depression

Bright Spots, Dark Days

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers! I’ve been procrastinating writing a blog post this week, because, frankly, it feels like there’s not much to write about. The days blend into each other, as you all know.

I realized in therapy on Monday (right at the end of the session, of course) that I’m showing some key signs that I’m in a depressive episode. This makes complete sense given everything that’s happening in the world, but it hadn’t really occurred to me that I was feeling particularly down, because I wasn’t so much down as just…numb. I’m having a hard time responding to things with appropriate emotion. For example: thanks to the stimulus check, I realized I’ll be able to pay off my credit card in May. I have a very small balance left on the card. I’ve been working my ass off for two and a half years to pay down my debt, and I should be over the moon. Instead, I’m just…like, I know it’s a big deal, and there’s a part of me that’s proud of myself, but mostly I just don’t feel much of anything about it.

I told my therapist, after coming to this realization on Monday, that I was going to approach this numbness with some curiosity. I’m learning to observe what my brain and body are doing without getting lost in them. So far, I’ve realized that it’s more pervasive than I had initially realized, and I’m a little surprised that it snuck up on me so easily. I think, when I was hit with overwhelming grief a few weeks ago and then felt that pass, I thought I’d somehow avoided or bounced back from depression, but…I think I was wrong.

Despite all of this, I am still trying to find the bright spots. Here are some things that are making me smile, even as I wish I could feel more enthusiasm:

  • The trees outside of our apartment are starting to green. The one that’s closest to our sunroom window, in particular, which has given me so much trouble with my allergies but that I love anyway, has gone from bare (save its little pollen bombs) to buds to the first tender leaves in the last week or so, and it is comforting to see that nature is getting on with spring despite what’s happening with humanity.
  • I may not be responding with the appropriate enthusiasm to the idea, but I am genuinely relieved that my credit card is about to be paid off. There was a long time when I didn’t believe it was possible and thought I’d be saddled with this debt forever. It hasn’t been a smooth path – I had some setbacks and definitely made mistakes along the way. But I made a plan and worked really hard at it and now I’ve managed to actually do the thing, which feels really great.
  • I’m starting a new D&D game with some friends tomorrow night, and I am so excited! I’ve been quietly trying out voices for my character while I work (I don’t always do voices in games, but some characters demand a little something extra), and I think I’m landing somewhere between Giles (from Buffy) and C3PO, and it’s entertaining. Whether I’ll be able to keep it up in game, I don’t know, but I’m having fun with it.
  • While it’s unfortunate that it took a pandemic to get us there, I’m really glad to be connecting more with friends and family. There are people I feel closer to now that we’re socially distancing than I ever have.
  • My partner and I haven’t really left our apartment in about three weeks, and we’re still getting along. We were both a little worried going into this, as two introverts in a one-bedroom apartment, but I have to say, we lucked out. I don’t know how I’d be functioning if I was living alone right now, but I also wouldn’t be able to do this with roommates. I am determined not to take any of this for granted.

Attempting Optimism

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been another kind of hard week. I’m tired, I’m achy, I got an unexpected medical bill, and I’ve been feeling cranky and out of sorts a lot of the time. However, I am attempting to look for some bright spots – not because I think everything needs a silver lining, but it’s easier to get up in the mornings and get through each day if I have things to look forward to. So here are a handful of happy things:

  • I was able to play guitar this week! A couple of weeks ago I picked up my guitar and couldn’t play, because my hands hurt so much. Thankfully, despite the fact that they still hurt, I’m finding that I can play some things, as long as I mostly avoid barre chords and don’t capo up so high that I’m having to cram my fingers into smaller spaces. So that was exciting and encouraging.
  • My department at work is going bowling tomorrow. I have admittedly mixed feelings about this – both because of how much socializing is involved and because my hands have been hurting and I can’t imagine bowling is going to help that. But I do enjoy bowling (even though I’m pretty bad at it), and it means a few extra hours I don’t have to work, so that’s good.
  • I’m getting super excited for FAWM. This will be my third year participating in this challenge, and it’s always a magical time. This year, I’m planning to get some serious work done on my 78 Songs project, where I’m writing a song for every card in a tarot deck. I’ve been “working” on this project for years and have almost nothing to show for it, so I’m excited for the external motivation to get some of the work done. This FAWM I’ll be tackling the major arcana, which is comprised of 22 cards. Since the goal is just to write 14 songs, I started working on them this week, and have two songs done and another set of lyrics started, so that feels like good progress.

What things are you excited about or looking forward to?

Coming Out

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers! This blog post is going up late today, because I did not write it yesterday and also because I stayed home from work today to catch up on sleep and fight off the headache I woke up with.

