My experience of depression has pretty much been a lifelong series of ebbing and flowing cycles. I used to compare it to floating in the ocean, with days where everything is calm and still, others where gentle waves rock you, and the occasional day of furious storms that threaten to bury you deeper beneath the surface than you could ever hope to return from. These days, or maybe these years, really, it is a much less tumultuous affair. Part of that is being more emotionally even-keeled as I’ve worked through a lot of my trauma and removed a bunch of the unhealthy relationships that added turmoil to my life. Another significant part of this more mild experience has been that I’ve learned how to handle my own internal spikes and troughs better, thanks to years of therapy and introspective work. The rest is probably settling a lot of outstanding issues that were actively causing me deep and constant pain. That said, it’s not like my depression is gone. It’s just different. I tend toward valleys and hills rather than waves and cratering depths. Little rises and falls along the way as I cross much larger rises and falls measured in a scale closer to geography than individual steps. The bad days are still bad and the good days often feel few and far between, but I have to admit that feeling less caught up in it, moment to moment, is a huge improvement.

I’d love it if things continued to improve, slowly or perhaps more quickly, if I ever decide to look into the medication route (and, you know, find one that works for me at a dosage where the side-effects aren’t more bothersome than the symptoms the meds are treating), but I’m really not sure where to go from here. Which isn’t saying much, I’ll admit. In my mid-twenties, when I was at my lowest, I couldn’t have imagined getting to where I am now, much less that I’d do so by following the path I took to get here, so why should this period of my life be any different? It’d definitely help if the world was in a less shitty place, if I had a better work/life balance, if my life had more positive elements to it than it currently does, and if I was less absolutely and complete burned out than I am, but those things aren’t entirely within my control and all I can do is try to work on them as the balance to my willingness to accept my own misery. Or to rest, when I can afford it and time allows, rather than force myself to work through every minute of my day. Maybe even to fix my sleep schedule and get back to my old days of six-hour minimums, back when I wasn’t working this much and didn’t have such a long pre-bedtime routine to help fix all my back, skin, and nerve problems. There’s a lot that could happen, mostly out of my control but a little inside it, that’d really help fix my life up.

Unfortunately, none of it is guaranteed and so much of it feels like it is under threat as the current US government tries to pick itself apart. It’s difficult to relax when you need to watch for whatever is going to be declared illegal next as Trump tries to expand the president’s power to be all-encompassing and Musk tries to shake all the loose change out of the government’s systems (often breaking a lot of them so that all the money pours out of them since his idea of “loose change” includes anything that isn’t in his fascist little nazi-saluting hands). It’s difficult to feel like we’ve got any kind of control in this day and age since you can either keep up with everything going on and risk a doom spiral or ignore it and risk missing your chance to act when it is needed most. It is difficult to feel settled in any way when so much is in flux and I can feel the impact it is having on my anxiety. It’s difficult to continue on as I have been given that my strongest coping mechanism, developed over years as a response to my OCD, has been reassuring myself that my anxieties are baseless and choosing to ignore them. These days, a lot of my intrusive anxieties aren’t entirely baseless and it’s difficult to ignore them when I know that it is often worth considering them a bit more fully than I’d like so that I can at least be mentally prepared when something similar happens.

The more time that passes into this year, the more time that passes since the US Presidential election was called, really, the more I feel that a lot of my responses to the world at large are justified and reasonable. Anyone who isn’t a little anxious about the world seems like they’re being dangerously naive to me. Anyone who isn’t struggling to find the positivity in what is happening seems like they’ve got their heads stuck in the sand. It does not seem unreasonable to feel worried or afraid or upset about what is happening, so long as you don’t let it stay your hand when it comes time to act. As long as you can keep calling your representatives, protest when appropriate (with everything going on, maybe consider carefully if you can afford to be arrested or if there might be a greater risk to you than some of your peers), and try to stay informed without burning yourself out. It’s a difficult balance to strike and there’s no shame in taking time away from this to reorient yourself if you overshoot and start to doom spiral. I mean, I’m taking a day away from social media and the internet at large the day I’m writing this because I was getting so caught up in trying to keep track of everything happening that it was leaving me unable to do much of anything other than fret. You have to look after yourself if you want to be of use to anyone, yourself included. I’m just glad I’ve put in the work on my mental health over these last several years so that I’m in a place where I can do what I need to do when I need to do it rather than getting paralyzed by stress and worry like I used to when things would happen. I hope it’ll be enough to weather these next few years, however many they might be.