glasses. It was fun while I collected them...but that doesn't mean I still need to. On the flip side, it doesn't mean I have to get rid of every single one - I can strike a happy medium between keeping ones that I like and am attached to and ditching the rest. The same objections come up - this was a gift! I spent a lot of money on this! This was bought by me or for me from XYZ and I could never replace it! I've had this since I was six! Yet, not everything that I've had a long time ACTUALLY has sentimental significance, and many other things that once had sentimental significance, I've forgotten the reasons, and all in all...there is just so much stuff, and what is having it all getting me?
I'm not saying one ditches everything. I've been collecting art since 2002. I've built my art collection very carefully, and every single piece I bought because I loved it, not because I thought "I really should buy a piece by this artist" or "this would fit with my other collected pieces." Almost all of my art is up on my (now almost full) walls...and I've been looking at it on my walls every day and thinking, "I still want all of these." So I will keep them all. And I'm still going to have over a thousand books when all is said and done (which tells you a lot about just how many I started with...). It's not about cutting all ties...it's about making sure that what I own, I own for a reason, and that things mean something to me, that I'm not just carting it all around thoughtlessly because that's what I've always done.
I haven't figured out so much about my life, I haven't figured out how not to be depressed or how to get over my break up or how to not be pessimistic about my chances of getting in to graduate school or any of that jazz...but I can start to liberate myself from the shackles I've made myself, the ways I've cluttered my life and dragged myself down. Onward...
I've finally come to understand that things are just things, and that I don't need them. That when all is said and done, I will be the sum of my experiences and the people I've loved and who have loved me, not of what I have accumulated.
Letting go has always been hard for me, and it's been a gradual process. My mother is borderline in to being a hoarder. She always wants more, and never seems to have enough. It doesn't matter how many projects she has the yarn for already, she always wants to buy more yarn for the new, shiny project in the newest issue of Vogue Knitting, ignoring all the many bins she already has. When that newest love affair doesn't end up getting made, she'll still buy more the next time. Or she'll buy all of the yarn for six projects that it'd take her a year to make, and maybe make one of them before getting distracted by something. And of course, when something is on sale, if you want it, it's okay. That's the mindset that I was raised with.
This got added to my own personality, a tendency towards collecting and trying to be complete and thorough and have ALL THE THINGS. When I was in high school, this was briefly a seriously problem, as it was the age of the Collectible Card Game, and I wanted to play the Star Trek CCG. But more than that, the cards were shiny, and I wanted ALL of them. I spent hundreds of dollars and all my allowance, and while I did end up with a zillion cards, I had no one to play the card with, and I still wasn't quite able to get all of them, though I got close. I came to recognize that this was not sustainable in the long term, and than my desire to collect and be complete was an issue. When I decided to play Magic: The Gathering with my friends, I did so under the express condition that I would NOT try to collect everything - a resolution which I kept. This was a useful lesson for me: I still wanted to collect, but I was able to control it. Definitely a win.
Still, throughout my life, this has come up over and over again. Once I get in to something, I have the bad habit of starting to think of it more as a collection and less as a dynamic reflection of my interests. When I got very into reading manga, it wasn't enough to just buy the manga that interested me and keep the manga I wanted, I started to look at it as a collection, to think, "I should get this because it will fit in" not because I particularly wanted to read it, to keep volumes even if I didn't particularly like them because it was part of the collection as a whole, and to keep buying series that I wasn't enjoying very much because I'd already collected the first 5 volumes, and I'd spent the money, might as well see it through.
These habits started to break 6 years ago when I broke up with my fiancee. We had excellent collections of video games and roleplaying game books that we'd built together, using our joint finances. The battles that resulted when we considered how to divide these things led me to be much less attached to things in general. Yet the manga experience happened AFTER this, so clearly I wasn't "cured." I moved 8 times in 5 years, and every time I would go through my books and try to reduce the number I had to move, but I still had about 50 boxes when all was said and done, and it was so hard to figure out how to reduce them.
The bed bugs were the next breaking point. In March, 2009, my apartment got bed bugs, and when that happens, you have to vacuum EVERYTHING in your apartment, especially around the infected areas, crate it up, and let the apartment get treated. Since all of my books were in my bedroom, a primary infected area, every single book had to be individually vacuumed on each side and on the front and back. It's amazing what you realize you don't need when you have to go to so much work. The most painful part was that, because of the infestation, I couldn't risk donating the books anywhere. It killed me to just throw them away (well, recycle them) but I did it because there just wasn't any choice, I had to pack up everything I owned in 4 days in preparation for the exterminator, and it all had to be vacuumed before packing, and so I just made the cuts.
I've been getting steadily "better" about cutting out the nonsense ever since. I moved out of the bed bug apartment in October, 2009, and have lived in the same apartment since then, and every 6 months or so I've gone through everything and gotten rid of more. I would always stop when I felt like I couldn't get rid of more...but that always left a lot.
In my last post, I mentioned "letting it go" as one of my strategies for trying to get through days when I was down. One of the side effects of this I didn't expect. Some days, it helps with my depression. Some days, it doesn't, but EVERY day, it has left me nearly desperate to go through my belongings and find more that I don't need. It's amazing how good it feels to let go of all of this stuff that I've managed to accumulate. After all of the prior reductions, throwing away hundreds of books during the bed bugs, all the previous 6 month sort throughs, I've been able to reduce the books by almost another third. It's incredibly liberating. I think it's the kind of evaluation that would do a lot of people good. For books, the process for me is pretty simple:
1. Have I read this in how ever many years that I've owned it? Do I still want to?
2. Will I ever read it again?
3. Do I have a particular sentimental attachment to this book? (ie, was it my favorite book when I was six?)
Those are the only questions that matter. If I've been carting a book around for 10 years without reading it, why am I bothering? Sure, it might look interesting, but it's not like I haven't been reading OTHER books - I'm CONSTANTLY reading, which means that I AM reading what I want to read. If there's a book that hasn't been read, and that I don't have strong feelings about reading it (ie, I don't look at it and think, oh wow, I really wanted to read this!) then why do I still have it? Some books have guilt attached to them - it was a gift! I spent so much money on it! I really thought I wanted to read it! I've had it since I was a kid! But now, I've decided...none of this matters. If I haven't read it, if I don't intend to read it, and if I have no special sentimental reason to keep it...then I'm not going to keep it. I bet, in a year, I won't even remember which books I got rid of. And if I end up regretting one or two of my choices, then so be it - I can always replace one or two books, and the difference in the amount of clutter in my life will be epic. Furthermore, whenever possible I can replace them with digital copies, which will still mean I'm no longer moving crates and crates of books around.
For other types of items, I'm taking a pretty similar approach.
1. What is the function of this thing?
2. Do I ever use it for that function?
3. Do I still like it? (in the cases of, for example, decorative items)
4. And, of course...do I have a sentimental attachment to the item in question?
And again, if the answer is no, I'm going to just take it all to Goodwill. This isn't always easy. 5 years ago I got it in my head that it would be fun to collect shot glasses every where I travel. Now, I've got probably over a hundred shot glasses, and have spent a lot of money, and most of them sit in storage. Clearly, I don't need all of these damn shot glasses. It was fun while I collected them...but that doesn't mean I still need to. On the flip side, it doesn't mean I have to get rid of every single one - I can strike a happy medium between keeping ones that I like and am attached to and ditching the rest. The same objections come up - this was a gift! I spent a lot of money on this! This was bought by me or for me from XYZ and I could never replace it! I've had this since I was six! Yet, not everything that I've had a long time ACTUALLY has sentimental significance, and many other things that once had sentimental significance, I've forgotten the reasons, and all in all...there is just so much stuff, and what is having it all getting me?
I'm not saying one ditches everything. I've been collecting art since 2002. I've built my art collection very carefully, and every single piece I bought because I loved it, not because I thought "I really should buy a piece by this artist" or "this would fit with my other collected pieces." Almost all of my art is up on my (now almost full) walls...and I've been looking at it on my walls every day and thinking, "I still want all of these." So I will keep them all. And I'm still going to have over a thousand books when all is said and done (which tells you a lot about just how many I started with...). It's not about cutting all ties...it's about making sure that what I own, I own for a reason, and that things mean something to me, that I'm not just carting it all around thoughtlessly because that's what I've always done.
I haven't figured out so much about my life, I haven't figured out how not to be depressed or how to get over my break up or how to not be pessimistic about my chances of getting in to graduate school or any of that jazz...but I can start to liberate myself from the shackles I've made myself, the ways I've cluttered my life and dragged myself down. Onward...
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Let Go
My stepmother attends Al-Anon meetings because of the troubles she's had as a result of my step-brother's behavior and life choices. She used to blame herself, and right after she started attending, little signs appeared all her and my dad's house. They said a wide range of affirmations, but the one that always stood out to me is "let go and let god." Now, the message doesn't work for me at all - I'm not religious in the least, and in fact I'm an atheist, so I don't really think that god is going to be doing much of anything for me. On the contrary, I feel that things happen if I make them happen; good things take place if I work hard for them.
My road trip afforded me a lot of time to think. Before setting off on it, I wasn't sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing. As it turned out...it was both. There were definitely times alone in the car when thinking was the worst thing that could be going on - that I just went round and round, and got more and more sad. But the last few days of the road trip - early last week - I started to make a break through, and I was surprised to find that the biggest breakthrough I made was the addition of a single phrase: "let go."
When I'm really depressed, and I start to cycle through Bad Things I Probably Shouldn't Be Thinking About, there is very little that I can do to help. However, when I'm feeling neutral or okay or good and I start to go down directions of thought that upset me, I've now got a set of things that I can do that seem to help - most of the time. :)
1. Self-Acceptance. "It's okay that I feel sad/hurt/down/angry/annoyed/frustrated/guilty/etc." I've been amazed by how often I've found myself feeling worse and worse and I've just cut it off cold by reminding myself that it's okay that I feel however I feel, and that there is nothing wrong with me just because I'm still sad or still depressed. I've turned entire days around this way.
2. Distraction (and more self-acceptance!). "What do I want to do?" And then I do it. I've given up on asking myself "what do I want?" as a general statement, because in the past four months I've only had one, unachievable answer to that one. If the answer is that I really don't want to do anything, I don't do anything. I put aside all of the "shoulds" - I should be crafting for Nerd Wars! I should be working for my day job! I should be reading! - and focus on it being okay. Last night, all I really wanted to do was watch my baseball game...so that's all I did. It's taken four months, but the side effect of persistently focusing on only doing what I want to do and not doing what I don't want to do...is that I finally want to do things again! I've finally picked my crochet hook back up. I'm reading more. I'm getting more done. But it has to be constantly reinforced - I have to honor my own desires.
3. Ask why. It's very easy to get into a cycle of bad, thinking about all the things that I'm still hurting about, wishing. Instead, now, I try to think, "why do I feel this way right now?" This weekend, it was because I realized that it would have been the six month anniversary of my relationship, had it worked out. Realizing this didn't really help me feel better, in fact I think it made me feel worse, but I still felt that it was better that I knew than that I didn't know.
4. Naming it. When I've got enough spunk, when I notice things taking a turn, I just call it up short: "Shut up, Cushan!" (recall: I nicknamed my inner demon Chushanrishathiam...) It doesn't work every time, but if I'm generally having a day where I feel okay, this can really work to stop the whole thing from derailing.
5. Self-encouragement. Simple reinforcement stuff. "I look nice today," or "I did well yesterday," or, "I've been getting a lot done!" It's easy to look at things that "don't matter" but that you did and took a long time, and then say, "damn it I wasted all this time!" Wrong attitude. When that starts to happen - and when it does it'll always drag me down other bad directions - I just remind myself, "no, it's okay. I've done well. I made the choice to do this thing. I'm on top of what I need to do." Even if I do fall behind, I try to keep the inner message positive.
6. Let go. This is my most recent addition, my epiphany last weekend that has helped me a lot in getting through this most recent week, and it's clearly derived from my step-mother's Al-Anon signs. When I really start to cycle, I say to myself, "let it go. I know that it hurts, I know that I'm sad/angry/guilty/frustrated/what-not, but there's nothing I can do about it. So let it go." I've noticed that increasingly, this is accompanied by a visual: my fist in a death grip around...nothing, scraps of paper, air, feelings, I don't know, and I just visualize pulling my fingers away, one by one, and...whatever it is...blows away in the wind. There's nothing there, really, yet I can kinda...see it...dissipate.
Do these things work every time? No. Last night, for example, they didn't work at all - but I know for sure that hormones were involved. When I start really low, none of this makes much impact at all. I have to have enough spirit to fight back before I can really tell Cushan to shove off. But I've found that all of these strategies have really helped me on the days where I'm mostly doing okay but I start to go down lines of thought that upset me. I'm sure I'll keep coming up with more, sure that I'll keep experimenting and discarding. What kinds of things do you all do?
My road trip afforded me a lot of time to think. Before setting off on it, I wasn't sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing. As it turned out...it was both. There were definitely times alone in the car when thinking was the worst thing that could be going on - that I just went round and round, and got more and more sad. But the last few days of the road trip - early last week - I started to make a break through, and I was surprised to find that the biggest breakthrough I made was the addition of a single phrase: "let go."
When I'm really depressed, and I start to cycle through Bad Things I Probably Shouldn't Be Thinking About, there is very little that I can do to help. However, when I'm feeling neutral or okay or good and I start to go down directions of thought that upset me, I've now got a set of things that I can do that seem to help - most of the time. :)
1. Self-Acceptance. "It's okay that I feel sad/hurt/down/angry/annoyed/frustrated/guilty/etc." I've been amazed by how often I've found myself feeling worse and worse and I've just cut it off cold by reminding myself that it's okay that I feel however I feel, and that there is nothing wrong with me just because I'm still sad or still depressed. I've turned entire days around this way.
2. Distraction (and more self-acceptance!). "What do I want to do?" And then I do it. I've given up on asking myself "what do I want?" as a general statement, because in the past four months I've only had one, unachievable answer to that one. If the answer is that I really don't want to do anything, I don't do anything. I put aside all of the "shoulds" - I should be crafting for Nerd Wars! I should be working for my day job! I should be reading! - and focus on it being okay. Last night, all I really wanted to do was watch my baseball game...so that's all I did. It's taken four months, but the side effect of persistently focusing on only doing what I want to do and not doing what I don't want to do...is that I finally want to do things again! I've finally picked my crochet hook back up. I'm reading more. I'm getting more done. But it has to be constantly reinforced - I have to honor my own desires.
