Today (the day I wrote this), I took a day off of work. I woke up feeling pretty crummy and in desperate need of more sleep, so I spent a little time debating myself about the merits of taking another day off versus going into the office and eventually agreed to let myself take a day off if I spent some time doing some chores I’d been putting off once I’d finished sleeping. It took a bit longer than normal to make up my mind because I felt kind of out of it, kind of mentally foggy, but the generally exhausted and ill feeling of my entire being that morning made it a pretty easy decision in the end. Unfortunately, sleeping didn’t really make me feel that much better. I felt a bit more clear-headed for a while, but the mental fog has returned by the evening (when I’m writing this) and though my stomach problems passed eventually, like they have every morning this week, I still felt crummy enough that I only did one of the chores I bargained with myself about. Given how I feel awful still, I’m pretty sure I’ll still have tomorrow to do the balance of them. I mean, I literally went back to sleep for another three hours and STILL felt exhausted and murky when I woke up. Almost like the sleep I got wasn’t terribly helpful, like back when my insomnia was at its worst and I’d be able to sleep a whole nine or ten hours and feel the same way as if I’d taken a very long nap. It’s not a great feeling to wake up tired, decide to take a day off so you can rest, get as much rest as you can, and then still feel tired and out of sorts.
Continue readingMental Health
A Week Of Ups And Downs And Sudden Lateral Movement
This has been a difficult week. I’ve had a lot of emotional turbulence as I’ve started up a new medication while still on an old one. It’s not making me feel things, but it does seem to be amplifying my naturally occurring emotions in weird ways. Or doing nothing except leaving me incredibly sleepy. I also had a day where I just felt out of it, like I had a bad head cold that was making me feel foggy. Today (a week before this posted), I feel mostly normal except all of my emotions are hitting me at full power rather than drifting up and down as normal. I think this is the unfortunate combination of weaning off my previous medication while starting up my new one and the sort of daily variability of it is giving me hope that this is just a temporary side effect as my body adjusts to the changing chemical levels within it [this seems to have played out as I hoped it would, with these symptoms largely vanishing by the time this posted]. That all of this emotional variability will calm down eventually and my body will adjust, settling into routine side effects and new chemical balances that will hopefully have the desired effect of treating my depression and anxiety. Eventually. For now, though, I’m implementing a lot of “Shut The Fuck Up Friday” best practices because I’ve caught myself prepared to say some things in the workplace that wouldn’t necessarily get me in trouble but would give my coworkers a better glimpse at the person I am than I’m prepared to show them in a structured work environment. I mean, I don’t exactly trust them after all…
Continue readingThe End Of My Ceaseless Exhaustion Is Hopefully In Sight
After three months of miserable side-effects, unending exhaustion, and sleepiness that dominated my every waking moment, I’ve finally hit the end of my “wait it out” period for the antidepressant my doctor recommended. I had some small improvement from it at the highest dose I took, but I was also so tired on it that I’d be falling asleep every afternoon even when I was sleeping a minimum of seven and a half hours. Which, you know, wasn’t exactly a viable outcome for me. It took me a couple weeks to even recognize that the medication was having a positive effect on me because I was just too tired to feel anything but nigh-overwhelming exhaustion. It was a bit of a lateral move rather than an improvement or worsening of my general well-being, but I can work through feeling incredibly depressed and I cannot work through exhaustion that complete, as I learned throughout the last three months. It never quite got bad enough to actually make me mess up at work, but I also took a lot of vacation time during the peak of the exhaustion and I had plans for that time later this year. So it wasn’t great but I got through it, told my doctor it wasn’t working for me at any dose, and now I’m officially on the “slowly wean off the antipressant” path. As of this blog post going up, I’m one week away from my last dose of it and what will hopefully be the end of my constant sleepiness.
Continue readingDepression Spikes And Shattered Healthy Habits
I’ve been dealing with the worst depression spike I’d had in years these last few days. I don’t think I’ve felt this bad since I was twenty-four and I was bad enough at that point in my life that maybe two people in all of existence know how poorly I was doing back then. Because that’s what always happened when I get this bad. I got quiet. I stopped talking to people. I stopped writing about it in any quantitative manner and just wrote in generalities, if I wrote about it all (back in those days, I mostly just stopped writing entirely). I would never bring up how badly I was doing out of a desire to avoid worrying people, to avoid taking up their mental space, and because I’m aware that these kinds of waves, the ones that show up and worsen without any kind of trigger, will last until they’ve over and nothing I can do but pass the time will bring them to an end. Which isn’t to say that I had no ability to influence my well-being or the frequency of those kinds of events. Over the years of my adult life, I’ve identified a few factors that contribute to these ways and worked to prevent those factors from coming into play. That’s why I almost never drink and avoid drinking to excess if I ever do. I go on regular walks for a mixture of fresh air, exercise, and sunlight, all of which contribute to a base level of well-being. I regularly exercise in order to create a firm basis for my daily routines, hone my discipline, and get myself feeling physically embodied. I also try to sleep at least six hours a night. If that last one didn’t illustrate the problem I’m having right now, don’t worry since I’m about to explain it in detail.
