It’s been a bit of a rough week, between the return of DepressedBrain and the fact that all the cottonwood fluff flying around Chicago has me wheezing. So I’m keeping it simple for the blog today.

1. Everything is overwhelming. I’ve been giving myself a pretty packed schedule (particularly for the introverted homebody that I am), and while I was manic, I was handling everything fine. Now, though…I’m recognizing that this might be part of the reason I’ve been more anxious the past couple of weeks. DepressedBrain is easily overwhelmed.
2. It’s really hard to focus. I’ve been finding myself forgetting things a lot. I’ll walk into a room and not remember why I was headed in that direction. Today I got a support request call at work, and after I took the notes and assured the caller I would take a look at it, I hung up and promptly forgot that there was something that needed looking at. Imagine my embarrassment when they called back later to ask if I’d been able to make any progress, and I had to tell them I had been sidetracked and hadn’t gotten there yet. (Thankfully, they were extremely gracious, and I was able to knuckle down and deal with the issue once I hung up from that call.)
3. Nothing is particularly exciting. I am a passionate person. It rarely takes much to get me excited about things, and when I get excited, I am like a small child: I bounce around a lot and I don’t shut up. But my passions are often intimately tied to my mania. New things that I know I was excited about two weeks ago have lost their luster. Even things that I’ve been excited about for years aren’t doing much to raise my energy level. I feel trapped in this perpetual state of “meh.”
4. All I want to do is sleep. This is often the case: I’ve been particularly sleepy since diving into the whole second puberty thing. But it’s harder to wake up now than it has been in a long time. I also have this sinking feeling that I should be expecting a visit from the insomnia monster sometime soon, which never helps.
5. Everything hurts. This is a pretty common state of being for me (I have back and knee problems, and chronic pain is so normalized by my experience that I forget that not everyone deals with it), but between the dampness outside, feeble attempts at Aikido, and the fact that those “depression hurts” commercials really weren’t lying…yeah. It hasn’t been fun. (The silver lining of this is that last week I discovered the miracle that is Tiger Balm. As someone who has a rather ridiculous tolerance for things like ibuprofen or aspirin, finding something that makes my knees feel like they might not explode when I go up and down stairs is a pretty huge deal. So that’s been nice.)