3. Ask why. It's very easy to get into a cycle of bad, thinking about all the things that I'm still hurting about, wishing. Instead, now, I try to think, "why do I feel this way right now?" This weekend, it was because I realized that it would have been the six month anniversary of my relationship, had it worked out. Realizing this didn't really help me feel better, in fact I think it made me feel worse, but I still felt that it was better that I knew than that I didn't know.
4. Naming it. When I've got enough spunk, when I notice things taking a turn, I just call it up short: "Shut up, Cushan!" (recall: I nicknamed my inner demon Chushanrishathiam...) It doesn't work every time, but if I'm generally having a day where I feel okay, this can really work to stop the whole thing from derailing.
5. Self-encouragement. Simple reinforcement stuff. "I look nice today," or "I did well yesterday," or, "I've been getting a lot done!" It's easy to look at things that "don't matter" but that you did and took a long time, and then say, "damn it I wasted all this time!" Wrong attitude. When that starts to happen - and when it does it'll always drag me down other bad directions - I just remind myself, "no, it's okay. I've done well. I made the choice to do this thing. I'm on top of what I need to do." Even if I do fall behind, I try to keep the inner message positive.
6. Let go. This is my most recent addition, my epiphany last weekend that has helped me a lot in getting through this most recent week, and it's clearly derived from my step-mother's Al-Anon signs. When I really start to cycle, I say to myself, "let it go. I know that it hurts, I know that I'm sad/angry/guilty/frustrated/what-not, but there's nothing I can do about it. So let it go." I've noticed that increasingly, this is accompanied by a visual: my fist in a death grip around...nothing, scraps of paper, air, feelings, I don't know, and I just visualize pulling my fingers away, one by one, and...whatever it is...blows away in the wind. There's nothing there, really, yet I can kinda...see it...dissipate.
Do these things work every time? No. Last night, for example, they didn't work at all - but I know for sure that hormones were involved. When I start really low, none of this makes much impact at all. I have to have enough spirit to fight back before I can really tell Cushan to shove off. But I've found that all of these strategies have really helped me on the days where I'm mostly doing okay but I start to go down lines of thought that upset me. I'm sure I'll keep coming up with more, sure that I'll keep experimenting and discarding. What kinds of things do you all do?
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Gut Punches
It's odd. When I started this blog, I had a number of ideas for posts, on all manner of topics related to the strategies that I had been working on to get over my depression. Yet, as the weeks have passed, I've found that I largely haven't been writing about those things, because every week brings something new. This week has been no different in terms of new and unexpected changes, and this time not for the better.
It's very difficult not to hope. As I planned the road trip that I'm currently on, I debated back and forth about what I should do when I passed through Akron. Should I ask my ex if he wanted to get dinner? Even knowing that I still have very strong feelings for him, and even knowing that there was no reason to expect anything out of such a meeting? Knowing that the relationship was over? Despite myself, despite having no expectations, I know I went in to last Tuesday night with much more hope than was warranted. I had thought, leading up to the evening, that I should kill that hope, but whenever I tried to kill it I ended up feeling like doing so was equivalent to killing myself (mostly figuratively...) - if I can't hope about John, why should I bother hoping about other things, either? Most of the things I'm currently hoping for feel like such a long shot, that if I can't put my faith in one long shot, how can I put it in to any other? So I didn't quell the hope. I hadn't even seen John, though, before I realized what a monumentally bad idea dinner had actually been. I was having trouble not breaking down just walking up to the building where he works, and it didn't get any better throughout dinner. I held it together...barely...but I didn't at all behave as I had hoped. I just wanted to be the upbeat, cheerful, interesting girl that he was starting to fall for, but there was just no way. There is too much sadness in me now, too much struggle, to be that person, and so the depression kept peaking through. And despite myself, I did end up crying in his presence before the end of the night, and I was furious with myself about that, too. For a dinner that probably went almost as well as could legitimately have been expected (by which I mean: amicable conversation with an ex-boyfriend that is a continuing part of the process of attempting to salvage a friendship from the wreckage of a love).
Tuesday night was shattering to me.
Before that, I was starting to get my feet back under me. Before that, I was starting to wake up each morning with a little bit of pep and think, this won't be so bad. Before that, I was starting to think the worst was over and I was going to start recovering, and in that recovery I'd be able to take a more reasoned look at some of the many things I've thought about the last three months and figure out which have any merit and which were just Chushanrishathiam being a douche bag in my head.
After dinner...the hope just died, and once again, as when he first broke up with me, I felt like there was nothing left at all, that everything was pointless. I still had a two hour drive after leaving him, and I spent most of it sobbing, and the rest on the phone with a friend who I sufficiently impressed with the seriousness of the situation that she didn't want to let me off the phone because I was scaring her. I have enough fight in me not to succumb to those thoughts, fortunately, but it was not a good drive, and I've hardly felt better since. More fortunately, the friend who I would call to talk me off the ledge, who I was talking to that night, is also the friend who I was staying with starting Friday (And I actually ended up changing the original plan, and coming out to her place Thursday instead). I've been there since, though I leave today.
I don't have much good feeling right now. I'm just pleased that I went from entirely bleak this morning to feeling decidedly neutral right now - I think entirely because despite it all I've managed to chip away at my to-do list just a little, which had been building up the last week. I'm still behind, but I'll be spending the next few days with friends who work during the day, so it's getting more manageable. Anyway. That's a tangent. Since I don't have much good feeling the last few days, I thought I'd take this post to instead describe just what the worst feels like. I'll never forget, my freshman year of college, feeling low and not being able to figure out what the feeling was. Why do I feel this way? What is this emotion? I didn't remember ever feeling it before...I talked it over with a friend, and finally we put a name to it: I was lonely. When one has never felt an emotion before, it can be shockingly hard to put a name to it, to figure if that thing you're feeling is what other people are talking about when they mean sadness, anger, joy, euphoria, or whatnot. After this past week, and these past months, I'm starting to feel like an expert on depression, so here goes, the elements that compose my depression.
1. Hopelessness. This is the core of it, for me. The feeling that there is no point in even trying because no matter what I do, good things have not happened and will never happen. That never part is important, it projects the current feeling of hopelessness in to the future and makes it immutable and unchangeable.
2. Helplessness. Nothing I do can change anything. This starts at the local level: why am I still depressed? nothing I do can shake this feeling of depression. From that simple level, it grows out from there - nothing I do, nothing I try, no matter how hard I've worked, nothing I do makes any difference at all. I could disappear and no one would even notice.
3. Loneliness and Neglect and Isolation. All of these goes hand in hand. It's about feeling alone, but it's also about not wanting to be a burden. It's about feeling like no one cares, yet being unwilling to ask for help. I mean, three nights ago I cried myself to sleep when there was help fifteen feet away in another room, because I didn't want to put my friend out when it was already midnight and I knew she had her own issues going on. Yet on some level, I wanted her to find me, to discover me. I remember the day before John broke up with me, I couldn't sleep at all, so I went into the living room so I wouldn't bother him, and I ended up crying for most of an hour. I didn't want to be a burden or disturb anyone else, but secretly I was hoping that he'd come out and tell me that everything was going to be okay - but he had room mate who I DEFINITELY didn't want involved - and so I fought this ridiculous internal battle about just how much noise it would be okay for me to make while crying. I wanted to be quiet, obviously, but since part of me hoped for discovery, I also wanted to make some noise. The whole process was sick and ridiculous and left me feeling like a manipulative bitch. (In the end, I was undiscovered, and I decided to try to go back to sleep, but I couldn't, and he woke up, and I ended up owning that I'd been crying in the living room for an hour, and the whole situation fell apart quickly. I'm not really sure how I SHOULD have handled it, but I clearly handled it wrong...probably I should have just woken him up and been like, "I feel like shit. Can we talk about this?" ...but we'd already BEEN talk about it and there was nothing left to say and mostly I was crying because I was scared that things weren't seeming to get resolved...and as it turns out I guess I was right to be scared...)
4. Desolation. Just a feeling of absolute and complete emptiness. I look for something to say, something cheerful, something happy, some glimmer of thought, and find...absolutely nothing. Blank slate.
5. Lack of appetite. One of my only physical symptoms, my appetite goes poof. When I'm a somewhat less depressed point - pretty but not entirely depressed - I actually end up eating MORE because I lack the energy to tell myself no when I want the enormous dessert all to myself - but when I hit the depths, I just don't feel hungry at all anymore, and I have to make myself eat. I also get headaches (Especially when I've been crying...which is a lot...) and have trouble falling asleep. 6. Disinterest/Lack of Preference. What do I want to eat? I don't care. What show do I want to watch? It's all the same to me. It's not that I find I'm opposed to eating out, or watching TV, or what not, but in terms of having an actual opinion? I really couldn't care less. 7. Inability to Face Simple Tasks. Like getting out of bed. Or, in my case, most frequently, walking the dog. I HAVE to walk the dog, but I've often reached the point the past week that the idea of having to take her out has been so daunting that I was struggling to get up in the morning. 8. The Merry-Go-Round. This is my short hand for what I'm actually thinking in my own head. At the risk of triggering some pretty bad thoughts for the rest of the day while I'm actually currently feeling functional, I think it'd be easier to replicate some of this out-right than try to describe what I mean. The thought process goes something like this: I wish I understood why John broke up with me. Why did he abandon me? Why does everyone abandon me? It must be something about me. In the end, everyone leaves, everyone gives up. He gave up on me, even though I wasn't willing to give up on him. I guess he's no different than I am, because I'm just giving up on myself, now. What's the point? If I try again, it'll just end the same. People told me to be myself, and this is the closest to being myself that I've ever been in a relationship, and he ran screaming in the opposite direction. The next guy will just do the same. No one will want to stay when they see what I'm like. I'm just too crazy. I can't put up with myself, so why should anyone else put up with me? And now that I'm so depressed, it's even worse, like my only redeeming feature was being the girl with pep and spunk and energy and now I have none of those so why would anyone want me around at all? If being myself wasn't good enough, then what's the point? It's not like I can be someone else, but who I am sucks. He broke up with me because I'm a wreck, and everyone else will also think I'm a wreck. There's no point in even trying. Chushanrishathiam (reminder: my new name for my inner monologue when it's being all evil) goes on like this, and on and on, and worries at the same points for hours and days and weeks, and that's why I call it the Merry-Go-Round: even if I beat a particular piece of unpleasantness on one day, the feelings eventually cycle around and I have to try to beat them another day. When I try to argue back (I'm not pathetic! It's about his issues, not mine! This is just depression, I'll feel better eventually! I'm not crazy!) I don't really get anywhere, even when I marshal evidence (I know I'm not crazy, because crazy people aren't able to accomplish the things that I've accomplished without supports of kinds that I haven't needed)! All in all, for me, the MGR is at the crux of all of my problems, and the difference between good days and bad days tends to be my ability to shut the MGR down. Increasingly, though, I've found that the methods that were working to stop it have been less effective this past week.
9. Suicidal Thoughts. This is always a tough place to go, to admit to others that I've been experiencing. It feels SO manipulative to even say that I've been thinking about killing myself that I hate to even own it. Yet, it IS part and parcel of all of this, and it's not going to go away if I pretend I haven't been thinking it. I've found the worst combination has been when I've felt awful while driving, because it just feels like it'd be so easy, just jerk the steering wheel and I have nothing left to worry about. More than specific thoughts on attempting suicide, though, I've persistently thought in the past few months - when I've been having a bad day - that I just wish I'd go to sleep and not wake up the next morning. I've even managed to get in to the "I wish I'd never been born" stage of things - the kind of useless conjecture that is comforting because it's the only version that hurts no one else. I don't WANT to hurt those around me, I want them to be happy, and I know that plucking myself out of their lives would make them very unhappy, and that's the main thing that keeps me from taking an extreme action - but if I just died anyway, or even better if I'd never been born, that's less pain for them. The suicidal thoughts have been one of the scariest aspects of all of this for me, because while I'd suffered from depression before, I'd never so consistently found myself wondering why I'm still alive, what the point is, and - on the worst days - staring at my wrists and wondering what the knife would feel like cutting in. I've had more than one day like that in the last week, and as soon as my head is a little clearer I'm horrified by it. Heck, even when I'm experiencing it, I'm horrified by it, but that horror doesn't stop me thinking about it.
10. Fear. I know there have been times in the past when I didn't feel this way, but now it seems like I have no idea when I'll feel this way or for how long. What happens if this is what the rest of life is like? This tends to tie in to the previous, because if I AM going to feel this way for the rest of life, than what's the point? Obviously none of the things I want and hope for will be accomplishable while I feel awful.
11. Inflicting pain because of the inside pain. While there is an element of actual physical masochism in this, for me what I actually more mean is a tendency to, when talking to my support network, say things that I know will make them sad, or worried, or frightened for me, because there's just so much pain and emptiness inside of me that I can't NOT share it. I'd say this is the main piece I've found that is actually damaging to the people around me. And of course, when I realize I'm doing it, I roundly condemn myself, and that doesn't make me feel any better.
12. Resentment. Another piece that involves the projection and competition with others, I've noticed an increasing tendency in myself to channel anger that I can't express at it's actual targets towards targets that are not at all deserving. I'm finding I increasingly resent and am jealous of the friends that have the things I want - particularly a spouse and a family - even when, when I look at their life more closely, it's clear that there is no joy in it. In the cases where my friends have a good and actually happy life, it's jealousy: don't I deserve what they have? Haven't I done enough? Haven't I done as much or more than they have? In the cases where it's my friends who actually are kind of a wreck, the thought is: they have what I want and they're totally screwing it up. If I was given the chances they've been given, I wouldn't blow it like they have. It's not fair.
The hardest part to remember, for me, is how many pieces of this aren't true. Of COURSE people would notice if I disappeared! I'm actually - when I'm not depressed - well aware that I am a well-liked person with a lot of caring friends. But in so many ways depression isn't about reality. I've come to think it's about a projecting the way it feels inside (empty, desolate, lonely) onto a world that is, generally speaking, entirely indifferent, and occasionally genuinely caring - and only exceptionally rarely actively hostile. However, I feel undesirable and hopeless, and that gets converted inside to, "no one loves me, no one cares," despite ample evidence to the contrary. Evidence means very little to that darkness within, I've found. One of the questions I've wondered a lot this past week, and haven't found an answer for yet, is why AM I still fighting? Even in those very black moments - hours sometimes - when it felt like I just didn't care at all and didn't have a shred of hope to cut through the empty desolation inside, well, I'm still alive, SOMETHING in there still thinks there's something worth fighting for. I feel like if I could dig through all the sludge to uncover that something, I'd have a potent tool to shine through the darkness. Yet I haven't got a clue what it is. A lot of it, though, is embodied in a song I know by Goldfinger. I can't remember if I've quoted it before, but it seems apropos at this moment. The song is called "Disorder," and the second verse goes:
"I sit there at the bar, and wonder what I've done.
