Category: Depression

Good Days, Bad Days

As anyone who’s ever fought with depression and anxiety knows. we have good days and bad days. Fortunately, the last couple of weeks were mostly on the good side and definitely on the busy side. In addition to working around prep work for the Fleur de lis exhibition, I’ve been lining up the next few rounds of projects. I’m just hoping I don’t over-commit myself as I’m usually prone to do and then end up regretting my project schedule on the bad days that will come along.

In the time between my Fleur de lis prep-work and now, Blizzard released the 8.2 Rise of Azshara patch World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. I’ve been actively watching the Women’s World Cup tournament and cheering on the American team. And, of course, in the U.S. we’ve also celebrated Independence Day this week. So, non-work hours have been and continue to be busy.

In art projects, I’m already doing pre-work and design work on projects for the next three Soulard Art Gallery exhibitions as well as a couple of personal projects. I also do church sanctuary and altar decorations and started working through the next few months projects for that.

In writing projects, I’ve signed up for and will be attending a Veterans Creative Writing Group through the St Louis Va Medical Center. This is a once a week session with writing based on a prompt and then reading and responding to each other’s pieces. I’m also working on a couple of other writing projects, some of which will be appearing here soon.

Clipart stolen from Clipartmax.

Father Martin

Over at Sober Coaches 4 Living‘s blog they’ve got several videos of Father Martin.

I’m not Catholic, but as a long-time 12 stepper, I’ve seen Father Martin’s incredible videos before. This is a real treat and my thanks to the bloggers there for sharing these.

If you’re not familiar with Father Martin, or don’t know where to start, at the very least I recommend this video:

12 Steps of AA with Father Martin.

The Hardest Part of the Twelve Steps

The 12 Steps is a reoccurring theme here for multiple reasons. But first among them is I believe in them and I live by them.

The hardest part of the 12 Steps is Steps 8 and 9:

  • 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
  • 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Of course, with these two steps the difficulty begins the first time through the steps. Part of the difficulty is not so much Step 8, it’s easy to make the list of people you’ve wronged. Step 9 is difficult in and of itself. You have to swallow your pride and apologize for things you’ve done that hurt others.

Step 9 is further complicated by a couple of caveats in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions: 1.) “There will be other cases where action ought to be deferred, and still others in which by the very nature of the situation we shall never be able to make direct personal contact at all.” and 2.) “While we may be quite willing to reveal the very worst, we must be sure to remember that we cannot buy our own peace of mind at the expense of others.”

I mention this because part of the responsibility of a 12 stepper is a constant inventory and review. For me, it seems like every time I review through these two steps, someone who was on a previous Step 8 list and was unavailable for Step 9 contact suddenly becomes available for Step 9 contact.

And, once again, this happened recently.

Clipart stolen from Clipartmax.

What a Bad Day Looks Like

Since my last post mentioned bad days interfering with writing and art projects, I decided to focus this post on what my bad days look like.

Of course, since no two bad days are identical, I can only give rough overviews of how mine tend to go.

The mornings:

Three things tend to happen here: I wake up extremely early (before 7am-ish), I wake up extremely late (after 10am-ish), or I didn’t go to sleep the night before. Normal waking up for me is between 7am and 730am with or without an alarm.

After waking up, the fun of getting up begins. These are two entirely different processes. Waking up is I’m awake. Getting up means getting out of bed. It’s always hard to get out of bed, but even harder on a bad day. Part of the lies depression tells is that “you can’t screw anything up, if you don’t get up.”

Getting to work:

Since unemployment/self-employment is a normal part of my life, my work day begins with starting up the computer, checking messages, and either prepping a Word writing page or an art page (either on the computer or on my drawing table).

Some bad days that Word document may sit empty or only get a few word thrown in. The art project may still be a blank sheet after several hours of “work”. Other bad days, the Word document is deleted multiple times because nothing feels right when I reread it. The art project may now consist of multiple pages tossed aside, or started-and-stopped sketches over multiple pages in a sketch book.

End of the work day:

I may still be on attempt three of reading the same two or three paragraphs in one of the books I’m reading. I also may have spent three hours staring at the page and comprehending nothing of what I’ve read. Normally, I’ve got at least one nonfiction book I’m reading for research and one fiction book I’m reading for pleasure and research.

Work breaks:

My main work breaks usually involve World of Warcraft gaming, Facebook stuff, or random internet browsing. On the really bad days, I accomplish almost none of them.

Other features of the bad days:

  • brain fog where my brain feels like mush
  • eating is either eating way too much all day long or forcing myself to eat the one meal I will eat that day
  • random napping throughout the day

The really bad days have found me laying on the couch with Ancient Aliens or some other similar program that requires no critical thinking skills running in the background alternating with napping. Throw in overcast/rainy days or winter days and just about everything on the nonproductive side escalates.

Clipart stolen from Clipartmax.

On Used Book Sales, Hockey Playoffs, and Other Excuses

This past week or so has been a busy week in some regards and a not so busy week in other regards. Here are some of the excuses I have for why I didn’t write much this past week:

There were a couple of used book sales in the local area at the tail end of last week. Somehow, my wife and I managed to make it through both only spending about $30. It helps that we both have book lists of specific books were chasing at these book sales.

Also, the NHL playoffs are ongoing and the Boston Bruins and the St Louis Blues, two teams I follow, are both still in the playoffs. I’ve had way too many late night sessions watching or listening to games go overtime. As a result, there’s been some further twisting to an already twisted sleep schedule.

And last, and certainly not least, this past week has been an off week for me productively due to anxiety and depression days. Since my own experiences with anxiety, depression, and ocd are a focus for this blog, I decided to not make excuses, apologize, or hide the fact that sometimes bad days will interfere with writing and art projects I am working on because:

  1. It’s not fair to anyone who follows this blog for the mental illness stuff.
  2. It shows that good and bad days are just part of the deal, even when you’re properly medicated. and
  3. It’s not being honest with myself and one of the reasons I write this blog is that there’s too much bad information about mental illness floating around.

Clipart stolen from Clipartmax.