I’m also not really sure what to write about this week. They still haven’t caught the perpetrator of the two shootings in our neighborhood that I talked about last week, so we’re still a bit on edge, trying to figure out how to navigate our neighborhood in a way that feels safe right now. Also, on a national level here in the US, things are pretty overwhelming right now. (If you’re a US citizen and haven’t checked your voter registration or haven’t registered to vote, do so now. We need everyone to show up and vote in November. Voter suppression is a serious reality in a lot of places right now, and voter rolls have been purged in some states as a part of that, so check your registration even if you know you were registered before.)

We did have the lovely experience on Monday of seeing our friend Heather Mae play a show in our neighborhood. We got to spend a while before and after the show catching up with her and hanging out, and that was great. Go check out her music if you’re not familiar with her stuff – she’s fabulous!

Yesterday was World Mental Health Day, and today is National Coming Out Day. So I think to close this blog I’m going to combine the sentiments of those two days and tell you a little bit about myself that you may or may not know:

I am queer. Queer is a label I’ve chosen because it represents so much of who I am. It describes my orientation – I’m attracted to all sorts of people of all sorts of genders. It describes my gender – I was assigned female at birth, but realized in my mid-twenties that that didn’t fit; I’m now living and presenting in such a way that I’m read as male by the world at large, but in my heart of hearts I really don’t identify with binary gender at all. Queer also describes my brain – I have Bipolar II Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, both of which I was finally diagnosed with 9 years ago, and which I’ve been medicated for ever since. A few months ago, I had to seek out a psychiatrist to get my meds adjusted – I was manic and anxious as hell for a solid month. It was miserable, and I still don’t know how I managed to get anything done during that time. Since getting my meds adjusted, I’m feeling much more capable of handling all of the anxiety that comes from life right now.

I choose to be out and proud about all of these intersections of my identity, but I can make that choice because I live with a great deal of privilege. I have safe, nurturing spaces where I can be myself. Not everyone is so lucky. If you’re struggling with whether or not to come out today, remember that your safety comes first, and that your identity is valid regardless of how public you are with it. I see you; you’re real. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. May we all work toward a world in which “coming out,” whether it’s in regard to sexuality or gender or mental health or anything else, doesn’t carry so much weight and fear with it.

Down

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’ll be honest with you, dear readers: I’m not feeling great. I’m currently being paid a visit by the Depression Monster. While nothing in my life is logically all that awful, there have been enough hard things lately (not to mention the dumpster fire of global issues in the news) to trigger a downswing in my Bipolar cycle.

The good news is that my recent med adjustment seems to be helping: I’m not particularly anxious. The bad news is…well, I’m depressed, and there’s no anxiety to distract from that. I have to grapple with it head-on, and I’m out of practice with that.

I know that my brain will even itself back out in the end. This current space is just a hard one to occupy, especially when the whole world feels like it’s burning.

Which, I guess, is all to say: hang in there, friends. I know I’m not the only one struggling. Hold your loved ones close and prop each other up. None of us can do this alone, but together, we’ve got a fighting chance.

Winter Blahs

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I am having a very blah sort of week. I’m not sad, exactly. I just feel very unmotivated, and tired, and nothing sounds like very much fun or like anything I want to do. All I really want to do is hibernate.

It wasn’t until I was on my way to therapy on Monday that I realized that this is probably a weird instance of the depressive side of my Bipolar cycle sneaking up on me. Usually when I’m heading into a depressive episode, I can tell – I feel really down. But “down” doesn’t feel like the right word for this. It’s just…blah.

It was a struggle to get anything done at work last week. It was a struggle to write my song for songwriting class (and my goal was actually to write TWO songs last week). It was a struggle to get myself to show up for my volunteer shift and for the social things I’d committed to doing (even though all of those things ended up being fine). I had a minor breakdown last Thursday evening, because I got home at the end of a long day, and even though I’d made a plan and knew what I should get done, none of those things actually happened. I got things done, but none of them were things on my to do list, and I felt like an enormous failure.

Since I was able to identify this as depression on Monday, it’s been a little easier – if not to find motivation or give-a-damn, at least to sit quietly with the blah-ness of it all and recognize that this, too, shall pass. Yesterday the sun was out, and I had the same revelation I do every time we get through a cloudy spate of days and come out the other side into sunlight – I am incredibly affected by the weather. I should probably definitely be taking vitamin D.