Should I just fuck it all, or should I go back home?
Cause if I take that drink, I might as well just die
And if I kill myself, I'll be giving up my try,
So I fall down."
I've said that to myself a lot the last three months: If I kill myself, I'll be giving up my try. This depression is the scariest, hardest thing I've ever faced, but I guess some small part of me DOES still believe that there will be something worthwhile on the other end...
It's very difficult not to hope. As I planned the road trip that I'm currently on, I debated back and forth about what I should do when I passed through Akron. Should I ask my ex if he wanted to get dinner? Even knowing that I still have very strong feelings for him, and even knowing that there was no reason to expect anything out of such a meeting? Knowing that the relationship was over? Despite myself, despite having no expectations, I know I went in to last Tuesday night with much more hope than was warranted. I had thought, leading up to the evening, that I should kill that hope, but whenever I tried to kill it I ended up feeling like doing so was equivalent to killing myself (mostly figuratively...) - if I can't hope about John, why should I bother hoping about other things, either? Most of the things I'm currently hoping for feel like such a long shot, that if I can't put my faith in one long shot, how can I put it in to any other? So I didn't quell the hope. I hadn't even seen John, though, before I realized what a monumentally bad idea dinner had actually been. I was having trouble not breaking down just walking up to the building where he works, and it didn't get any better throughout dinner. I held it together...barely...but I didn't at all behave as I had hoped. I just wanted to be the upbeat, cheerful, interesting girl that he was starting to fall for, but there was just no way. There is too much sadness in me now, too much struggle, to be that person, and so the depression kept peaking through. And despite myself, I did end up crying in his presence before the end of the night, and I was furious with myself about that, too. For a dinner that probably went almost as well as could legitimately have been expected (by which I mean: amicable conversation with an ex-boyfriend that is a continuing part of the process of attempting to salvage a friendship from the wreckage of a love).
Tuesday night was shattering to me.
Before that, I was starting to get my feet back under me. Before that, I was starting to wake up each morning with a little bit of pep and think, this won't be so bad. Before that, I was starting to think the worst was over and I was going to start recovering, and in that recovery I'd be able to take a more reasoned look at some of the many things I've thought about the last three months and figure out which have any merit and which were just Chushanrishathiam being a douche bag in my head.
After dinner...the hope just died, and once again, as when he first broke up with me, I felt like there was nothing left at all, that everything was pointless. I still had a two hour drive after leaving him, and I spent most of it sobbing, and the rest on the phone with a friend who I sufficiently impressed with the seriousness of the situation that she didn't want to let me off the phone because I was scaring her. I have enough fight in me not to succumb to those thoughts, fortunately, but it was not a good drive, and I've hardly felt better since. More fortunately, the friend who I would call to talk me off the ledge, who I was talking to that night, is also the friend who I was staying with starting Friday (And I actually ended up changing the original plan, and coming out to her place Thursday instead). I've been there since, though I leave today.
I don't have much good feeling right now. I'm just pleased that I went from entirely bleak this morning to feeling decidedly neutral right now - I think entirely because despite it all I've managed to chip away at my to-do list just a little, which had been building up the last week. I'm still behind, but I'll be spending the next few days with friends who work during the day, so it's getting more manageable. Anyway. That's a tangent. Since I don't have much good feeling the last few days, I thought I'd take this post to instead describe just what the worst feels like. I'll never forget, my freshman year of college, feeling low and not being able to figure out what the feeling was. Why do I feel this way? What is this emotion? I didn't remember ever feeling it before...I talked it over with a friend, and finally we put a name to it: I was lonely. When one has never felt an emotion before, it can be shockingly hard to put a name to it, to figure if that thing you're feeling is what other people are talking about when they mean sadness, anger, joy, euphoria, or whatnot. After this past week, and these past months, I'm starting to feel like an expert on depression, so here goes, the elements that compose my depression.
1. Hopelessness. This is the core of it, for me. The feeling that there is no point in even trying because no matter what I do, good things have not happened and will never happen. That never part is important, it projects the current feeling of hopelessness in to the future and makes it immutable and unchangeable.
2. Helplessness. Nothing I do can change anything. This starts at the local level: why am I still depressed? nothing I do can shake this feeling of depression. From that simple level, it grows out from there - nothing I do, nothing I try, no matter how hard I've worked, nothing I do makes any difference at all. I could disappear and no one would even notice.
3. Loneliness and Neglect and Isolation. All of these goes hand in hand. It's about feeling alone, but it's also about not wanting to be a burden. It's about feeling like no one cares, yet being unwilling to ask for help. I mean, three nights ago I cried myself to sleep when there was help fifteen feet away in another room, because I didn't want to put my friend out when it was already midnight and I knew she had her own issues going on. Yet on some level, I wanted her to find me, to discover me. I remember the day before John broke up with me, I couldn't sleep at all, so I went into the living room so I wouldn't bother him, and I ended up crying for most of an hour. I didn't want to be a burden or disturb anyone else, but secretly I was hoping that he'd come out and tell me that everything was going to be okay - but he had room mate who I DEFINITELY didn't want involved - and so I fought this ridiculous internal battle about just how much noise it would be okay for me to make while crying. I wanted to be quiet, obviously, but since part of me hoped for discovery, I also wanted to make some noise. The whole process was sick and ridiculous and left me feeling like a manipulative bitch. (In the end, I was undiscovered, and I decided to try to go back to sleep, but I couldn't, and he woke up, and I ended up owning that I'd been crying in the living room for an hour, and the whole situation fell apart quickly. I'm not really sure how I SHOULD have handled it, but I clearly handled it wrong...probably I should have just woken him up and been like, "I feel like shit. Can we talk about this?" ...but we'd already BEEN talk about it and there was nothing left to say and mostly I was crying because I was scared that things weren't seeming to get resolved...and as it turns out I guess I was right to be scared...)
4. Desolation. Just a feeling of absolute and complete emptiness. I look for something to say, something cheerful, something happy, some glimmer of thought, and find...absolutely nothing. Blank slate.
5. Lack of appetite. One of my only physical symptoms, my appetite goes poof. When I'm a somewhat less depressed point - pretty but not entirely depressed - I actually end up eating MORE because I lack the energy to tell myself no when I want the enormous dessert all to myself - but when I hit the depths, I just don't feel hungry at all anymore, and I have to make myself eat. I also get headaches (Especially when I've been crying...which is a lot...) and have trouble falling asleep. 6. Disinterest/Lack of Preference. What do I want to eat? I don't care. What show do I want to watch? It's all the same to me. It's not that I find I'm opposed to eating out, or watching TV, or what not, but in terms of having an actual opinion? I really couldn't care less. 7. Inability to Face Simple Tasks. Like getting out of bed. Or, in my case, most frequently, walking the dog. I HAVE to walk the dog, but I've often reached the point the past week that the idea of having to take her out has been so daunting that I was struggling to get up in the morning. 8. The Merry-Go-Round. This is my short hand for what I'm actually thinking in my own head. At the risk of triggering some pretty bad thoughts for the rest of the day while I'm actually currently feeling functional, I think it'd be easier to replicate some of this out-right than try to describe what I mean. The thought process goes something like this: I wish I understood why John broke up with me. Why did he abandon me? Why does everyone abandon me? It must be something about me. In the end, everyone leaves, everyone gives up. He gave up on me, even though I wasn't willing to give up on him. I guess he's no different than I am, because I'm just giving up on myself, now. What's the point? If I try again, it'll just end the same. People told me to be myself, and this is the closest to being myself that I've ever been in a relationship, and he ran screaming in the opposite direction. The next guy will just do the same. No one will want to stay when they see what I'm like. I'm just too crazy. I can't put up with myself, so why should anyone else put up with me? And now that I'm so depressed, it's even worse, like my only redeeming feature was being the girl with pep and spunk and energy and now I have none of those so why would anyone want me around at all? If being myself wasn't good enough, then what's the point? It's not like I can be someone else, but who I am sucks. He broke up with me because I'm a wreck, and everyone else will also think I'm a wreck. There's no point in even trying. Chushanrishathiam (reminder: my new name for my inner monologue when it's being all evil) goes on like this, and on and on, and worries at the same points for hours and days and weeks, and that's why I call it the Merry-Go-Round: even if I beat a particular piece of unpleasantness on one day, the feelings eventually cycle around and I have to try to beat them another day. When I try to argue back (I'm not pathetic! It's about his issues, not mine! This is just depression, I'll feel better eventually! I'm not crazy!) I don't really get anywhere, even when I marshal evidence (I know I'm not crazy, because crazy people aren't able to accomplish the things that I've accomplished without supports of kinds that I haven't needed)! All in all, for me, the MGR is at the crux of all of my problems, and the difference between good days and bad days tends to be my ability to shut the MGR down. Increasingly, though, I've found that the methods that were working to stop it have been less effective this past week.
9. Suicidal Thoughts. This is always a tough place to go, to admit to others that I've been experiencing. It feels SO manipulative to even say that I've been thinking about killing myself that I hate to even own it. Yet, it IS part and parcel of all of this, and it's not going to go away if I pretend I haven't been thinking it. I've found the worst combination has been when I've felt awful while driving, because it just feels like it'd be so easy, just jerk the steering wheel and I have nothing left to worry about. More than specific thoughts on attempting suicide, though, I've persistently thought in the past few months - when I've been having a bad day - that I just wish I'd go to sleep and not wake up the next morning. I've even managed to get in to the "I wish I'd never been born" stage of things - the kind of useless conjecture that is comforting because it's the only version that hurts no one else. I don't WANT to hurt those around me, I want them to be happy, and I know that plucking myself out of their lives would make them very unhappy, and that's the main thing that keeps me from taking an extreme action - but if I just died anyway, or even better if I'd never been born, that's less pain for them. The suicidal thoughts have been one of the scariest aspects of all of this for me, because while I'd suffered from depression before, I'd never so consistently found myself wondering why I'm still alive, what the point is, and - on the worst days - staring at my wrists and wondering what the knife would feel like cutting in. I've had more than one day like that in the last week, and as soon as my head is a little clearer I'm horrified by it. Heck, even when I'm experiencing it, I'm horrified by it, but that horror doesn't stop me thinking about it.
10. Fear. I know there have been times in the past when I didn't feel this way, but now it seems like I have no idea when I'll feel this way or for how long. What happens if this is what the rest of life is like? This tends to tie in to the previous, because if I AM going to feel this way for the rest of life, than what's the point? Obviously none of the things I want and hope for will be accomplishable while I feel awful.
11. Inflicting pain because of the inside pain. While there is an element of actual physical masochism in this, for me what I actually more mean is a tendency to, when talking to my support network, say things that I know will make them sad, or worried, or frightened for me, because there's just so much pain and emptiness inside of me that I can't NOT share it. I'd say this is the main piece I've found that is actually damaging to the people around me. And of course, when I realize I'm doing it, I roundly condemn myself, and that doesn't make me feel any better.
12. Resentment. Another piece that involves the projection and competition with others, I've noticed an increasing tendency in myself to channel anger that I can't express at it's actual targets towards targets that are not at all deserving. I'm finding I increasingly resent and am jealous of the friends that have the things I want - particularly a spouse and a family - even when, when I look at their life more closely, it's clear that there is no joy in it. In the cases where my friends have a good and actually happy life, it's jealousy: don't I deserve what they have? Haven't I done enough? Haven't I done as much or more than they have? In the cases where it's my friends who actually are kind of a wreck, the thought is: they have what I want and they're totally screwing it up. If I was given the chances they've been given, I wouldn't blow it like they have. It's not fair.
The hardest part to remember, for me, is how many pieces of this aren't true. Of COURSE people would notice if I disappeared! I'm actually - when I'm not depressed - well aware that I am a well-liked person with a lot of caring friends. But in so many ways depression isn't about reality. I've come to think it's about a projecting the way it feels inside (empty, desolate, lonely) onto a world that is, generally speaking, entirely indifferent, and occasionally genuinely caring - and only exceptionally rarely actively hostile. However, I feel undesirable and hopeless, and that gets converted inside to, "no one loves me, no one cares," despite ample evidence to the contrary. Evidence means very little to that darkness within, I've found. One of the questions I've wondered a lot this past week, and haven't found an answer for yet, is why AM I still fighting? Even in those very black moments - hours sometimes - when it felt like I just didn't care at all and didn't have a shred of hope to cut through the empty desolation inside, well, I'm still alive, SOMETHING in there still thinks there's something worth fighting for. I feel like if I could dig through all the sludge to uncover that something, I'd have a potent tool to shine through the darkness. Yet I haven't got a clue what it is. A lot of it, though, is embodied in a song I know by Goldfinger. I can't remember if I've quoted it before, but it seems apropos at this moment. The song is called "Disorder," and the second verse goes:
"I sit there at the bar, and wonder what I've done.
Should I just fuck it all, or should I go back home?
Cause if I take that drink, I might as well just die
And if I kill myself, I'll be giving up my try,
So I fall down."
I've said that to myself a lot the last three months: If I kill myself, I'll be giving up my try. This depression is the scariest, hardest thing I've ever faced, but I guess some small part of me DOES still believe that there will be something worthwhile on the other end...
Monday, March 19, 2012
What's in a Name?
When I was a kid, I had two nearly all-consuming phobias. One was of the dark. I couldn't STAND that dark. It freaked me the hell out. I remember once, when I was very young (four or five years old?) we were visiting my grandfather's house. I'm from NYC, where it's NEVER all that dark, but he lived outside of a small town in New Hampshire - VERY dark. I was sleeping in the basement with my brother and my mom in nearby beds, and I was absolutely petrified with fear, but I was afraid to tell anyone. I was convinced that in the inky darkness, through which I couldn't see, there was a panther that had opened up the storm doors nearby and was stalking me. Only by telling myself that the panther couldn't see me unless I opened my eyes did I force myself to lie down, close my eyes, and try to sleep. But sleep was a long time coming. Nightlights became mandatory, or at home, the hall light had to be on (outside the room I shared with my mom). My second phobia was both scarier and worse, and it started at about the same time - though it persisted even as I started getting over the darkness phobia. I was afraid of death. I used to have nightmares in which the skeletons of my parents would dance around me and there was nothing I could do. As I got older, the dreams got more common, and I started to be afraid to go to sleep, and over time it developed in to fairly bad insomnia. It came and went, of course, but when it was bad it was REALLY bad. My mother used to let me stay up late and stuff me full of Sleepy Time tea to calm me down, and that often helped, but when I'd spend summers at my grandfather it was more problematic. Finally, when I was 10 or so (it was either the summer after 5th, 6th or 7th grade...I think 6th...) it started to get unmanageable. I was so afraid to go asleep that I would just sit on the bed in the dark (with a nightlight, and no longer in the basement!) and rock back and forth and cry. Poppop was, of course, worried about me. One night I woke up in the middle of the night after a nightmare, and had a full-blown panic attack. Poppop came in, and calmed me down, and promised me that the next day, we would go in to town and we would find me a guardian.
