Dear diary,
It has been a very long time since I have added an entry here. Too long. Well life sucks sometimes and it gets in the way of doing what we “should” be doing. This post just wasn’t going to cut it on my “sweet” sister site, so here we are and hopefully this will be a good place for me to drudge through this drudgery…..
My husband and I went to see our therapist a couple of nights ago. He was concerned with my current “mental state” and we wanted to share some of the struggles I had been facing.
“I think you are depressed” is what she told us.
Great, just fucking great. I don’t have time to be depressed. But our therapist basically told me I need to find time to allow myself to be depressed. I was told that I shouldn’t make any big changes in my life for at least another six month (because on top of being depressed, I was still in the grieving period of my father’s passing back in July of 2017). And to add a cherry to the top of this crap cake, she said a lot of people in her practice were also suffering from SAD this year. SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, is a kind of subcategory of depression that tends to affect people at certain times of the year (mainly in the fall and winter). Austin has had what I would call an unusual winter. Lots of days that have been colder than normal, even some snowfall, and not so much sun. I am very familiar with SAD but on the opposite end of the spectrum. I feel like it usually affects me in the heart of summer. Having spent over 20 years in Arizona, I am not someone who particularly likes the heat and by August I usually find myself depressed and irritable towards those long dog days. I want nothing more for fall to come and for hoodies and hot beverages to seep into my soul.
The summer of 2017 was already very depressing for other reasons and now I have this to continue to deal with. It really fucking sucks too. I just want to feel like me again. I want to enjoy running and even working again. But instead I like to layer up, get into bed and snooze or spend hours surfing Facebook, all the while, asking myself: “why I am wasting my life away with this nonsense”? Or worse yet, sometime I hit Amazon pretty hard hoping to find some”thing” to fill the hole in my present existence.
Most days my mind is pretty foggy anyways. I find I have a hard time concentrating (it took me like 4 times to just spell “concentrating” close enough for the spell check to figure out what the hell I was trying to type) and I get very frustrated with myself at work and even at home with my family. Work has been very accommodating with allowing me to take time off during the week and just kind of float around and rest my mind. My family somewhat understands. My husband wants so badly to just be able to “fix” my issues but is learning that what I really need is for him to just listen to me and cuddle with me whenever necessary. My mom I’m sure would be supportive IF I really let her in and told her how I was feeling. I choose not to because, right now she is facing her own grief period and probably a bit of SAD as well. She lost a husband of 44 years and is now living in brand new state with weather that she doesn’t agree with at all. She doesn’t need to worry about me as well (even though she worries about everything anyways).
I have been reading and listening to podcasts a lot more lately. Lots of self-help crap so that when I do burst out of this emotional fart bubble, I will hopefully have a good grip on what I want to do with my life going forward. One thing that I can say about death, is it really gets you to look at your own life (and the wasting of it) a lot more closely. I’m hoping that the second half of 2018 will look a lot different from the first. I really want to make some changes. I live more intentionally, instead of just going through the motions each day. Ryan and Josh from The Minimalist have been helping me understand more and more just how to do that and I have discovered many great books that have “f*ck” somewhere in their title, to be great motivators too*. Go figure.
So yeah, this sucks and I’m so ready to be over it.
~ a depressed, american, Vegan
* Books:
- “Fu*k it, Do what you love” by John C. Parkin
- “The Subtle art of not giving a F*ck” by Mark Manson
diary of a MAD, american, Vegan 