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.
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