We ended up at a mall with quirky local shops. We didn't have much luck at first, but finally, tucked away on the second floor in a place that I remember mostly having furniture, we suddenly found it: a wolf, about two feet tall, his mouth open to howl. I knew he was the one, but he was $65 and I felt REALLY guilty asking for him. But Poppop didn't even hesitate, and the wolf went home with us. When we got back to his place, he went digging out the bookshelves and pulled out a book for me: bible names and their meanings. "Why don't you find a good name for your wolf?" Poppop suggested to me. So I diligently sat down on his bed with the book and paged through. I ended up with three or four names, but I only remember the one I ended up picking: Hezekiah. The book said it meant "fortress." That was what I needed, I thought: something that would protect me, and give me strength, and keep the bad things out while I was sleeping inside. It was decided, and he was promptly nicknamed Hez. Yet I was nervous: would this work? I wasn't a little kid any more - I knew that there was no Santa Claus, and I knew all my swear words and what they meant, and I knew that dolls were just dolls, they didn't DO anything. As night came, I got more and more scared. It wasn't going to work! It was just a doll! All the things that scared me would still be waiting when I closed my eyes.
I got in to bed, and Poppop put Hez in my arms, and turned off the light. The scary things started immediately, but I closed my eyes, and held Hez close, and thought, "Hez will protect me." I thought it over and over again, concentrated on that thought...and everything else fell away. The only thing in there was, "Hez will protect me." And that night, I slept.
I slept with my fortress every night until my senior year of high school. At that point, I decided that college kids don't sleep with dolls, so I weaned myself into sleeping with a pillow instead - but Hez was never far. I brought him to school with me, and in my junior year of college when things started getting rough with my boyfriend in ways that I didn't really understand, I started sleeping with Hez again, and continued until I was in graduate school and I'd broken up with said boyfriend. The only reason I stopped was that when my dog was a puppy I used to close her in my room. Puppy on the floor, Hez on the bed. I got home from work to find that Jonie had ripped Hez' sad, worn leather nose to shreds - her first act of destruction after she started teething. I was VERY upset but there was nothing to be done, and I carefully put Hez in a place she couldn't reach him and went back to sleeping with a pillow. I STILL sleep with a pillow. And I still need to fix Hez' nose.
Not the best pic, but the only one I have - Hez is up in the upper left hand corner.
So, why talk about all this now?
I need a new name. There is this person in my head - I know it's me, yet at the same time, it's NOT me - a voice who produces so many mean things that I sometimes can hardly even face my own criticism. When I describe this to other people, such as in posts in this blog, I keep saying things like, "my brain then said..." or "my inner demon." But none of that feels right. My therapist calls this voice "the brother in my head," after the unavoidable conclusion that the voice reflects an internalization of the things that my brother used to say to me when we were kids. He was very verbally abusive, and used to call me stupid and pathetic. But I can't call it my brother - for better or for worse, he and I are adults now and we actually do have a relationship, and not a bad one all things considered, and it gets better every year and I want to continue that. Heck, I'm staying at his house starting tomorrow night, and when I touched base with him by text earlier, he mentioned potentially going out and visiting William T. Sherman's house with me - he knows that Sherman is my personal hero - which is to say, he does care about me, and cares about what I'm interested in only because I'm interested in it, and I care about him, and it's not been easy but we've REALLY worked at it, and so I don't want to make that voice be him if it means villainizing him after all we've tried to overcome.
What I realized a few days ago was...that voice needs a name!
I don't have my grandfather any longer - he died last August - and I don't have a book of bible names, but I do have the internet. So I've wondered over to unusual biblical names. Hmm...Abishag, it means "father of error" or "blundering" - that seems appropriately derogatory for an internal monologue that's always putting me down. Achaia, Achaicus, Achan, Achor, Jachan, all mean "trouble" or something similar. This one I like a lot: Achzib, which means "deceit." Akkub - insidious. Amasa, Massa - burden. Buzi - contempt. Chozeba - falsehood. Chushanrishathaim - twice-wicked Cushan (which means "darkness"). Eshek - oppressor. Hagab - locust. Hareph - reproachful. Ikkesh - twisted. Ishbosheth - man of shame. Kelaiah - insignificant. Maachah - oppression. Maalehacrabbim - hill of scorpions. Mahli, Mahlon - sick. Merari - sad or bitter. Phaseah - lame. Shephuphan, Shupham, Shuppim - serpent. Ulam - solitary.
Hmm...well, I think I need to sleep on this, but from the moment I read it, I've been leaning heavily towards Chushanrishathaim. I could call it Cushan for short. Darkness seems very appropriate for me, given my childhood phobias (which still, on rare occasions, give me trouble). Chushanrishathaim.
On a much lighter note, I also found Zemaraim. It means "double fleece of wool." I loled.
We ended up at a mall with quirky local shops. We didn't have much luck at first, but finally, tucked away on the second floor in a place that I remember mostly having furniture, we suddenly found it: a wolf, about two feet tall, his mouth open to howl. I knew he was the one, but he was $65 and I felt REALLY guilty asking for him. But Poppop didn't even hesitate, and the wolf went home with us. When we got back to his place, he went digging out the bookshelves and pulled out a book for me: bible names and their meanings. "Why don't you find a good name for your wolf?" Poppop suggested to me. So I diligently sat down on his bed with the book and paged through. I ended up with three or four names, but I only remember the one I ended up picking: Hezekiah. The book said it meant "fortress." That was what I needed, I thought: something that would protect me, and give me strength, and keep the bad things out while I was sleeping inside. It was decided, and he was promptly nicknamed Hez. Yet I was nervous: would this work? I wasn't a little kid any more - I knew that there was no Santa Claus, and I knew all my swear words and what they meant, and I knew that dolls were just dolls, they didn't DO anything. As night came, I got more and more scared. It wasn't going to work! It was just a doll! All the things that scared me would still be waiting when I closed my eyes.
I got in to bed, and Poppop put Hez in my arms, and turned off the light. The scary things started immediately, but I closed my eyes, and held Hez close, and thought, "Hez will protect me." I thought it over and over again, concentrated on that thought...and everything else fell away. The only thing in there was, "Hez will protect me." And that night, I slept.
I slept with my fortress every night until my senior year of high school. At that point, I decided that college kids don't sleep with dolls, so I weaned myself into sleeping with a pillow instead - but Hez was never far. I brought him to school with me, and in my junior year of college when things started getting rough with my boyfriend in ways that I didn't really understand, I started sleeping with Hez again, and continued until I was in graduate school and I'd broken up with said boyfriend. The only reason I stopped was that when my dog was a puppy I used to close her in my room. Puppy on the floor, Hez on the bed. I got home from work to find that Jonie had ripped Hez' sad, worn leather nose to shreds - her first act of destruction after she started teething. I was VERY upset but there was nothing to be done, and I carefully put Hez in a place she couldn't reach him and went back to sleeping with a pillow. I STILL sleep with a pillow. And I still need to fix Hez' nose.
Not the best pic, but the only one I have - Hez is up in the upper left hand corner.
So, why talk about all this now?
I need a new name. There is this person in my head - I know it's me, yet at the same time, it's NOT me - a voice who produces so many mean things that I sometimes can hardly even face my own criticism. When I describe this to other people, such as in posts in this blog, I keep saying things like, "my brain then said..." or "my inner demon." But none of that feels right. My therapist calls this voice "the brother in my head," after the unavoidable conclusion that the voice reflects an internalization of the things that my brother used to say to me when we were kids. He was very verbally abusive, and used to call me stupid and pathetic. But I can't call it my brother - for better or for worse, he and I are adults now and we actually do have a relationship, and not a bad one all things considered, and it gets better every year and I want to continue that. Heck, I'm staying at his house starting tomorrow night, and when I touched base with him by text earlier, he mentioned potentially going out and visiting William T. Sherman's house with me - he knows that Sherman is my personal hero - which is to say, he does care about me, and cares about what I'm interested in only because I'm interested in it, and I care about him, and it's not been easy but we've REALLY worked at it, and so I don't want to make that voice be him if it means villainizing him after all we've tried to overcome.
What I realized a few days ago was...that voice needs a name!
I don't have my grandfather any longer - he died last August - and I don't have a book of bible names, but I do have the internet. So I've wondered over to unusual biblical names. Hmm...Abishag, it means "father of error" or "blundering" - that seems appropriately derogatory for an internal monologue that's always putting me down. Achaia, Achaicus, Achan, Achor, Jachan, all mean "trouble" or something similar. This one I like a lot: Achzib, which means "deceit." Akkub - insidious. Amasa, Massa - burden. Buzi - contempt. Chozeba - falsehood. Chushanrishathaim - twice-wicked Cushan (which means "darkness"). Eshek - oppressor. Hagab - locust. Hareph - reproachful. Ikkesh - twisted. Ishbosheth - man of shame. Kelaiah - insignificant. Maachah - oppression. Maalehacrabbim - hill of scorpions. Mahli, Mahlon - sick. Merari - sad or bitter. Phaseah - lame. Shephuphan, Shupham, Shuppim - serpent. Ulam - solitary.
Hmm...well, I think I need to sleep on this, but from the moment I read it, I've been leaning heavily towards Chushanrishathaim. I could call it Cushan for short. Darkness seems very appropriate for me, given my childhood phobias (which still, on rare occasions, give me trouble). Chushanrishathaim.
On a much lighter note, I also found Zemaraim. It means "double fleece of wool." I loled.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Endings and Beginnings
Since Friday...I've felt okay. In fact, I've felt pretty much like myself. It's been really good. Each night when I got to bed, I worry that it won't last, but so far, well, it's Tuesday, and I've made it. Anyway, I don't have much time right now - I'm heading out the door, about to start a four week road trip! For the trip, I'll be making fourteen stops (!!) where I'll be seeing family, lots of old friends, and finally meeting some new friends, getting dinner with my ex and possibly seeing both my other exes. I've been nervous about it, I'll admit - lots of time alone in the car, also worrisome - but in the end, I think it'll be exciting. Sussex, NJ; Binghamton, NY; a stop for a meal in Syracuse, NY; Rochester, NY; University Park, PA; a stop for a meal in Akron, OH; Columbus, OH; Indianapolis, IN; Chicago, IL; Bloomington, IN; Louisville, KY; a stop for a meal in Nashville, TN; Savannah, TN; probably a random excursion down to Corinth, MI (I've never been to Mississippi before! Is that the right state abbreviation?); Lynchburg, VA; drive down to Chapel Hill, NC; drive up to Charlottesville, VA; a stop for a meal in Silver Springs, MD; and finally back home! Four weeks, total, and it'll be exciting.
The past week, I've done a lot of prep for this trip. The first step was to clean. I never want to come home to a messy apartment, so I put a bunch of time in to just straightening and cleaning and putting away. I'd already stashed most of the things related to my break up that made me sad to look at, but there's one thing I'd left out. Last January (2011), my dad came down to visit and found me down. He told me about a strategy he uses from time to time. When things get too rough, write down whatever you can't let go on a slip of paper. Put that slip of paper in a jar, or a bowl, or what not. When there are a lot of slips of paper, burn them all, without reading them. In the early days of this January, I'd filled out a LOT of slips of paper, and I'd been holding off on burning them until I was sure I wasn't that likely to add more. Finally, as part of cleaning, I took the jar (I keep mine in an old used up Yankee Candle jar, I can be positive it's fire proof...) and burned them.
I read one or two of them first, somewhat inadvertantly, since the text was facing up. In truth, I'm glad I did. There was one phrase written there that had been on my mind a lot the last few weeks. See, John (the ex over whom so much of this was triggered) had said to me on the phone in mid-February that he felt like he ruined everything. I'd really latched on to that phrase, and started to feel like I'd co-opted it from him when I started thinking it myself. But there, in my jar - which I hadn't added to since the second weekend of January - was written on a slip of paper, "I ruin everything." It wasn't from him, I'd had it all along. Seeing that, and then watching it burn, felt really good.
So that was my ending. I burned the last of the bad, on Sunday, and I think it's a piece of why I feel a lot better this week (which started Friday night, so it's not just that - it's really a combination of things which have happened, starting with a rock-bottom moment on Friday morning). I'd like to write about all of that, but I really don't have time just now...oh, screw it. Quick overview. On Friday morning, I was feeling very low. This culminated around 9 AM when I walked the dog, and I got in the elevator, and another woman was in there, and she gave me the hairy eyeball for getting in with my dog, who was acting a bit rambunctious. I hate when people do that to me, and so when I left I said, "you don't have to roll your eyes at me, she's not going to hurt you." It felt good to fight back, but it always feels lousy when folks are mean to my pooch, she's not well trained but she's perfectly sweet. The training is my part. Anyway, I got back to my apartment, and promptly started to cry. I'm assuming hormones, though not PMS, apparently. Still, it was shocking. That's just not normal. I pushed through, went about my day, and decided to go to a lecture that afternoon. While at the lecture, a strange but cute guy sat next to me and started a conversation. And...it was nice. We just talked. Then, after the lecture, we just talked more. We ended up walking back to the train together, at which point we shook hands and said goodbye. I'm sure I'll never see him again, yet it was just a great experience. It made me feel wanted and interesting, and feeling curious and mystified and intrigued and engaged by another person - and, really, by a cute guy - also felt good. I got home feeling much better. Then, on Saturday morning, out of the blue my ex called. I still really care about him and miss him and am coping with the sadness of the break up, and I'll admit it never occurred to me that he would just call me because he felt like talking about life. It was really nice, and we had a really pleasant conversation about nothing important. For an hour. And he said he would be happy to meet me for dinner when I drive through his area. Then...just, the weekend went okay. So add it all up, and I feel good about life. What a change from last Monday! And now really I have to stop.
