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 readingMental Health
The 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 readingEnough For The Endless Present I’m Living In
Despite having about an entire week off–a Tuesday through Monday kind of deal, which unfortunately means I didn’t get to have my desired nine-days-without-work vacation–I’m still not in the shape I wanted to be. I’m still tired, still struggling to feel rested, and while a lot of that can be placed at the feet of the medication I’ve been taking, not all of it can be. I’m still incredibly burned out. A week away from my work responsibilities was helpful, but not enough to recover from over a decade of endlessly pushing myself. Which is why I’m writing this a week after my final day of vacation, in the middle of the afternoon, on the day it was supposed to go up instead of the day I planned to write this. Despite my efforts, I still haven’t been able to rebuild my blog buffer. I just don’t always have the energy for it or the focus required to get through typing out my thoughts without drifting towards social media and the doom spirals that inevitably follow. The world’s in a rough situation these days, not just my particular geographic chunk of it, and it’s difficult to avoid letting my mind wander over towards the various horrors when it wanders I’ve been struggling to find good distractions for when I’m at my desk, working. Maybe I should just double-down on work and stay even more busy than usual, but that doesn’t really work anymore since I’m almost always still struggling with my flagging energy levels.
Continue readingStaggering Exhaustedly Into Another Week
Adjusting to my new medication has been rough. Not as rough as the last one was, sure, but given how long it has been since I’ve felt like I was near one hundred percent (and the fact that I started this medication as soon as I felt I could when coming off the last one), it feels maybe worse than it otherwise would. There’s a lot of emotional weight behind the thought “I don’t know how long it has actually been since I felt more than alright” and it occasionally winds up one hell of a sucker punch to throw my way when I’m feeling down. It doesn’t help that the benefits I’m supposed to be seeing from this medication haven’t really materialized yet and I don’t know if they ever will. It’s entirely possible that this one just doesn’t work for me and that I’ll have spent two months waiting for something that just won’t materialize. Or that has somehow materialized without me knowing it? It’s difficult to say, sometimes, given how much the tiredness from this medication is just sort of casting a pall over my life. That’s the problem with such overwhelming tiredness: it’s difficult to keep track of anything at all, much less how you’re feeling, when your predominant physical and emotional state is “ready to fall asleep the instant I relax” all day, every day.
Continue readingFixing One Problem So I Can Work On The Rest
After a few sessions without much in the way of stuff to work on, my physical therapist and I decided to change our appointment schedule to every-other-week (starting with a three-week skip due to scheduling issues). Since I stopped taking that medication that was making me physically miserable, I’ve had fewer and fewer problems that I’ve needed to work on with my physical therapist. At this point, as I’m coming up on two months off the medication, I’m still dealing with some lingering stuff, but most of what I’ve got going on is due to the physical demands of my job and the somewhat uneven muscle usage those demands result in. Other than stretches and starting up my exercise routine in earnest again, there’s not much to do for now. Thus the every-other-week appointments. We’ll let some time pass, see if getting back into my exercise routine helps fix my lingering problems, and then hopefully either end our appointments or set me up with a better workout and stretching routine and THEN end our appointments. Either way, I suspect I’m less than half a dozen appointments from being done. Which is great, let me tell you. I still remember just how awful last fall was, even if a lot of those days blur together in my memory, and no matter how tired or sore I feel nowadays, I can take comfort in knowing that it will pass in a couple days if I stretch and get enough sleep. And destress a bit. I’m still struggling with that part, but I always have so I doubt I’m going to fix it any time soon.
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 readingI’m Not Always Making Progress, But I’m At Least Not Getting Worse Again…
Another week (mostly) down the tubes and another update on how I’m doing. Physically, anyway. And a little mentally and emotionally, of course. That’s part of it these days, given that the reason I’ve stopped making much progress in physical therapy is that I’m exhausted from work and stressed beyond my ability to easily handle. Turns out that having your entire week knocked off course by someone else’s fuckup really sucks. To put it briefly, since I’m writing this late, one of my coworkers took crucial parts of my testing apparatus without telling me, rendering it incapable of being used for the testing I originally built it for. When I found out and confronted him, I was told to just build up my gear again and fix up the testing setup that he’d dismantled and only barely begun to put back together again in a “nice” way (despite me telling him a couple days prior that I was going to need it that week and that “working” was better than “pretty”). Which means that my plans to leave work “early” to play video games with my friends got thrown to the side so I could spent seven hours fixing what he’d messed up so I could run my goddamn twenty-minute test to verify that the latest version of the software, that the developer had put out that day, was good to go so that we’d have time for fixes and more testing if it WASN’T fine. I spent most of Wednesday apoplectic about that and had the rest of the week completely disrupted by this eight hours of work and software updating I wound up needing to do outside of my already busy plans for the week.
Continue readingIs It Still Resilience If I’m Just Willing To Accept Being Miserable?
Content warnings for discussions of mental health and therapy, including suicidal ideation as a side-effect of obsessive-compulsive disorder and non-specific misery.
Continue readingReflecting Along The Road To Recovery
Well, since I’m writing this a day later than usual (on the 17th instead of the 16th), I’ve now made it through two increasingly demanding weeks at work. I got through my first exhausted weekend, started this week feeling fresh, and immediately pushed my limits as far as they could go every day I could. I spent four days doing a huge amount of testing, recruited anyone who was willing to help me, and made it through about fifty percent of the testing I needed in about a week. I also completely exhausted myself such that, despite sleeping pretty decently last night (thanks to choosing to work less and sleep more the morning I wrote this), I’m ready to fall asleep at my desk. I even forced myself to take a day off testing, to rest my poor hands, my give my aching body a break, and to focus on denying my ever-present desire to be horizontal rather than any amount of vertical, but I’m still struggling to stay conscious and alert today any time I’m not actively doing something and half of the rest of the time. It’s a nice exhaustion, though. I feel sleepy and ready for rest rather than uncomfortable and in pain like I was for most of last year. I can be still and the lingering pains will cease or I can move and stretch and feel my body loosen up. Truly, it is a remarkable thing to be recovering after so much time of just being miserable.
Continue readingSigns Of Improvement
Well, my first day of work is done and while I feel like I’m way more tired than I should be from what felt like a relatively light day of work (compared to two weeks ago, I barely did anything), I’m not feeling as completely exhausted as I used to. I’ve actually recovered a bit from how tired I was when I finished the moderate labor portion of my day, which is the first time that has happened in months. Maybe more than half a year. That was the worst part of the medication I was on. Because my physical recovery period was so long, any tiring work meant that I’d still feel tired from it for at least a week. Now, today, I’m already feeling like I might be up for the household labor I’d planned for my evening back when I was feeling ambitious yesterday. I mean, it’s only folding laundry and maybe unloading the dishwasher, but I remember a time not that long ago when even those labors were beyond me on all but my best days after work. It’s good to finally be feeling better, even if now I have to keep pumping the brakes to make sure I don’t wind up pushing myself too hard during my continued recovery period. I have to make sure I pace myself and work out patterns and habits I can maintain over the next two incredibly demanding months. So, to that end, my plan for the rest of this week (last week, as you’re reading this) is to get back into the swing of things at work, stepping up my effort every day a little bit at a time. Then, next week, I’ll be doing that and trying to get in my morning workouts again. Or my evening physical therapy workouts, whichever the day demands. And then after that… Well, maybe I’ll go about trying to fix my sleep schedule. Who knows. If I can get the first two things down, I feel like anything will be within my grasp.
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