Identifying and Accepting When External Events Are Hard

Of late my to do lists have been piling up in a stressful way. I get home from work, and instead of jumping in to my blogging or editing, I just fall into bed and play Pokemon for 5 hours. Now I’m not one to knock playing Pokemon for 5 hours, but this is leaving me feeling like I’m being lazy and useless, and the things that I had intended to get done don’t get done…which means more on the list for the next day.

Of course my first impulse on seeing that is to get angry at myself. I berate my lazy self and ask why I can’t just do my work. I tell myself that I have tons of time, that I wasted time doing something unproductive. And I get more and more frustrated that I can’t seem to focus.

Now (totally unrelated) to all of this, I increased the dose of my antidepressants a few weeks ago and have been dealing with some nasty side effects since then. Serious exhaustion, twitchiness, anxiety, heartburn like a mofo (up to and including vomiting), and a complete inability to tolerate alcohol of any kind.

Wait, what’s that you say? Spending multiple nights puking and incapable of sleeping will affect one’s ability to get their work done? Messing with your brain chemicals takes time to adjust and might mean you have to cut back on other work for a while? Sometimes your body and brain require care that doesn’t allow you to keep going at your normal pace?

Of all the ironies in my life, I think my inability to recognize and validate my own mental health as an actual legitimate concern in my life is probably the best one.

Despite the fact that I’ve been bitching about these side effects to anyone who would listen for the past two weeks, it took until yesterday for me to realize that the reason I have felt so behind and had so much difficulty with my work recently is because making this transition is affecting me. And it took that realization for me to accept that I might need to take things easy until I can get my brain sorted out.

This is one of the most difficult things for people with mental illness, or at least I have witnessed people with mental illness struggling with it. We’re willing to accept when we need to make accommodations for ourselves, we can accept when our bodies start to give out, but so often I and others with mental illness discount external factors that might exacerbate our mental illness, or just make life harder. I’ve had multiple therapy sessions in which I walk in thinking I have nothing to talk about and halfway through my therapist will say “Sounds like there’s been a lot going on. A lot of stressors. How are you handling that?”

The question usually confuses me because I forget that much has been going on.

I suspect that for many others, just like myself, when you’re used to operating on full anxiety alert all the time, it’s hard to recognize when that anxiety really does match what’s going on around you. That means that it’s hard to cut yourself slack when the world really is making things harder for you. That’s one of many problems with living in a state of constant crisis. You cannot recognize and deal with actual crises.

With the realization that a change in medication is actually a pretty big shift and these side effects are really hindering my ability to do anything, I’m cutting back on extra stuff. Going into survival mode until I can get back in to my shrink and get a different med. That’s ok. It’s temporary. But I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t realized that bad medication is a minor crisis that needs to be dealt with.

So if you’re noticing that you’re falling behind and feeling overwhelmed with everything…it might not be the time to try to get rid of those emotions. It might be time to listen to those emotions and see if there’s something going on in your life that needs addressing. It’s far too easy for us to invalidate ourselves, since we spend so much time dealing with emotions that don’t make sense, but sometimes we do need to trust those emotions.

You got this friends. And so do I.

Now excuse me, I have more Pokemon to play.

Featured pic is me, self caring.

Bad Things Will Always Happen

One of the things that many people who struggle with depression or mental illness find extremely difficult is understanding what it means when people say that life can be better. It’s very easy to look at the bad things that happen to basically everyone at some points in life and wonder how things will feel or be better. It’s especially difficult to imagine how other people can go through life without being overwhelmed or sad about the state of the world as a whole. When you’re a naturally fairly reactive person, it can seem as if the only way to not be hurting is if nothing goes wrong.

I have good news and bad news for people who are really struggling with the idea of imagining recovery.

The bad news is that bad things will always happen. Sure, getting some of your emotions under control and learning better ways to interact with people will probably improve your external circumstances to some extent. If you’re doing relatively well at your job and not getting into fights with your spouse, things will feel calmer overall. But there will always be random, nasty things that happen. In the last two weeks I’ve lost my key card for work (which was also holding my bus card and gym membership card), popped a tire on my car, had another tire on my car repeatedly go flat, and had an unexpected fee added to my rent bill.

All of these things are stressful. This kind of stuff isn’t ever going to stop happening. It’s the nature of life that unexpected things happen. Sometimes good things, sometimes bad things.

This is where the good news comes in: bad stuff doesn’t always feel that bad.

All of these things were things that I could deal with. None of them put me in a financial situation that was untenable, I’m fully capable of fixing all of them with a few phone calls or a trip to the lost and found of the bus service. Of course it’s a nuisance and things I have to add to figuring out in my day to day life, but none of them is the kind of irreversible issue that can’t be solved.

The total revelation for me came when I realized that I can both be upset and frustrated, and still be functional and capable at getting stuff done. Maybe I need to run off to the bathroom for 15 minutes and cry in frustration, but then I’ll pick myself up and fix the problem. This might not seem like a revelation for some people, but when a stressful event can trigger a complete meltdown, it’s amazing to realize that the stress and anxiety isn’t a bad thing and it doesn’t stop you from being competent.