For my new beginning...in all of this, one of the things that kept cropping up in my head was how alone I felt, how isolated, how I feel like no one cares. This is obviously nonsense, but surprisingly hard to refute. Yet, I'm about to go on a road trip where I will see literally dozens of people who care about me. Like, I'd have to count, but I'd guess around 30 or 40. Maybe even more. So, I'm going to ask all of these people if I can take their photographs, and I'm going to make myself an album of all of the people who care about me, and next time I start feeling like no one cares, I'll just pull that down. I won't get everyone in there - my mother, my friends in NYC, my friends and family who live in more distant places like Texas and California, I won't be seeing any of them, but I can add their pictures when I DO see them. I'm really looking forward to this project. It's sort of like a scrap book...but with out all the collage. ;)
The past week, I've done a lot of prep for this trip. The first step was to clean. I never want to come home to a messy apartment, so I put a bunch of time in to just straightening and cleaning and putting away. I'd already stashed most of the things related to my break up that made me sad to look at, but there's one thing I'd left out. Last January (2011), my dad came down to visit and found me down. He told me about a strategy he uses from time to time. When things get too rough, write down whatever you can't let go on a slip of paper. Put that slip of paper in a jar, or a bowl, or what not. When there are a lot of slips of paper, burn them all, without reading them. In the early days of this January, I'd filled out a LOT of slips of paper, and I'd been holding off on burning them until I was sure I wasn't that likely to add more. Finally, as part of cleaning, I took the jar (I keep mine in an old used up Yankee Candle jar, I can be positive it's fire proof...) and burned them.
I read one or two of them first, somewhat inadvertantly, since the text was facing up. In truth, I'm glad I did. There was one phrase written there that had been on my mind a lot the last few weeks. See, John (the ex over whom so much of this was triggered) had said to me on the phone in mid-February that he felt like he ruined everything. I'd really latched on to that phrase, and started to feel like I'd co-opted it from him when I started thinking it myself. But there, in my jar - which I hadn't added to since the second weekend of January - was written on a slip of paper, "I ruin everything." It wasn't from him, I'd had it all along. Seeing that, and then watching it burn, felt really good.
So that was my ending. I burned the last of the bad, on Sunday, and I think it's a piece of why I feel a lot better this week (which started Friday night, so it's not just that - it's really a combination of things which have happened, starting with a rock-bottom moment on Friday morning). I'd like to write about all of that, but I really don't have time just now...oh, screw it. Quick overview. On Friday morning, I was feeling very low. This culminated around 9 AM when I walked the dog, and I got in the elevator, and another woman was in there, and she gave me the hairy eyeball for getting in with my dog, who was acting a bit rambunctious. I hate when people do that to me, and so when I left I said, "you don't have to roll your eyes at me, she's not going to hurt you." It felt good to fight back, but it always feels lousy when folks are mean to my pooch, she's not well trained but she's perfectly sweet. The training is my part. Anyway, I got back to my apartment, and promptly started to cry. I'm assuming hormones, though not PMS, apparently. Still, it was shocking. That's just not normal. I pushed through, went about my day, and decided to go to a lecture that afternoon. While at the lecture, a strange but cute guy sat next to me and started a conversation. And...it was nice. We just talked. Then, after the lecture, we just talked more. We ended up walking back to the train together, at which point we shook hands and said goodbye. I'm sure I'll never see him again, yet it was just a great experience. It made me feel wanted and interesting, and feeling curious and mystified and intrigued and engaged by another person - and, really, by a cute guy - also felt good. I got home feeling much better. Then, on Saturday morning, out of the blue my ex called. I still really care about him and miss him and am coping with the sadness of the break up, and I'll admit it never occurred to me that he would just call me because he felt like talking about life. It was really nice, and we had a really pleasant conversation about nothing important. For an hour. And he said he would be happy to meet me for dinner when I drive through his area. Then...just, the weekend went okay. So add it all up, and I feel good about life. What a change from last Monday! And now really I have to stop.
For my new beginning...in all of this, one of the things that kept cropping up in my head was how alone I felt, how isolated, how I feel like no one cares. This is obviously nonsense, but surprisingly hard to refute. Yet, I'm about to go on a road trip where I will see literally dozens of people who care about me. Like, I'd have to count, but I'd guess around 30 or 40. Maybe even more. So, I'm going to ask all of these people if I can take their photographs, and I'm going to make myself an album of all of the people who care about me, and next time I start feeling like no one cares, I'll just pull that down. I won't get everyone in there - my mother, my friends in NYC, my friends and family who live in more distant places like Texas and California, I won't be seeing any of them, but I can add their pictures when I DO see them. I'm really looking forward to this project. It's sort of like a scrap book...but with out all the collage. ;)
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Deserved and Undeserved
Over the weekend, my friend A. shared on Facebook that her boyfriend, B., had proposed to her. I was happy for them, of course, but I was also shocked by how jealous it made me feel. How unreasonable of me, I thought! Surely, if any two people I know deserve to be happy, it's A. and B. (not their actual initials, in case that's not obvious). A. had been in a relationship with a guy for a seven years, during which he had systematically told her that everything that was "her," all her perkiness, enthusiasm, and energy, was immature, stupid, and inappropriate. She had finally broken up with him, and all of us had breathed a sigh of relief. "Finally, A. is free of him!" Then there's B. He had gotten married to a woman who, well, is a total bitch, no two ways about it, and all of us had wondered why he had stayed with her. They'd finally gotten divorced, and we'd all thought, "finally, B. is free of her!" At another friend's wedding last summer, A. took me aside and told me, very excitedly, that she and B. were going out. They didn't want everyone to know yet cause the break-ups were still recent, but they knew I didn't live locally, and the only one of the bunch I knew more than a little was A. - I didn't get along with either of the exes well, and when I'd lived locally, it had been impossible to get to know B. without spending time with the bitch he was attached to at the hip. Telling me was pretty safe. Yet I felt a little jealous then, too. It was a terrible feeling. Why couldn't I just be happy for my friends finally finding happiness together? Surely they, of all people, deserved to finally find joy.
I've never thought of myself as a jealous person before, so I've been trying to figure out why I feel jealous. What is it about this situation that makes me feel so envious? And then it struck me. It's not that I don't think my friends deserve to be happy. Quite the contrary. I think they DO deserve it. But it leads immediately to my thinking, what about what I deserve? What about my happy ending? Haven't I got just as much right to have something good happen to me, to have the things I want happen?
This concept, of what I "deserve," is one that I've really been struggling with the last few weeks. On the one hand, no one "deserves" anything. I don't really believe in a karmic scale or a cosmic balance. As awful as it is to acknowledge, it is possible for bad thing after bad thing to happen to a person who has never done anything wrong, and it's just as possible for good things to pile on to someone who never did a thing to earn those good things. Life isn't fair. Yet even though I know, objectively, that that's the case, that doesn't really help. I want to think that, in the long run, if I do the right thing, work hard, am honest, am a good friend, that good things will come to me, because I've worked for them and I've earned them.
On the other hand, I think in general I know when I've really done my best, and when I've done my best, I would like to think that would be recognized and rewarded. I'll get a bonus at my job. I'll get praise for my completing the assignment. I'll develop a strong bond with a friend. In many cases, this has happened in my past. Yet, right now, this narrative is falling apart, and it's causing me a lot of problems.
What do I deserve? I find I don't want much in life. I don't care about money one way or the other - it's nice when I've got some, but I've managed when I don't. I don't care about my house - it was awesome when I lived in a four bedroom house, but I was just as content when I lived in an 180 square foot apartment with a shared bathroom. I don't care where I live - I prefer cities and decent sized towns, but I've spent months living in rural areas and it's got it's charms too. What do I care about? I do care about my job - all I want is a position doing something that I care about. I care about being alone - I'm lonely, and I want someone else (read: a significant other) in my life, someone who cares about me and who I care about. I keep coming back to a sticking point: don't I deserve those things?
This dialog has been going round and round in my head, and yet it keeps coming back in the same loops. The job one, I'm dealing with. It's under my control, and I'm changing it at the snails pace that I can. I just wish I'd figured out just how unhappy I was with the way things are right now, so I could have done something about it sooner. It's the relationship one that's really causing me problems. I've been single 5 out of the last 6 years. I haven't gotten in to relationships with people I wasn't genuinely interested in. I've treated my relationships seriously, and done my best to be myself, and be there for the other person. Everyone keeps telling me, "do the things you love, and you'll meet someone." I've done the things I love endlessly, so much so that I'm not even sure I love them any more, I've gone out, I've gone to museums and festivals and concerts and events. I've traveled all over the world, and throughout the US, going to conventions and celebrations and even a cruise. I've put myself out there. And I've hardly met a soul. I've made only a handful of friends this way, and only met one of three boyfriends by doing those things I loved.
So, the inner monologue goes like this:
Me: "I deserve to be happy! I deserve to have good things happen to me?"
Inner Demon: "Do I really? Then why haven't they happened?"
Me: "Maybe I haven't tried hard enough." This one leads on a dangerous path - it makes me think that I should be doing more, but the reality is I HAVE done a lot, I've worked really hard. I can refute that this is the reason, so I move on to another. "Maybe it's just not time yet." This one is also tough. I feel like I've waited long enough, like I've "done my time" as a single woman. "Maybe I just haven't met the right person yet." True, presumably, and totally useless as a response, because it just leads to the question, "why haven't I met the right person yet?" which has no answer. "Maybe life just isn't fair." Well, I knew that all along, but again, it's a useless answer. I'm not likely to just give up, and so the only way to confront life being unfair is to keep trying. And that invariable leads to the last maybe, and the one I haven't figured out how to deal with yet. "Maybe it's me." This is the hardest, the most insidious, and the one I have the least counter argument to. It's a very simple trap: Occam's razor, and nearly irrefutable. The easiest explanation, requiring the least cavaets, is probably the correct one. Either all of maledom (and the couple members of femaledom I've been interested in) doesn't realize how great I am. That seems unlikely. Alternative, I'm not that great. A very difficult thing to accept, and one that I'm not actually sure is true. I'm not gonna claim I'm the greatest catch in the ocean, and in my head I can list the things I think are my strengths - a useful exercise, but not the purview of this post - yet it always ends up coming back to, "if all those things are true, then why I haven't I found anyone yet?" Another question with no answer. I think, of all the things I've been dealing with the last couple months, this one might well be the one that leaves me feeling lowest.
See, if it's me, then I'm in a bind. It means that whatever I do is part of the problem. It means that where-ever I go I won't escape the problem, because it's in me. It leaves me feeling like there's no point in trying, like there's no way I can "win." I end up asking, "don't I deserve to be happy?" and, since I can't seem to escape the conclusion that I'm the problem, the only answer I can produce is, "no, I don't deserve to be happy, because I'm too damaged/silly/lazy/etc." - the reason changes, but the message remains the same. In the end, it feels like a circular message: "If I deserved to be happy, I would have found happiness already. Since I am not happy, that must mean I don't deserve to be happy."
I have no answers for how to deal with this. I haven't got the least clue. I know that I can't seem to escape from it, though, and that it generates hopelessness like nothing else I've ever found. It generates jealousy of my friends, even though I want them to be happy. It generates self-loathing and self-defeatest attitudes, because it feels unchangeable and unanswerable. It leaves me wondering where such destructive inner monologues even come from. How do we get like this? Why do we do these things to ourselves?
I wish I had something heartening to say this week, but I really don't. I'm actually not as low as I was last week, but I just feel so weighted down by depression over all that I can't seem to push through the trees enough to see the forest. Maybe next week, I'll have figured out some answers. For now, I'll keep pushing on, and remembering and using the strategies I came up with last week for dealing with bad days. ;)
I've never thought of myself as a jealous person before, so I've been trying to figure out why I feel jealous. What is it about this situation that makes me feel so envious? And then it struck me. It's not that I don't think my friends deserve to be happy. Quite the contrary. I think they DO deserve it. But it leads immediately to my thinking, what about what I deserve? What about my happy ending? Haven't I got just as much right to have something good happen to me, to have the things I want happen?
This concept, of what I "deserve," is one that I've really been struggling with the last few weeks. On the one hand, no one "deserves" anything. I don't really believe in a karmic scale or a cosmic balance. As awful as it is to acknowledge, it is possible for bad thing after bad thing to happen to a person who has never done anything wrong, and it's just as possible for good things to pile on to someone who never did a thing to earn those good things. Life isn't fair. Yet even though I know, objectively, that that's the case, that doesn't really help. I want to think that, in the long run, if I do the right thing, work hard, am honest, am a good friend, that good things will come to me, because I've worked for them and I've earned them.
On the other hand, I think in general I know when I've really done my best, and when I've done my best, I would like to think that would be recognized and rewarded. I'll get a bonus at my job. I'll get praise for my completing the assignment. I'll develop a strong bond with a friend. In many cases, this has happened in my past. Yet, right now, this narrative is falling apart, and it's causing me a lot of problems.
What do I deserve? I find I don't want much in life. I don't care about money one way or the other - it's nice when I've got some, but I've managed when I don't. I don't care about my house - it was awesome when I lived in a four bedroom house, but I was just as content when I lived in an 180 square foot apartment with a shared bathroom. I don't care where I live - I prefer cities and decent sized towns, but I've spent months living in rural areas and it's got it's charms too. What do I care about? I do care about my job - all I want is a position doing something that I care about. I care about being alone - I'm lonely, and I want someone else (read: a significant other) in my life, someone who cares about me and who I care about. I keep coming back to a sticking point: don't I deserve those things?
This dialog has been going round and round in my head, and yet it keeps coming back in the same loops. The job one, I'm dealing with. It's under my control, and I'm changing it at the snails pace that I can. I just wish I'd figured out just how unhappy I was with the way things are right now, so I could have done something about it sooner. It's the relationship one that's really causing me problems. I've been single 5 out of the last 6 years. I haven't gotten in to relationships with people I wasn't genuinely interested in. I've treated my relationships seriously, and done my best to be myself, and be there for the other person. Everyone keeps telling me, "do the things you love, and you'll meet someone." I've done the things I love endlessly, so much so that I'm not even sure I love them any more, I've gone out, I've gone to museums and festivals and concerts and events. I've traveled all over the world, and throughout the US, going to conventions and celebrations and even a cruise. I've put myself out there. And I've hardly met a soul. I've made only a handful of friends this way, and only met one of three boyfriends by doing those things I loved.