In the meantime, I’m finding ways to cope. I’m listening to a lot of Dar Williams (even when I’m not listening to Dar Williams, my brain’s playing The Christians and the Pagans or The Babysitter’s Here or When I Was A Boy). I’m taking time to write down what I’m anxious about. I’m thinking a lot about the Starfinder game I’m going to start playing soon. I’m dreaming up new tattoos (even though I can’t afford a new tattoo right now). I’m celebrating the fact that I pushed my credit card debt down under the next $1000 since making a payment last week and getting a disputed charge taken care of. (I’m trying not to be disappointed that I haven’t gotten farther in the process of paying it off.) I’m trying to remind myself that while yes, I probably should be reading and knitting and writing more, the fact that I’m not doing it right now does not mean that this is what my life is going to be like forever. Once again: this, too, shall pass.

Brains Can Be Sneaky

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Being Bipolar is an adventure.

Sometimes, I can feel the shifts in the cycle coming, like the ache in my joints when the weather changes, only the ache is in my brain and it feels less like an ache and more like an electrical current under my skull.

Other times, it jumps out from behind a corner, beats me up, takes my lunch money, and leaves me wondering what in the world happened to get me here.

This week has been an example of the latter. I have so many things to be excited about, and so much to work on to get there, and yet DepressedBrain has decided to come to visit. I’m so tired all the time, and I’m spending way more time than seems necessary feeling paralyzed by the sadness.

With DepressedBrain has come what feels like a particularly paranoid iteration of AnxietyBrain. My internal monologue seems to get stuck on an endless stream of worst-case scenarios if I let my mind wander. Which, as you might imagine, is a super fun time while waiting to find out if my insurance is going to cover this otherwise extraordinarily expensive surgery that’s now less than a month away.

Still, it does feel like things are falling into place, and I am tentatively hopeful that everything is going to work out.

Sweaters and Self-Care

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Last month, I probably mentioned once or twice that I was working on a sweater, one that I hoped to have finished by the time I went on my camping trip.

Well, I finished it…but when I blocked it, it grew at least six inches in length, and didn’t gain the couple of inches in circumference that I needed, and long story short, it doesn’t fit at all.

I was so disappointed…I’d put so much effort into the sweater, and the finishing work (reinforcing the button band and sewing on the buttons) was spot-on. A lot of friends tried to give me suggestions of ways I could try fixing it, but…well, I’d have to remove the buttons and reinforcing ribbon from the button band to try any of them, and I really don’t think anything is going to make it fit the way I want it to.

I finished the sweater on a Wednesday. Thursday is knit night at our favorite local yarn store, and I decided that, rather than be totally demoralized (or, you know, work on any of the other three sweaters I have in progress…), I was going to buy yarn that I had used before (and therefore could predict how it would block out), and start a swatch for a new sweater.

I didn’t get started on the actual sweater itself until this past weekend, but I’ve already got one sleeve done, and have started on the second one. It’s a very basic pattern (the only particularly interesting feature is a couple of cables on the front panel, which I’m saving for last), so it’s been some very soothing knitting that I’ve been able to work on while reading and thinking (and, sometimes, just staring off into space).

Sometimes, self-care looks like mindless sweater knitting.

And sometimes, self-care is finally contacting the therapist whose business card you’ve been carrying around for two weeks, and making an appointment.

As of this past Monday, I am officially back in therapy. I’ve got some shit to work through, some major emotional processing that I’ve been avoiding for months. It’s a little overwhelming and scary, but I know in the end it’s exactly what needs to happen, both for my own sake and the sake of everyone I interact with.

Adjusting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I am going to be honest: I really want to write something happy this week, but I’m really not feeling it.

I have dealt with chronic pain for years, but have never brought it up to a medical professional (or much of anyone, really) before, for a variety of reasons. I went to the doctor on Saturday (luckily, my insurance card finally made it to me on Friday) with the intention of changing this, because it’s been getting steadily worse, and is starting to affect my quality of life in ways I’m not okay with.

Long story short, I spent three days waiting to hear back about lab results, wrestling with the fact that I’m probably looking at either rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia – in other words, a thing with pretty straightforward treatment options that will probably be increasingly debilitating as time goes on, or a thing that is super nebulous and hard to treat that’s debilitating in different ways.

I finally got the call from the nurse on my way home from work yesterday – these initial lab results were nothing definitive, but they weren’t normal and indicated the possibility of RA, which means I now need to schedule some further tests with a rheumatologist. And whether it’s the weather this week or the fact that I’ve been actually acknowledging that pain is happening recently, I’ve been in more noticeable amounts of pain all week. So now I am grouchy, and anxious, and generally struggling to focus on much of anything else, even though I realize there’s nothing I can really do about it right now.

Hopefully next week I’ll have more of an action plan together and will be up for writing something more profound or happy or, at least, less “woe is me”. For now, though, I’m going to give myself time to adjust to the fact that pursuing a diagnosis for whatever-this-is might illuminate the best way to deal with it, but it also means it’s real, and this is a reality I’ve been ignoring for a while.