Continue readingThe Current Contours Of My Depression And Anxiety
I have spent pretty much my entire life dealing with depression and anxiety. I don’t remember a single time in my life that I wasn’t anxious (and I can remember back pretty early into my life) and the depression has been a constant companion since I was five or six. I developed tools to cope as a child, improved them in order to survive as a pre-teen and teen, worked to solidify them as a young adult, and then worked to heal in my twenties. I haven’t really struggled with them in almost a decade, since my mid-twenties, because I got so good at handling them that it took very little effort, at least as far as my day-to-day energy was concerned. Some days were worse, some were better, but I mostly averaged out to being fine. These days, though, that is no longer the case. Ever since last year, when I started the medication that would go on to cause me a great deal of constant pain, I’ve been fighting to keep an even keel again, in a way I haven’t had to since I left my parents’ house in 2009. Part of that is the accumulation of stress over the past five years of Covid-19’s domination of existence, a lot of that was the stress from being in constant pain, and the rest has been the gradual turn towards shitty fascism that has been really taking center stage in the US. There’s just been so much to feel stressed and depressed about and so very little I’ve been able to rely on to counteract those feelings that I’ve just had to make some kind of peace with living in this state of perpetual exhaustion, depression, stress, and anxiety.
Continue readingMental Health In My Doom Spiraling Era
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.
Continue readingWhat’s Next Now That My Dragon Age Playthrough Is In The Rearview Mirror?
Please, if you know the answer, tell me. I’m desperate. As of writing this, it has been almost a week since I finished this momentous task, this three hundred forty hour undertaking, and nothing compares to the soaring highs and wonderful emotional lows (that were also soaring highs, let’s be real, because I love a tear-jerker) of Veilguard. I’ve tried playing other video games, things I set aside to brute-force my way through Inquisition, and none of them seem fun. I’ve tried to read, but my mind can’t focus on something that doesn’t feel as real as Veilguard did. I tried taking a night off, to do something other than play a Dragon Age game, and yet I found myself unable to focus on anything but thoughts of how nice it would be to start a new file. Nothing compares to the depth of character and delight I felt while blissfully escaping into this latest Dragon Age game, so how can I tear myself away from the fresh character I made on my second night after beating the first one? How can I deny myself what my entire being desires so deeply and clearly?
Continue readingAn Exchange Of Beliefs To Reflect This Upcoming Political Era
Content warning for discussion of childhood abuse and the lingering effects of that trauma.
Continue readingRose-Tinted Glasses In The Gathering Dusk Of A Quiet Night Alone
It is difficult to not look at my life from the past and not feel diminished in some way. The siren song of nostalgia is a difficult to tune resist, as I find myself feeling more isolated and alone than I have in years. I speak with fewer people on a regular basis these days. I have fewer recent conversations in all of my communication channels. I have no weekly events except the one I have laboriously scraped together every Sunday. I barely have the energy to even think about making any kind of positive changes to my life, let alone actually making any changes. I am in a rough patch and the thought that yesteryear was better is a difficult one to deny when I am watching the sun set while I fill up my water bottle for my final hour of work as the building settles into silence and darkness on a Friday evening. I am not the only one working still, but, like me, we all work in isolation and silence, largely unaware of each other’s presence. I do not know their life situations, but a part of me wonders if they, too, have little waiting for them but a trip home and a quiet weekend doing their own things. Sure, I’ll do some grocery shopping and get my weekly takeout before I settle into my apartment for another weekend, but that’s not much of a social life. The events I have this weekend will hopefully keep me from falling into the silence and isolation I’m increasingly familiar with these days, but it’s little comfort as I feel the building’s heat shut off and the temperature begin to drop while I’ve still got work to do.
Continue readingThe Weight of Sleep Deprivation
As of writing this, it has been about three months since I’ve felt well-rested. July of this year, coming off a vacation, started roughly since I was struggling to get my sleep schedule under control and, in a preview of the what would wind up being the entire month of September (and an unknown amount of October), had just returned from a vacation that was nice but not terribly restful since I kept having back pain due to the mattress I was sleeping on. The stress from that first week of July just picked up from there due to work deadlines and the amount of heavy labor I had to do to meet those deadline at my job. Plus, the back pain I had over my vacation faded a bit, but never entirely went away before it start slowly growing worse and worse until August started and I realized I needed to replace my mattress. It peaked two weeks later when I woke up with such severe lower back pain that I was afraid I’d permanently damaged my spine, prompting me to go out immediately in search of a new mattress. While I was able to reduce the severity of the pain I was dealing with by putting my futon mattress on top of my old, bad mattress, it didn’t really do much more than allow me to not feel like I was breaking my back by going to bed. Then, after an exhausting month of never enough sleep, I settled down for my first night on my new mattress and then started my birthday after barely six hours of sleep due to incredible and debilitating back pain. Since then, I’ve struggled to get even an average of five hours of sleep a night thanks to similar (but not the same) back pain that has shifted around my back over the entire month of September. Now, as October starts, my only hope for relief is the physical therapy appointment I have set up the day before this post goes up.
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