So, the inner monologue goes like this:
Me: "I deserve to be happy! I deserve to have good things happen to me?"
Inner Demon: "Do I really? Then why haven't they happened?"
Me: "Maybe I haven't tried hard enough." This one leads on a dangerous path - it makes me think that I should be doing more, but the reality is I HAVE done a lot, I've worked really hard. I can refute that this is the reason, so I move on to another. "Maybe it's just not time yet." This one is also tough. I feel like I've waited long enough, like I've "done my time" as a single woman. "Maybe I just haven't met the right person yet." True, presumably, and totally useless as a response, because it just leads to the question, "why haven't I met the right person yet?" which has no answer. "Maybe life just isn't fair." Well, I knew that all along, but again, it's a useless answer. I'm not likely to just give up, and so the only way to confront life being unfair is to keep trying. And that invariable leads to the last maybe, and the one I haven't figured out how to deal with yet. "Maybe it's me." This is the hardest, the most insidious, and the one I have the least counter argument to. It's a very simple trap: Occam's razor, and nearly irrefutable. The easiest explanation, requiring the least cavaets, is probably the correct one. Either all of maledom (and the couple members of femaledom I've been interested in) doesn't realize how great I am. That seems unlikely. Alternative, I'm not that great. A very difficult thing to accept, and one that I'm not actually sure is true. I'm not gonna claim I'm the greatest catch in the ocean, and in my head I can list the things I think are my strengths - a useful exercise, but not the purview of this post - yet it always ends up coming back to, "if all those things are true, then why I haven't I found anyone yet?" Another question with no answer. I think, of all the things I've been dealing with the last couple months, this one might well be the one that leaves me feeling lowest.
See, if it's me, then I'm in a bind. It means that whatever I do is part of the problem. It means that where-ever I go I won't escape the problem, because it's in me. It leaves me feeling like there's no point in trying, like there's no way I can "win." I end up asking, "don't I deserve to be happy?" and, since I can't seem to escape the conclusion that I'm the problem, the only answer I can produce is, "no, I don't deserve to be happy, because I'm too damaged/silly/lazy/etc." - the reason changes, but the message remains the same. In the end, it feels like a circular message: "If I deserved to be happy, I would have found happiness already. Since I am not happy, that must mean I don't deserve to be happy."
I have no answers for how to deal with this. I haven't got the least clue. I know that I can't seem to escape from it, though, and that it generates hopelessness like nothing else I've ever found. It generates jealousy of my friends, even though I want them to be happy. It generates self-loathing and self-defeatest attitudes, because it feels unchangeable and unanswerable. It leaves me wondering where such destructive inner monologues even come from. How do we get like this? Why do we do these things to ourselves?
I wish I had something heartening to say this week, but I really don't. I'm actually not as low as I was last week, but I just feel so weighted down by depression over all that I can't seem to push through the trees enough to see the forest. Maybe next week, I'll have figured out some answers. For now, I'll keep pushing on, and remembering and using the strategies I came up with last week for dealing with bad days. ;)
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Dealing with the Bad Days
Once again, events have led me to a different blog post topic than I'd been planning on. I'd intended to focus on affirmations, which I've been trying to use, and which many others have told me have worked for them. This was to have gone live yesterday. But when I woke up yesterday morning, I felt so low that I knew that affirmations were the last thing on my mind. There are good days and there are bad days during a recovery. Yesterday was a very bad day, which is why this blog post is a day late. There's nothing like trying to describe how to be upbeat and recover while feeling oneself like recovery is impossible and unattainable. Days like that are bound to happen, and they raise a lot of hard questions:
Is anything I'm doing working?
Am I always going to feel this way?
On days like that, there's a line from a song that I always think of: "How will I get through tomorrow if I can't make it through today?" To me, that line is epitome of what stark depression really feels like. It embodies the sense that even if I somehow get through the apparently endless hours of one day, I'll be confronted by all the same realities the next day. But of course in practice, it's not like that. Some days are better, and some days are worse. As time goes on, the good days get more and more frequent, and the bad days less and less, but that still means they are going to happen. When they do, they'll stir up all the doubts and the self-recrimination. The one I always come back to on the worst days is, "why do I even try? I always end up right back here in the end." This defeatest attitude feels very real at those moments, yet is clearly an utterly flawed attitude. "Always," huh? Do I really always end up right back there? Of course not! It's just the darkest parts of myself, trying to drag me down, utilizing all the cynicism at their command to convince me that the worst thoughts on a bad day are somehow the truth, and that deep down "I know that to be true." (just like Luke knows that, deep down, the evil Vader is his father...do we really know things like that?)
Still, all logical arguments really feel like they come to absolutely nothing on those terrible days. So what to do?
1. Accept it. If I'm already depressed, just what I don't need to do is heap on top of that, "man I stink, what a failure I am, how dare I be depressed again, I'm so pathetic and weak!" Alright, I'm depressed. It's okay.
2. Fight back. There is always that little demon on my shoulder, ready to pop out during those down times and tell me every single little thing I'm doing wrong, why I should just curl up and give up, why I'm alone and will always be alone and why that's entirely my own damn fault. It's hard, when feeling so low, to even muster the energy to stop this inner-abuser from being nasty to you, but the counter-arguments don't have to be well thought out or even all that accurate (the inner demon isn't telling the truth, why should I when fighting back?). I find even just a simple, "shut the f- up, you're wrong, it's not like that" helps a lot. Saying it out loud - though it causes the people I'm walking past on the sidewalk to look at me like I'm a maniac - helps even more. And actually, there's something liberating about being looked at like a maniac. ;) Usually, I find that when I acknowledge the demon, it gets even nastier - but it also gets even more out there. "I'll never be happy," it'll say, or "I'm such a failure." This is that demons weakness! When it fights back, it goes off the deep end in terms of making any actual sense, and this is when even when I feel entirely listless, the demon has made it so easy to fight back I can manage it. "I'm not a failure! Here are my successes!" List them. All of them. Even the stupid insignificant ones. It'll take a while. "How can I be a failure, when I've done all these things?"
3. One thing at a time. I ran a bunch of errands yesterday, and when I got home, I wanted to putz around on my computer, except for the big problem: my router was broken. The new router was bought during the errands, but the task of actually hooking it up seemed entirely overwhelming. "Even once it's hooked up, I'll still have all my internet work to do, groups to moderate, FB to read..." All the tasks tied together became crushing. And in the background was the demon, whispering, "I'm probably wrong about the router being the problem anyway, I'm going to open this box, and then it still won't work, and I won't be able to return it and get my money back, and I won't be able to figure out what the problem is, and then what will I do?" The only way to vanquish this kind of demon is just to do the task. One task at a time. All those other things that may or may not happen after that task are incidental. I can always decide after I've done the first task that I don't have the energy to do the others, and that's okay. And it won't always work out. Sometimes, the router won't be why the internet is broken. But you don't know if you don't try - in my case, there were some sticky moments when it looked like I wouldn't get things running again, but it WAS the router, and I'm back online, and if I hadn't tried, it'd still be hanging over my head, with the added recrimination of, "I know I should have done that yesterday..."
4. Take care of yourself. Part of what happened to me yesterday was a misfortune of timing. Two appointments and a bunch of errands meant that I ate breakfast at 7:30 in the morning, and as 2 PM came I still hadn't eaten lunch. I eat pretty small meals, and I'm used to eating three times a day at roughly the same times, so this was a serious problem. Yet I convinced myself that I should wait until I got home to eat, and it was only as I stood on the train platform at 2 that I finally realized that this was self-abuse pure and simple. I had a little food in my bag, and if I ate it, I KNEW I'd feel better, yet even that seemed like too much effort. I actually had a nearly 10 minute internal debate about eating a bagel. "But I bought this to eat with dinner," whined my inner demon. "I want it THEN, not now." Well, I ate the damn bagel. And I felt better. Because food, and hydration, and exercise, and hormonal cycles, all have a profound impact on this stuff, and it's impossible to sort out what is actual depression and what is just dehydration until I've taken the stupid drink of water.
5. Do as much as you can...and then don't do anything else. When all was said and done, I did get through most of my internet responsibilities and fun things yesterday evening. I took it one thing at a time, and each one felt like a small weight off my shoulders. "I feel like crap, but at least that's done now," I thought each time. And I triaged - if it didn't really need to be done, I didn't do. It can be hard to evaluate when depressed, and the little demon goes, "aw, come on, REALLY? I know I could get that done. It's such a small task." But rational brain knows better, and can evaluate - yes, I COULD get it done, but it's not important. There's no obligation to immediately and perfectly complete entirely unimportant tasks. Gotta draw the line somewhere. And when I hit the wall...I stopped. And I sat on the couch, and I ate dinner, and watched some TV, and worked on some craft stuff - and having reached that point, and let that point be okay, and not kept pushing, was the first time all day that I started to feel okay.
So, by evening I felt a lot more like myself. Was it eating? Drinking? Was it getting done some of the things I wanted to get done? Was it telling the demon to go back to hell? Was it just the contentment of knowing that even as low as I'd felt, I'd still gotten a lot done? Or was it something else entirely out of my control, a biochemical shift of some kind? I'll never know. But I think that it was a combination of all these things, that these and other strategies can help pull one out of a funk. I don't feel good today. I've felt good very few days this winter. But I made it through yesterday, and that means I can make it through today, and if I can spend more days than not feeling neutral to okay, I know I'll get through to those happier times.
Is anything I'm doing working?
Am I always going to feel this way?
On days like that, there's a line from a song that I always think of: "How will I get through tomorrow if I can't make it through today?" To me, that line is epitome of what stark depression really feels like. It embodies the sense that even if I somehow get through the apparently endless hours of one day, I'll be confronted by all the same realities the next day. But of course in practice, it's not like that. Some days are better, and some days are worse. As time goes on, the good days get more and more frequent, and the bad days less and less, but that still means they are going to happen. When they do, they'll stir up all the doubts and the self-recrimination. The one I always come back to on the worst days is, "why do I even try? I always end up right back here in the end." This defeatest attitude feels very real at those moments, yet is clearly an utterly flawed attitude. "Always," huh? Do I really always end up right back there? Of course not! It's just the darkest parts of myself, trying to drag me down, utilizing all the cynicism at their command to convince me that the worst thoughts on a bad day are somehow the truth, and that deep down "I know that to be true." (just like Luke knows that, deep down, the evil Vader is his father...do we really know things like that?)
Still, all logical arguments really feel like they come to absolutely nothing on those terrible days. So what to do?
1. Accept it. If I'm already depressed, just what I don't need to do is heap on top of that, "man I stink, what a failure I am, how dare I be depressed again, I'm so pathetic and weak!" Alright, I'm depressed. It's okay.
2. Fight back. There is always that little demon on my shoulder, ready to pop out during those down times and tell me every single little thing I'm doing wrong, why I should just curl up and give up, why I'm alone and will always be alone and why that's entirely my own damn fault. It's hard, when feeling so low, to even muster the energy to stop this inner-abuser from being nasty to you, but the counter-arguments don't have to be well thought out or even all that accurate (the inner demon isn't telling the truth, why should I when fighting back?). I find even just a simple, "shut the f- up, you're wrong, it's not like that" helps a lot. Saying it out loud - though it causes the people I'm walking past on the sidewalk to look at me like I'm a maniac - helps even more. And actually, there's something liberating about being looked at like a maniac. ;) Usually, I find that when I acknowledge the demon, it gets even nastier - but it also gets even more out there. "I'll never be happy," it'll say, or "I'm such a failure." This is that demons weakness! When it fights back, it goes off the deep end in terms of making any actual sense, and this is when even when I feel entirely listless, the demon has made it so easy to fight back I can manage it. "I'm not a failure! Here are my successes!" List them. All of them. Even the stupid insignificant ones. It'll take a while. "How can I be a failure, when I've done all these things?"
3. One thing at a time. I ran a bunch of errands yesterday, and when I got home, I wanted to putz around on my computer, except for the big problem: my router was broken. The new router was bought during the errands, but the task of actually hooking it up seemed entirely overwhelming. "Even once it's hooked up, I'll still have all my internet work to do, groups to moderate, FB to read..." All the tasks tied together became crushing. And in the background was the demon, whispering, "I'm probably wrong about the router being the problem anyway, I'm going to open this box, and then it still won't work, and I won't be able to return it and get my money back, and I won't be able to figure out what the problem is, and then what will I do?" The only way to vanquish this kind of demon is just to do the task. One task at a time. All those other things that may or may not happen after that task are incidental. I can always decide after I've done the first task that I don't have the energy to do the others, and that's okay. And it won't always work out. Sometimes, the router won't be why the internet is broken. But you don't know if you don't try - in my case, there were some sticky moments when it looked like I wouldn't get things running again, but it WAS the router, and I'm back online, and if I hadn't tried, it'd still be hanging over my head, with the added recrimination of, "I know I should have done that yesterday..."
4. Take care of yourself. Part of what happened to me yesterday was a misfortune of timing. Two appointments and a bunch of errands meant that I ate breakfast at 7:30 in the morning, and as 2 PM came I still hadn't eaten lunch. I eat pretty small meals, and I'm used to eating three times a day at roughly the same times, so this was a serious problem. Yet I convinced myself that I should wait until I got home to eat, and it was only as I stood on the train platform at 2 that I finally realized that this was self-abuse pure and simple. I had a little food in my bag, and if I ate it, I KNEW I'd feel better, yet even that seemed like too much effort. I actually had a nearly 10 minute internal debate about eating a bagel. "But I bought this to eat with dinner," whined my inner demon. "I want it THEN, not now." Well, I ate the damn bagel. And I felt better. Because food, and hydration, and exercise, and hormonal cycles, all have a profound impact on this stuff, and it's impossible to sort out what is actual depression and what is just dehydration until I've taken the stupid drink of water.
5. Do as much as you can...and then don't do anything else. When all was said and done, I did get through most of my internet responsibilities and fun things yesterday evening. I took it one thing at a time, and each one felt like a small weight off my shoulders. "I feel like crap, but at least that's done now," I thought each time. And I triaged - if it didn't really need to be done, I didn't do. It can be hard to evaluate when depressed, and the little demon goes, "aw, come on, REALLY? I know I could get that done. It's such a small task." But rational brain knows better, and can evaluate - yes, I COULD get it done, but it's not important. There's no obligation to immediately and perfectly complete entirely unimportant tasks. Gotta draw the line somewhere. And when I hit the wall...I stopped. And I sat on the couch, and I ate dinner, and watched some TV, and worked on some craft stuff - and having reached that point, and let that point be okay, and not kept pushing, was the first time all day that I started to feel okay.
