This day I managed to get 3 bags of books out the door. But most of the day I stayed home getting nothing done but taking care of sick child. Also I may or may not have decluttered some area of the house. I no longer remember. Did not manage to post, but I figured that I could post the next day. But I didn't. I did take meds. In the morning. That's about it. I cheated and had bags hiding secretly in the garage. But three of them were newly minted by going through the upper regions of my cupboards. The nosebleed shelves. The cheap seats. Spent much time with sick child today. With any luck I will be sick tomorrow. Ordinarily she is quite good at covering her cough with her elbow (and lecturing other people about it.) Now she is too tired to move and intstead uses my face to cover her cough. Besides creating havoc in the kitchen (which will ultimately help but now looks somewhat tornadic) I also cleaned out most parts of the disastermobile. Had tea with neighbor. Hopefully will be able to make plans for future something later. Right now I want to do nothing. I want to set and knit and watch a movie. Perhaps that is in the works. We shall see. Grateful Crap: I really like my friends. I realize this does not make me unique in the world and that most people like their friends. But my friends are better. Daily Convexions took meds in the morning (150mg sertraline, 450mg bupropion) spent a bit of time outside got 13 bags OUT of the house decluttered in the kitchen Depression metaphor for the day... a lack of connectivity. I thought today about the loss of the big picture that occurs for me when I am in even a mildly Depressed state. I can think about pieces of things. Parts of a plan. But I am not very adept at conceiving of vast projects spanning much time or many parts. I lose the connections between things. And then I thought about the brain not able to make the connection between the synapses so much as they ought to be. Which is what is happening. Serotonin and other lazy neurotransmitters are just reabsorbed and sit around eating bon bons instead of turning around and delivering the necessary messages from one brain cell to another. Which led me to the lack of connections that happen between a Depressed person and the rest of the people. Friends and family and community and coworkers. Even if there is physical presence, the connection is not the same. I also have a lovely mind-body disconnect that exists independently of Depression, but it certainly is not improved by that craptastic condition. Then it occurred to me that all these metaphors are really good for how I think about moderate Depression. Because when people are having a Major Depressive Episode they are not very good at accessing verbal profundity. And if they come out of the fog of deep Depression, their swiss cheese memory doesn't allow them to describe what it felt like to be inside of that darkness. Which is probably for the best. I don't mean remembering specific things that happened (although that can be hard too) or the empty horrible feeling (with all kinds of words attached to it that I am not going to go into because it causes me stress at the moment). I mean words that describe how your brain feels as it tries to make connections but it doesn't. Can't. Won't. Okay, I am cutting me off. I am not as melancholy as I sound. I am really doing quite well. My other thought today was about reasoning that there are so many depressing poems because Depressed people can think in this smaller form. Fewer connections. Grateful Crap: Volunteering with children. I like children. They make me smile-- which is good for me. Daily Convexions: took meds in the morning (whoo hoo! now I am just showing off) took a nap (probably longer than I should have) felt better-- headache mostly just a memory Tomorrow I am starting the 40 bags in 40 days. My neighbor is joining me in this venture. The challenge: get 40 bags of stuff OUT OF THE HOUSE and to the donation or recycling site. Now is that brown time when the leaves aren't pretty anymore and the grass is dead and the snow hasn't come yet and all the perennials have dried up seed heads sadly bobbing around the garden. Now is when furnaces blow dust and dander throughout the house, dislodging seasons of allergens it has been storing for months and months. Now no one wants to play outside because you can't sled on frosty ground and there is no ice for skating. Slightly frozen mud makes for poor snowmen. And too slippery for bikes. Too cold to swim. Too dark to take a walk. Now the children disappear and the sun becomes shy hiding behind clouds and on the other side of the world. Now is what I imagine when C.S. Lewis had his witch say it was always winter and never Christmas. Not the beautiful glittering jewels of new snow. But this. Now I am somewhat disconsolate. Discordant. Disassociative. Dissolved. Disastrous. Divided. Distant. Dilligent. Divine. Diurnal. Now I will stop this brown study and leave to complete the remaining tasks of the day. Write. Read. Drink. Sleep. Grateful Crap: that I don't always think in stilted language like this. Daily Convexions: took meds in the morning (150mg sertraline, 450 mg bupropion) I am so rockin' this medication every day at the same time Also, not going to sleep after 1:30 am. Regularly not doing that. Tea with a friend played horn Very Bad Headache. Somewhat less today. Still feels sometimes like an icepick behind my ear and below my temple. Wimp. I don't get headaches and when I do I am a pathetic invalid. Chronic pain takes practice. I do Depressed much Did not post today (okay, yesterday since this is a backdated post) because I came home at 3:30 pm with a bad headache and went to bed. I did wake briefly, but it was after nine and I was not about to interact with electronic media. Grateful Crap: Spouse and children who made it possible for me to sleep. Daily Convexions: took meds in the morning adequate self care in getting rest I have stuff. Much stuff. Too much stuff. When I moved in to this house I insisted that it was not too small but that it would require agressive stuff management. I have not been agressive enough. I am declaring one of my semi-regular "forty bags in forty days" initiatives in which I attempt to get stuff out of the house (instead of just packing it up in unlabled containers that I will