Faulty Coping Mechanisms

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Sometimes (and this should come as a surprise to no one)…I make mistakes.

I knew, all through last week and most of the week before, that I was starting to run low on my medications. I put off sending in the refill request, because my new insurance card hadn’t come in the mail yet. Last Thursday morning, I took the last pills I had. My insurance card still hadn’t come, but I didn’t really have a choice; I put in the refill request.

Unfortunately, my insurance card continued to not show up, and the pharmacy didn’t get going on the refill right away, and I was feeling very overwhelmed and low on spoons and doing a terrible job of expressing to my partner what was happening, and, long story short, I had no meds over the weekend.

I’ve been on the same duo of medications for six years. There have been times when I’ve run out of one or the other (never both at once), or missed a day, but neither of those things have happened often, and neither have happened at all in probably two years. I had no idea what to expect. I assumed that I had a day or two, at least, before it really started working its way out of my system, but beyond that? Not a clue.

I felt increasingly off as the weekend progressed. I finally told my partner what was happening on Sunday. Monday morning I overslept  (in part because it was stormy and so dark outside that I think my brain decided it couldn’t possibly be day, and I turned off all but my last alarm in my sleep), which meant that I was already not in the best place when I got to work. A few hours into my day, I realized I was feeling pretty shaky. I started sweating profusely. My head hurt. It gradually dawned on me that the withdrawal had finally hit.

I logged into my pharmacy’s online portal and saw that the one medication that was most likely causing the worst of the withdrawals had been filled, and my old insurance had covered it (I’d forgotten that I submitted a refill request when I got a reminder email from the pharmacy a month prior, then realized that, because I only take half a pill per day, I didn’t actually need it yet, and had never picked it up). I decided I’d head to the pharmacy after work and at least pick that one up.

I ended up leaving work around lunchtime, because I realized that the withdrawal symptoms were only going to get worse, and headed straight to the pharmacy, feeling increasingly desperate.

As it turned out, even though I didn’t have my new insurance information, I was able to use a clinic discount to get my other medication at a reasonable price as well. I tried not to beat myself up too much as I headed home with the medications I probably could have picked up over the weekend, before things got out of hand.

Thankfully, in the midst of getting my brain back on track, I’ve had plenty of folks around to help me keep moving. A friend invited me to join a weekly roleplaying game, which meant I got to spend a good chunk of Monday and Tuesday coming up with character ideas. Tuesday evening was the game, and there’s nothing quite like several hours of collaborative storytelling to get you out of your own head. Work has been especially busy, which has been challenging, but has also provided a really good gauge of how quickly my mental state is improving – I felt so much more capable of focusing and getting work done yesterday than I did on Monday, which was encouraging.

I’m still waiting for my insurance card to show up, but now HR is aware that there’s a problem and is working on rectifying it. I’m making myself a list of appointments I need to schedule when it finally gets here (and I’m hoping it comes before the appointment I have scheduled for this weekend). Finding a therapist to help me work through some of the underlying emotional things that are siphoning off my supply of spoons is at the top of the list. I am not letting myself get back into the position I was in at the beginning of the week every again, if I can help it.

Here’s to finding new and more reliably effective coping mechanisms.

Drifting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m writing this Wednesday evening, and it’s already been a long week. Between humidity (and who knows what else) causing pain and multiple items of unexpected (and not particularly happy) news causing anxiety and an unusually high level of work drama causing frustration, I’m not in the best place right now.

On top of (and, maybe, because of) it all, I’ve been really struggling to focus. I feel like I’m drifting aimlessly through my universe right now. It’s not so much that I feel lacking in purpose…I just don’t have the energy to devote to moving in any particular direction right now.

I’ve been thinking more lately about belief, spirituality, and ethics. In some ways, I feel like I’m having a super understated existential crisis…there’s nothing particularly earth-shattering going through my brain, and I’m not panicking. There’s something immensely comforting about being able to articulate the basics of one’s beliefs in an organized manner, and that’s something that I feel like I’m currently missing. What I want to do is make a concentrated effort to work through and be super conscious of the belief system that’s shaping how I live my life. Because I’m so low-energy these days, that’s a challenge, but I’m gathering resources and thinking a lot about it, which seems like the place to start. Several years ago I gave myself permission to ask questions; now, I think I need to give myself permission to find answers. I’m not at all interested in organized religion, but I’m slowly identifying which pieces of religious life I miss and feel a need to recreate on my own terms. There aren’t many of them, but they’re there. Meditation and ritual are two things I am finding mean a lot to me and to my mental health, and I’ve been working toward finding ways of reincorporating them into my life, but so far it’s been pretty freeform, and (as much as I hate to admit it) I think I need a bit more structure there.