So, by evening I felt a lot more like myself. Was it eating? Drinking? Was it getting done some of the things I wanted to get done? Was it telling the demon to go back to hell? Was it just the contentment of knowing that even as low as I'd felt, I'd still gotten a lot done? Or was it something else entirely out of my control, a biochemical shift of some kind? I'll never know. But I think that it was a combination of all these things, that these and other strategies can help pull one out of a funk. I don't feel good today. I've felt good very few days this winter. But I made it through yesterday, and that means I can make it through today, and if I can spend more days than not feeling neutral to okay, I know I'll get through to those happier times.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Be Nice To Yourself!
This popped up on Pinterest, and it's so true (and so in line with the things I'm talking about in this blog) that I had to share:
Monday, February 20, 2012
Self-Acceptance
Last night, I cried myself to sleep. It was the first time I've ever actually cried until I just couldn't stay awake another instant. I'm not sharing this for the sympathy vote. I'd had a long day, which hadn't been all bad by any means, and it was nearly midnight when I got home, exhausted. I'd known I was close to a good hard cry all day, I'd felt it creeping up on my at all kinds of inappropriate moments, like on the train home, and so I wasn't surprised that it happened. Despite that, I was angry with myself. "What's the matter with you?" my inner monologue demanded. "You cried last night, why do you need to cry again tonight?" I had no answer for this. "Anyway, why are you still so upset about this, it's been almost two months! Man, you're weak."
And I realized - this past week I'd managed to forget one of the most important things I'd learned about the recovery process: self-acceptance.
If you're anything like me - and if you're NOT anything like me, you're likely wasting your time reading this blog! - this will all sound familiar. My inner monologue needs to be heavily policed - a fact that I only discovered last month, when I realized how badly I was treating myself. Generally, according to it's point of view, things in life fall in to two categories.
A book I read in January (Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman) talks about this issue, identifying this sort of attitude as pessimism, and suggesting that it can be combated by, essentially, positive thinking. An inner monologue that, instead of identify things as being due to unchangeable personal deficiencies, identifies things as being do to temporary external agency - and therefore changeable and surrmountable with renewed effort. There's something to that, I think, and I recommend the book - a friend loaned it to me, and it was very interesting and eye opening. However, there's more to it than that, I think.
Flash back to Summer, 2001. I can hardly believe it's been 10 and a half years since then. The summer after my freshman year of college, I came home at a difficult time. I had a blast that first year, but it had fallen apart near the end, and I came home leaving behind a new boyfriend about whom I felt very strongly and a group of friends who were already starting to ostracize me because of how I'd gone about getting that new boyfriend (pretty much stealing him from a friend, though of course things are never that simple!). I was ashamed and miserable, on the one hand, and very lonely, missing the significant other, missing my friends, on the other. I had a job for the first time, and three months before I'd be back at school. I sunk in to a very deep depression. From the depths of that, about half-way through the summer, I was walking to work on a sunny day when a thought suddenly crossed my mind. "It's all what you make it," was my realization. What does that mean? It means that if I sat there going, "ah, me, I'm so miserable, life is horrible, I'm so unhappy, I won't even get to see Jason for another two weeks, alas!" constantly, then of course I would be unhappy, and I'd continue to be unhappy. But suppose I tried a different tactic? "Hey, life isn't so bad, it's a gorgeous sunny day, I'm listening to great music, and I'll be seeing Jason in two weeks!" Suddenly, there was a spring in my step, and a smile on my face. All the problems were the same, but I'd put a new face on them, and it seemed...better. And this strategy has been one of my leading coping mechanisms ever since.
During the last two months, though, I've begun to think I've had it all wrong. Or, perhaps, not all wrong, but that I missed a very critical piece of this. Yes, I'm finally getting to self-acceptance.
In my exercise in positive thinking, recasting the situation for the best, there was always a tacit implication: I shouldn't feel sad, I shouldn't be low, I should be happy, there's something wrong with me for wallowing in the dark side when I could be smiling on the bright side. I'm a worse, weaker person because I can't appreciate all the good things that I have, only focus on the things I want and don't have. This is where I've been the past week - a constant refrain of, "why are you still so upset? what's the matter with you? any normal person would be over this by now!" This will never, ever work. It just creates a double sadness - there's the unhappiness already being felt from whatever cause (for me, it all relates to my break up), and then there's the additional unhappiness of self-recrimination. I'm sad because I've lost something that matters to me, and on top of that I'm a lousy person for feeling sad.
Last night, while I was crying, I finally remembered. This is all wrong. It's all well and nice to look on the bright side, but there's more to it than that. I used to drive that boyfriend from my freshman year of college (we ended up together for five years...) nuts with this - he'd come to me upset about something ("I was sick at work today!") and I'd invariable come back with something cheerful, like, "well, at least you're feeling better now." It's not that it's not okay to say something like that, but it's not the first step. The first step needs to be, "I'm sorry that you weren't feel well! What was the matter?" I've learned how to do that in my interactions with other people, but it's only recently that I've realized that I have to do this in my interactions with myself, too. Not, "stop feeling sad, there's so much to be happy about," but...
"I accept that I feel sad about this. Why do I feel sad about this?"
Once you've got the acceptance, once you've made yourself feel comfortable and safe, opened up a dialog where it's safe to say whatever it is that has made you unhappy, no matter how unreasonable those things may seem, then you're off to a good start. I would never look at someone I care about and tell them, "what's the matter with you, why are you so upset over something so nonsensical?" So why should I ever say that to myself? Why should any of us say it to ourselves?
I'm horrified that I forgot this critical lesson, but I'm glad I remember it now. Today, I feel very tired, and still quite sad, but I'm confronting that sadness with, "it's okay, you can feel sad," and for the first day in almost a week, I'm not going round and round thinking about what's upsetting me, and I don't feel like I'm one hard push from crying. I just wish I'd remembered it sooner - but enough of the self-recrimination, already! I accept that for whatever reason, I couldn't get my head to a place where this came back to me before.
So if something is troubling you, and you keep trying to box it up, push it away, denigrate yourself for feeling it, or what not, why not give it a try. "I accept that I feel sad." "I accept that I don't feel sad even though I think I should." "I accept that I'm angry." "I accept that today, I'm just too tired to face this." "I accept my own limitations." "I accept that I've earned my own achievements." Whatever it is...legitimize your own feelings, give yourself some of the credit you deserve - treat yourself the same way you would treat someone else.
And I realized - this past week I'd managed to forget one of the most important things I'd learned about the recovery process: self-acceptance.
If you're anything like me - and if you're NOT anything like me, you're likely wasting your time reading this blog! - this will all sound familiar. My inner monologue needs to be heavily policed - a fact that I only discovered last month, when I realized how badly I was treating myself. Generally, according to it's point of view, things in life fall in to two categories.
- When Bad Things Happen. When bad things happen, they are always my fault. I didn't work hard enough. I didn't do it right. I didn't think it through. I said the wrong thing (I always say the wrong thing!). I shouldn't have done that. I'm such an idiot. I'm such a klutz. Last night, at a party, I managed to spill the contents of my purse on to the floor, and responded to questions if everything was okay by saying, "don't worry, it's a talent." Reverses that I suffer are ALWAYS attributed to my own failings, in my case usually to my inability to keep pushing and keep trying (I believe that I have enough ability to do anything I set my mind to; therefore, if I've failed, it's no because I didn't have enough ability, but because I didn't try hard enough. Obviously, different people will feel differently about this.) Other people don't cause the bad things in my life; I cause the bad things in my life, just like always.
- When Good Things Happen. When good things happen, it's never because I did the right thing. I got lucky. I've had a lot of great opportunities in my life. It was easy. Even when other people come to me and say, "you worked so hard! You did great!" my answer is usually, "we all worked hard together!" or "I couldn't have done it without your help!" I say this sort of thing even when I know it's not true - I've told people whose dubious "help" I could much better have done without that I couldn't have done it without them! And it's not just a social nicety. I find I'm largely incapable of accepting the credit for my own achievements. Good things are accidents, that have little to do with my own expenditure of energy and time.
A book I read in January (Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman) talks about this issue, identifying this sort of attitude as pessimism, and suggesting that it can be combated by, essentially, positive thinking. An inner monologue that, instead of identify things as being due to unchangeable personal deficiencies, identifies things as being do to temporary external agency - and therefore changeable and surrmountable with renewed effort. There's something to that, I think, and I recommend the book - a friend loaned it to me, and it was very interesting and eye opening. However, there's more to it than that, I think.
Flash back to Summer, 2001. I can hardly believe it's been 10 and a half years since then. The summer after my freshman year of college, I came home at a difficult time. I had a blast that first year, but it had fallen apart near the end, and I came home leaving behind a new boyfriend about whom I felt very strongly and a group of friends who were already starting to ostracize me because of how I'd gone about getting that new boyfriend (pretty much stealing him from a friend, though of course things are never that simple!). I was ashamed and miserable, on the one hand, and very lonely, missing the significant other, missing my friends, on the other. I had a job for the first time, and three months before I'd be back at school. I sunk in to a very deep depression. From the depths of that, about half-way through the summer, I was walking to work on a sunny day when a thought suddenly crossed my mind. "It's all what you make it," was my realization. What does that mean? It means that if I sat there going, "ah, me, I'm so miserable, life is horrible, I'm so unhappy, I won't even get to see Jason for another two weeks, alas!" constantly, then of course I would be unhappy, and I'd continue to be unhappy. But suppose I tried a different tactic? "Hey, life isn't so bad, it's a gorgeous sunny day, I'm listening to great music, and I'll be seeing Jason in two weeks!" Suddenly, there was a spring in my step, and a smile on my face. All the problems were the same, but I'd put a new face on them, and it seemed...better. And this strategy has been one of my leading coping mechanisms ever since.
During the last two months, though, I've begun to think I've had it all wrong. Or, perhaps, not all wrong, but that I missed a very critical piece of this. Yes, I'm finally getting to self-acceptance.
In my exercise in positive thinking, recasting the situation for the best, there was always a tacit implication: I shouldn't feel sad, I shouldn't be low, I should be happy, there's something wrong with me for wallowing in the dark side when I could be smiling on the bright side. I'm a worse, weaker person because I can't appreciate all the good things that I have, only focus on the things I want and don't have. This is where I've been the past week - a constant refrain of, "why are you still so upset? what's the matter with you? any normal person would be over this by now!" This will never, ever work. It just creates a double sadness - there's the unhappiness already being felt from whatever cause (for me, it all relates to my break up), and then there's the additional unhappiness of self-recrimination. I'm sad because I've lost something that matters to me, and on top of that I'm a lousy person for feeling sad.
Last night, while I was crying, I finally remembered. This is all wrong. It's all well and nice to look on the bright side, but there's more to it than that. I used to drive that boyfriend from my freshman year of college (we ended up together for five years...) nuts with this - he'd come to me upset about something ("I was sick at work today!") and I'd invariable come back with something cheerful, like, "well, at least you're feeling better now." It's not that it's not okay to say something like that, but it's not the first step. The first step needs to be, "I'm sorry that you weren't feel well! What was the matter?" I've learned how to do that in my interactions with other people, but it's only recently that I've realized that I have to do this in my interactions with myself, too. Not, "stop feeling sad, there's so much to be happy about," but...
"I accept that I feel sad about this. Why do I feel sad about this?"
Once you've got the acceptance, once you've made yourself feel comfortable and safe, opened up a dialog where it's safe to say whatever it is that has made you unhappy, no matter how unreasonable those things may seem, then you're off to a good start. I would never look at someone I care about and tell them, "what's the matter with you, why are you so upset over something so nonsensical?" So why should I ever say that to myself? Why should any of us say it to ourselves?
I'm horrified that I forgot this critical lesson, but I'm glad I remember it now. Today, I feel very tired, and still quite sad, but I'm confronting that sadness with, "it's okay, you can feel sad," and for the first day in almost a week, I'm not going round and round thinking about what's upsetting me, and I don't feel like I'm one hard push from crying. I just wish I'd remembered it sooner - but enough of the self-recrimination, already! I accept that for whatever reason, I couldn't get my head to a place where this came back to me before.
So if something is troubling you, and you keep trying to box it up, push it away, denigrate yourself for feeling it, or what not, why not give it a try. "I accept that I feel sad." "I accept that I don't feel sad even though I think I should." "I accept that I'm angry." "I accept that today, I'm just too tired to face this." "I accept my own limitations." "I accept that I've earned my own achievements." Whatever it is...legitimize your own feelings, give yourself some of the credit you deserve - treat yourself the same way you would treat someone else.
Monday, February 13, 2012
The Phoenix Project
I've been thinking a lot the last few weeks. As so often happens when I start to figure things out for myself, I've reached the point where I'd like to try to share what I've learned with others.
This is blog about rising from the ashes. This is a blog about finding my inner strength, and overcoming the difficult things that have come my way. This is a blog about gathering my thoughts, and putting things in order, and discussing what has worked and what hasn't. This is a blog about trying to show others some strategies they can try, if they find themselves where I've found myself.
My Story
I woke up on January 1st feeling like life was finally falling in to place, convinced that 2012 was going to be the best year yet. I had a job that I was good at, where I made nearly a hundred thousand dollars in 2011. I was self-employed, which gave me some freedom and some options. I had a timeline all prepared - the knowledge that this job was going to end in a few years, and that once it was passed, I'd have a world of options in front of me. I owned my own apartment, was supporting myself, was doing a whole wide range of things which brought me pleasure. Best of all - I had finally met someone. We'd only been going out for about three months, but things were going great, and I was really starting to think he was the one. I'd joked to my mother that if he didn't ask me to marry him by our one year anniversary, I would take things in to my own hands.