donate some later time and then forgettin what they are and mixing them together with stuff we plan to keep. ACK.) Keeping this short becuase it is too late to post and I am behind on homework and I feel guilty that my living room is a mess and my kitchen needs cleaning (but my bedroom and the bathroom are still quite decent, so kudos on that.) Grateful Crap: laughing really hard with a friend. This counts as anaerobic exercise becuase we could not breathe. Daily Convexions: took meds in the morning went to the y (swimming lessons with 2yo) saw a friend and laughed until we cried I was down this morning and then in the middle and then a bit up. Kind of all over the place today. The grey outside can lead to the horrible cliche of melancholy. Which it probably did. Not going to write a lot because it is after ten, but I didn't want to miss two days in a row. It would then become like my phone. I have not listened to the 12 messages waiting for me for so long that I am disinclined to check them. Because it can't be anything good. So too if I miss enough days of this blog that I mean to do daily, the weight of all those missing entries will be enough to drive me away. Had some uncomfortable eating-disordered-type thoughts and feelings today. So I overcompensated by eating more food than I wanted to. As if to prove that I will not engage in restricting behaviors. You know, the eating disorder may or may not be the thing that kicked off my clinical Depression in the first place. It may also be to blame for the seven years it took to conceive my first child. First child (pictured above) turned eleven today. Daily Convexions: took meds in the morning (150mg sertraline, 450mg bupropion) nothing else See, there is a strong correlation between days that I feel down and days that I do nothing to combat Depression but take the pills. Wise up. Get on the ball. Get off your butt. Get moving. Tomorrow. Sunday kinda sucked. I spent Saturday in a cleaning frenzy in my room. Sunday I tackled the bathrom. In a big way. I had two speeds: on and off. I whizzed around in a frenzy of motion and then collapsed into dreamless sleep for hours. Then back up again and whirling whirling whirling. The real suckage came from many people's expectations for the day going unmet and folks being very angry/upset/sad about it. Felt like everything must somehow directly or indirectly be my fault. Not rational. Not true. But it felt true. Grateful Crap: that I am writing this a day late and am no longer in the land of Sucky Sunday. Daily Convexions took meds in the morning became a (nontheist Christian Quaker) whirling dervish I am an unreliable narrator. Maybe. I can spin things however I want and how would you know? Few of you see me regularly. And I can tell a good story. I can tell a story so it feels true. Even to me. Because I majored in lying. My graduate degree is in creative writing. And while I did a joint thesis in poetry and fiction, I never did manage to take any classes in creative nonfiction. So I can lie to you in prose or in verse. I spent today in a frenzy of cleaning. So my room not only has visible floor, but everything is on shelves, put away, dusted, swept and polished. I even cleaned the dust from the air purifier. This also means that the rest of the house is in varying shades of "holy crap!" I will deal with that tomorrow. Perhaps a little less frenzied. Maybe allowing other people to pitch in. Slept quite ill last night. Allergies and waking children and whatnot. So I read. Which was fine, but not so restful as actual sleep. I am pensive. And exhausted. Actually now that I am sitting down it feels like a good exhausted. I cleaned aerobically for hours on end today and I got an entire room done. Which I realize is not the prescribed way to do things, but having a clean space to retreat to will make tackling other things in small batches much easier. Grateful Crap: Sunday night we are getting rid of all the Halloween Candy. Some colorful bits may live on as decorations on gingerbread houses. Lifesized. To lure in the neighborhood children. For impromptu jamming sessions and possible auditions for my straight-edge punk group, the Perpetrators of Yelliness. Chocolate is probably not the world's most perfect food. It is just my favorite controlled substance. And perhaps I am riding a bit of a sugar high, here. Who knows. Maybe I am actually on vacation in Tahiti. And I am a sixty year old man with cataracts. Daily Convexions took meds 150mg sertraline, 450mg bupropion (still using pill minder) in the morning aerobic cleaning dust mitigation activities to lessen allergy symptoms (although the mitigation process mightily sucked) It must be a cliche. I must have heard it any number of times. What if the light at the end of the tunnel is a train coming your way? Or what if the end of the tunnel is just a small stretch of road before entering another tunnel. And this whole going through tunnels thing implies a continuing journey-- a journey with no end. Unless you are talking about that end-of-life tunnel that people who have had near-death experiences describe. Then I guess it may not be without end. But who knows. This is a bit abstract. In the concrete world, I think things in general are mostly going okay. I am still feeling like me. I am still taking meds regularly. I am starting to track my food/exercise daily. But there is still the backlog. The years of neglect of self and surroundings. Mild, benign neglect. But over years it compounds. Which means now I am nowhere near as physically healthy as I would like to be. And my home is nowhere near as uncluttered as I would like it to be. And there are many more things that need fixing than I would like to have unfixed. I have still not done some things that I was going to do. And I can't remember what they were. Oh yes. Allergist. And Eye doctor. Flu vaccine for the children. Pneumovax for me. This weekend I want to make one trip to the dump. And one trip to the Goodwill. With a full van. That will make me feel a bit better; breathe a bit easier. Grateful Crap: All the things that are going perfectly fine. Having a job and a house and a family and a faith community. Daily Convexions: took meds in the morning cut myself a break |
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K. BuchananQuaker, teacher, parent, |