There is often an assumption, especially in the more competitive and high test areas of society, that if you have an emotional reaction to something, then you aren’t handling it. That can snowball quite quickly, as feeling the emotion will trigger feelings of inadequacy or a sense that you’re out of control. The emphasis on logic over emotion tells us that if you’re feeling an emotion you’re not in a state to deal with problems. That’s straight out not true: one of the most important skills of being an adult is the ability to feel an emotion and act in a way that isn’t dictated by that emotion. In fact feeling stress, anxiety, unhappiness, or anger at situations like these is entirely healthy and can help you set up ways to keep them from happening again (in cases where you might be able to be more proactive).

So for those who feel mired, imagine this: something stupid and shitty happens. You get a parking ticket. You feel annoyed and frustrated, but you get in your car, you drive home, you pay the ticket, and you cut out something fun in the next week to make up the cost. And then it’s over. It can be that easy. That’s what recovery looks like.

 

Depression and Dance

For quite some time I’ve noticed that my mental health and my ability to enjoy dancing interact in bizarre and often unpredictable ways. Movement is often quite good for depression and anxiety, particularly movement that requires just enough though to get you out of your head. Dance in particular has a way of turning into a kind of exhilarating protest against depression, and during some of my very worst times it has been the only way that I can find enjoyment in my life.

But oftentimes depression itself can keep you from finding any enjoyment in the activity because you’re second guessing yourself, you’re comparing yourself to others, and for me, I was even looking at how skinny other women looked in their nice dresses or cute shorts rather than paying any attention to my dancing at all.

I’ve often been left in a space where I contemplate going out to dance utterly uncertain whether it will save me from a bad day or leave me spiraling downwards even further. So why is it that sometimes dance is a lifesaver and sometimes it’s destruction? Perhaps even further complicating the matter is that I’ve noticed recently when I go out to dance and I’m in a decent mood, I am a much better dancer. I have better dances and because of increased confidence and the ability to play around with my partners, I simply have more fun. It’s left me questioning whether I was even capable of improving beyond a certain point when I was in the midst of depression.

As one of my coping mechanisms, dancing has been incredibly helpful. But how on earth do I figure out when it’s a good idea to hit the dance floor and when I should try to avoid it? How do I feel good about dancing when I’m down if I know that I’m not going to be my best dancer self? What is the point of dancing if there’s all this ridiculous complicated bullcrap going through my mind in a kind of calculus of “will I be ok” every time I go out?

These questions hit on one of the most difficult elements of depression across the board: it can be deeply unpredictable, and coping mechanisms are often unreliable. I keep dancing because oftentimes it’s the best I’ve got. Sometimes, the high from a good night of dance can keep me going for a week, looking forward to the next time I’ll get it. Considering the fact that when I’m in a bad place nearly anything can send me into a shame spiral, it’s certainly worth the risk if there’s even a chance that I might get the positive benefits.

The longer I’m depressed, the easier it becomes to match coping mechanism to mood, and paying attention to what sets off certain bad spirals can do a lot to make things like dance a more positive thing overall. I’ve started to get the feel for whether I have the energy to become fiercely pissed off at my depression and drop everything to dance, or whether I am trapped in my head and exhausted. For me, going out alone is the best idea when I’m in a bad place because it means I never have to try to converse, I just have to dance. This is part of using coping methods effectively: figuring out when and how to use them.

Part of learning coping skills is also learning when to abort the mission. This is one of the difficulties of using something that you love as a way to improve your mood. You don’t want to abort the mission. You want to find the good dance, the happy moment, the high. That isn’t always possible, and accepting that is hugely helpful to cutting off bad spirals. Sometimes you will go out and it won’t feel good and you’ll just have to leave.

But what about the interaction of my ability to dance and my depression? Well of course i’m better when I’m not body checking every few seconds. The dance that I do is about fun, so of course I can embody the feeling of swing music significantly better when i’m not in a mood directly antithetical to it. But that doesn’t mean that I’m a bad dancer or that I’m not learning anything when I dance in the midst of depression. It means that I’m learning how to navigate my body, learning steps, learning how to follow better, even if I can’t get into the musicality in the same way. I can focus on a different set of skills here. And in many ways that is fun. It’s a practice of getting out of my head and working on discrete skills rather than trying to work on the more artistic aspects of dance.

It is a fallacy of depression that one should only do things if one will be good or perfect at them, or that one must always be their very very best (or keep trying to be better always). Sometimes it’s ok to simply do something for fun with no eye to improvement (gasp). Sometimes it’s ok to just be where you are today rather than trying to be better or the best version of you. Improvement is a great goal, but it doesn’t need to always be the goal. In this case, I probably am improving something when I dance while depressed: my coping skills and my ability to manage my emotions. Points for me!

Swing dancing is really an expression of energy, body, and connection. These things are all incredibly hard when you’re depressed but when you can capture them they can go huge lengths to making things better. That’s why it’s just easier to dance when you’re in a better place, but why it’s so important to keep trying when things are bad. That’s also why it’s so complicated: all of these elements are deeply out of whack in the midst of depression and can change at any time. But this might also be a case where overthinking isn’t helpful: checking in with my emotions before I head out for the night, learning to accept where I am and  leaving early if I need to may be all the more tools I need in this toolkit.

Because seriously: I love dancing. I’m not giving it up to my mental illness anymore.