By the end of the day, it was all falling apart, and less than two days later, I was single and as depressed as I'd ever been. It wasn't just a newly shattered heart that did it, though. It was the realization that, no matter how I THOUGHT I'd felt for the past few months, the only thing that had actually been keeping me afloat was how happy the relationship made me feel, and that when it went away, I was left feeling completely empty. I had a job that everyone thought I was lucky to had, and sure, it was lucrative, but that I hated doing and dreaded every single day. I had a lot of hobbies, but a relentless personal drive and a plunge over the past year into pure workaholism had left me burnt out on every one of them. I faced those first few days alone in my apartment with the greatest of dread, because it wasn't just that I was depressed, and it wasn't just that I was lonely, it was that every single thing I USED to do to cheer myself up no longer brought me any pleasure at all. It all felt like work. It all felt like things I was supposed to do. If that wasn't enough, I was also left questioning everything. I'd been empty and depressed for a long time before the relationship, I realized, and that made me suspect every thing I thought I'd wanted in that time. I'd wanted a boyfriend so I'd feel less empty inside (it hadn't worked, of course). How about the other things I'd wanted? I'd wanted a family. Did I think I could fill the emptiness with a child? I wanted to go back to school. Did I think reliving the "glory days" of college would fill the emptiness? It seemed like every choice, every desire, was suspect. As I looked back over past decisions, I even realized it had been a trend. Almost six years previously, I'd gotten a dog, and I saw now that it was the same theory - fill the emptiness, fill the loneliness - and that had resulted in many unhappy years for me and for the dog, before I finally figured out how to make it work and how to care about her unselfishly.
The first two weeks were some of the hardest of my life.
I was determined, though. I finally had a chance to see clearly. I started keeping a journal. On the third day, I wrote, "The walls are down. Time to storm the castle." With all the bull washed away, I had an opportunity that only comes rarely in life, a chance to try to rebuild myself in to someone stronger, better, and happier. I had a chance to re-examine every cherished belief, every nuance of thought, every thing I clung to, and start to think...which of these has been helping me? Which of these has been dragging me down? Which of these reflects out-dated needs and fears? Which of these deserves to be nurtured?
I realized something scary very quickly. One night, I remembered to pull a loaf of bread out of the freezer, and transferred it to the fridge. The next morning, I meant to let it finish defrosting on the counter. However, I forgot before I went to the gym. When I realized I'd neglected to do this inconsequential chore, I thought, "you idiot, you forgot to take the bread out of the fridge!" Woah, hold up. How did that make me an idiot? Over the next couple of days, I tuned in to my inner monologue, and discovered to my horror that far from this being unusual, it was routine. My inner monologue had, at some point, become a constant stream of "you're an idiot," "you're a failure," "why aren't you doing more?", "what's wrong with you?", "you ruin everything!" and "can't you do anything right?" No wonder I felt like crap all the time. No matter how much I accomplished, no matter how much I did, I put myself down constantly, routinely, as a matter of course, and I'd never thought twice about it before.
Clearly, I had a lot of work to do. So I set to it with a vengeance. I did a lot of thinking, and I did a lot of journal writing, I did a lot of reading, and I got a lot of help.
It's been six weeks. And it's definitely a work in progress. This is my Phoenix Project, this is about how I'm rising from the ashes, recovering from that moment where everything I thought I knew burned away and I felt like I was left with nothing. I know that, objectively speaking, what I've gone through? Really not all that bad. Obviously, there's more to my life than just this recap, and I'll use my own past liberally as I keep this blog.
The goal?
Once a week, I'll take some piece of what I've been working on, what seems to have helped, what doesn't seem to have helped, and I'll write a post.
Will it attract much readership?
I don't really know, and I don't really care. But organizing my thoughts will help me, and I bet, with time, I can help others too. All we can do is keep trying. All we can do is pick up the pieces, grasp on to whatever is left, and start over, however many times we need to.
Getting Started
In those earliest, bleakest few days, when I felt like every task was insurmountable, I found three things that helped most. If you're coming here, and you're starting at the beginning, in that most black of places? This is what I'd suggest.
1. Take one task at time. It can be anything. In my case, it was walking the dog. It absolutely had to happen, but even getting her outside the building seemed like more than I could face. But I just did it one step at a time. If I can get my shoes on, if I can get the door open, I can get downstairs. I can let her do her business. And then I can come home, and wallow some more. Everyone has things in their life that, really, need to be done every day. Don't short-change yourself or deny yourself credit for even the simplest ones. When in the grip of really crushing depression, every single exertion is hard. You deserve a pat on the back for brushing your teeth. You deserve a pat on the back for showering, or getting dressed, or buying the groceries. Remember, no matter how mundane it seems, there is a simple truth in life: Whatever is difficult for you, is difficult for you. It doesn't matter one bit how easy it might be for someone else. Stephen Hawking thinks advanced theoretically physics is easy - that doesn't mean that it is. And a non-depressed person thinks taking a shower is easy, but it doesn't mean it is. Take one task at a time, and give yourself all the credit you deserve for having accomplished it, and don't worry about what comes next until you have to.
2. Keep a journal. As soon as I got home that first night, I poured everything in my head out on to a sheet of (virtual) paper. I couldn't keep it in my head any longer, it was driving me crazy, just going around and around and around. I've never been a regular journal-keeper before. Instead, journals were always something I'd kept sporadically, when the need had arisen. During the start of my first relationship - and during the end of it, five years later; in graduate school, when I'd faced years of unrequited love; last fall, when my last grand parent died; these were times when I'd turned to a computer file or sheet of paper to pour my heart out on to, usually once or twice and then done til the next time, years later, when I just couldn't hold it in any longer. Well, this was different. This was looking at my whole life, and now I've written in my journal (and I've moved to print!) almost every day since then. It's a place where I can just get the crap out of my head, and stop the merry-go-round. It's a place where I can unload, where no one will judge me. It's a place where I can force myself to face difficult truths, to just write whatever comes and tell myself that if it's really how I feel, it doesn't matter if it's crazy, or illogical, or unfair. It's my first line of defense for accepting myself, and for nurturing myself, and for acknowledging my own feelings and thoughts. I think I'll be journaling for a long, long time to come.
3. Outreach to the people who care about you. You are not alone. No matter how alone you feel, no one is really an island, everyone has someone who loves and cares about them. Sometimes, we tell ourselves reasons that this isn't true - it's been to long, I wasn't there for them, they haven't been here for me, I don't want to be a burden - sweep all those things away. They're your friends or your family, and they love you, and they want to help. I've asked a lot of support from the people close to me, and I'm sure I'll be asking more. And, a step further - if really don't have friends or family - we live in a world with this vast internet. Find a group that shares your hobbies, and throw yourself in to it. You'll be amazed by the wonderful people you can meet, and just how much they can help you get through difficult times. I've drawn on all these sources - my friends, my family, and my internet circle, and they've all amazed me, even the friend I called who I hadn't spoken to in over a year, even the people I contacted by e-mail, and especially the people in my online "family," who have been my last resort time and time again (because I kept telling myself...I don't want to keep burdening a stranger! I don't want them to think of me as that whiny girl!) and yet who have been fabulous every time. Find a niche, and turn to them. They won't let you down.
This is blog about rising from the ashes. This is a blog about finding my inner strength, and overcoming the difficult things that have come my way. This is a blog about gathering my thoughts, and putting things in order, and discussing what has worked and what hasn't. This is a blog about trying to show others some strategies they can try, if they find themselves where I've found myself.
My Story
I woke up on January 1st feeling like life was finally falling in to place, convinced that 2012 was going to be the best year yet. I had a job that I was good at, where I made nearly a hundred thousand dollars in 2011. I was self-employed, which gave me some freedom and some options. I had a timeline all prepared - the knowledge that this job was going to end in a few years, and that once it was passed, I'd have a world of options in front of me. I owned my own apartment, was supporting myself, was doing a whole wide range of things which brought me pleasure. Best of all - I had finally met someone. We'd only been going out for about three months, but things were going great, and I was really starting to think he was the one. I'd joked to my mother that if he didn't ask me to marry him by our one year anniversary, I would take things in to my own hands.
By the end of the day, it was all falling apart, and less than two days later, I was single and as depressed as I'd ever been. It wasn't just a newly shattered heart that did it, though. It was the realization that, no matter how I THOUGHT I'd felt for the past few months, the only thing that had actually been keeping me afloat was how happy the relationship made me feel, and that when it went away, I was left feeling completely empty. I had a job that everyone thought I was lucky to had, and sure, it was lucrative, but that I hated doing and dreaded every single day. I had a lot of hobbies, but a relentless personal drive and a plunge over the past year into pure workaholism had left me burnt out on every one of them. I faced those first few days alone in my apartment with the greatest of dread, because it wasn't just that I was depressed, and it wasn't just that I was lonely, it was that every single thing I USED to do to cheer myself up no longer brought me any pleasure at all. It all felt like work. It all felt like things I was supposed to do. If that wasn't enough, I was also left questioning everything. I'd been empty and depressed for a long time before the relationship, I realized, and that made me suspect every thing I thought I'd wanted in that time. I'd wanted a boyfriend so I'd feel less empty inside (it hadn't worked, of course). How about the other things I'd wanted? I'd wanted a family. Did I think I could fill the emptiness with a child? I wanted to go back to school. Did I think reliving the "glory days" of college would fill the emptiness? It seemed like every choice, every desire, was suspect. As I looked back over past decisions, I even realized it had been a trend. Almost six years previously, I'd gotten a dog, and I saw now that it was the same theory - fill the emptiness, fill the loneliness - and that had resulted in many unhappy years for me and for the dog, before I finally figured out how to make it work and how to care about her unselfishly.
The first two weeks were some of the hardest of my life.
I was determined, though. I finally had a chance to see clearly. I started keeping a journal. On the third day, I wrote, "The walls are down. Time to storm the castle." With all the bull washed away, I had an opportunity that only comes rarely in life, a chance to try to rebuild myself in to someone stronger, better, and happier. I had a chance to re-examine every cherished belief, every nuance of thought, every thing I clung to, and start to think...which of these has been helping me? Which of these has been dragging me down? Which of these reflects out-dated needs and fears? Which of these deserves to be nurtured?
I realized something scary very quickly. One night, I remembered to pull a loaf of bread out of the freezer, and transferred it to the fridge. The next morning, I meant to let it finish defrosting on the counter. However, I forgot before I went to the gym. When I realized I'd neglected to do this inconsequential chore, I thought, "you idiot, you forgot to take the bread out of the fridge!" Woah, hold up. How did that make me an idiot? Over the next couple of days, I tuned in to my inner monologue, and discovered to my horror that far from this being unusual, it was routine. My inner monologue had, at some point, become a constant stream of "you're an idiot," "you're a failure," "why aren't you doing more?", "what's wrong with you?", "you ruin everything!" and "can't you do anything right?" No wonder I felt like crap all the time. No matter how much I accomplished, no matter how much I did, I put myself down constantly, routinely, as a matter of course, and I'd never thought twice about it before.
Clearly, I had a lot of work to do. So I set to it with a vengeance. I did a lot of thinking, and I did a lot of journal writing, I did a lot of reading, and I got a lot of help.
It's been six weeks. And it's definitely a work in progress. This is my Phoenix Project, this is about how I'm rising from the ashes, recovering from that moment where everything I thought I knew burned away and I felt like I was left with nothing. I know that, objectively speaking, what I've gone through? Really not all that bad. Obviously, there's more to my life than just this recap, and I'll use my own past liberally as I keep this blog.
The goal?
Once a week, I'll take some piece of what I've been working on, what seems to have helped, what doesn't seem to have helped, and I'll write a post.
Will it attract much readership?
I don't really know, and I don't really care. But organizing my thoughts will help me, and I bet, with time, I can help others too. All we can do is keep trying. All we can do is pick up the pieces, grasp on to whatever is left, and start over, however many times we need to.
Getting Started
In those earliest, bleakest few days, when I felt like every task was insurmountable, I found three things that helped most. If you're coming here, and you're starting at the beginning, in that most black of places? This is what I'd suggest.
1. Take one task at time. It can be anything. In my case, it was walking the dog. It absolutely had to happen, but even getting her outside the building seemed like more than I could face. But I just did it one step at a time. If I can get my shoes on, if I can get the door open, I can get downstairs. I can let her do her business. And then I can come home, and wallow some more. Everyone has things in their life that, really, need to be done every day. Don't short-change yourself or deny yourself credit for even the simplest ones. When in the grip of really crushing depression, every single exertion is hard. You deserve a pat on the back for brushing your teeth. You deserve a pat on the back for showering, or getting dressed, or buying the groceries. Remember, no matter how mundane it seems, there is a simple truth in life: Whatever is difficult for you, is difficult for you. It doesn't matter one bit how easy it might be for someone else. Stephen Hawking thinks advanced theoretically physics is easy - that doesn't mean that it is. And a non-depressed person thinks taking a shower is easy, but it doesn't mean it is. Take one task at a time, and give yourself all the credit you deserve for having accomplished it, and don't worry about what comes next until you have to.
2. Keep a journal. As soon as I got home that first night, I poured everything in my head out on to a sheet of (virtual) paper. I couldn't keep it in my head any longer, it was driving me crazy, just going around and around and around. I've never been a regular journal-keeper before. Instead, journals were always something I'd kept sporadically, when the need had arisen. During the start of my first relationship - and during the end of it, five years later; in graduate school, when I'd faced years of unrequited love; last fall, when my last grand parent died; these were times when I'd turned to a computer file or sheet of paper to pour my heart out on to, usually once or twice and then done til the next time, years later, when I just couldn't hold it in any longer. Well, this was different. This was looking at my whole life, and now I've written in my journal (and I've moved to print!) almost every day since then. It's a place where I can just get the crap out of my head, and stop the merry-go-round. It's a place where I can unload, where no one will judge me. It's a place where I can force myself to face difficult truths, to just write whatever comes and tell myself that if it's really how I feel, it doesn't matter if it's crazy, or illogical, or unfair. It's my first line of defense for accepting myself, and for nurturing myself, and for acknowledging my own feelings and thoughts. I think I'll be journaling for a long, long time to come.
3. Outreach to the people who care about you. You are not alone. No matter how alone you feel, no one is really an island, everyone has someone who loves and cares about them. Sometimes, we tell ourselves reasons that this isn't true - it's been to long, I wasn't there for them, they haven't been here for me, I don't want to be a burden - sweep all those things away. They're your friends or your family, and they love you, and they want to help. I've asked a lot of support from the people close to me, and I'm sure I'll be asking more. And, a step further - if really don't have friends or family - we live in a world with this vast internet. Find a group that shares your hobbies, and throw yourself in to it. You'll be amazed by the wonderful people you can meet, and just how much they can help you get through difficult times. I've drawn on all these sources - my friends, my family, and my internet circle, and they've all amazed me, even the friend I called who I hadn't spoken to in over a year, even the people I contacted by e-mail, and especially the people in my online "family," who have been my last resort time and time again (because I kept telling myself...I don't want to keep burdening a stranger! I don't want them to think of me as that whiny girl!) and yet who have been fabulous every time. Find a niche, and turn to them. They won't let you down.
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