the thoughts and experiences of Heather Meadows
Yay.
I don’t know what else to say. There’s a lot I can’t talk about publicly. And I feel like the personal stuff will just be a rehash. Sheltering in place due to delta etc., terrified about climate change, horrified by cruelty, doing practically nothing all day, not seeing much of a point to anything.
I guess that covers it.
I had one of those moments where it feels like you’ve thought of something really profound, but it’s also something completely obvious. Here is the thing I thought of:
Everything in life is preparing for doing, doing, and cleaning up after doing. Doing is all we do.
This miraculous epiphany came to me as I was tidying up after baking cookies. I’d been thinking about how people spend a lot of time and effort preparing to do things like go kayaking and then doing those things and then putting everything away after, and how I used to spend a lot of time and effort this way for hiking and photography, and how after roughly a year and a half of rarely doing anything outside the home, going to all that effort just to do something outside can seem so pointless. Over the long weekend I put together a TV stand (with a fireplace in it!). I also made blueberry muffins from fresh blueberries I picked at a friend’s house, but I didn’t hear the timer for some reason and they got a little burnt. This is why the next day I made cookies. All of these things involved a lot of preparation, time for the actual doing, and cleanup. And I thought, this is all there is. This is life.
We do some things because we must in order to survive. We do some things to help others. And we do some things, like the kayaking and hiking and photography, because we enjoy them. We expend effort on them because they are worth it to us.
Depression is not wanting to do things because you don’t see the point. Or at least, it is for me. Depression is not finding that enjoyment in anything.
I have paid attention to my depression for long enough that I can tell when I am in danger of slipping into it, and that has been very useful for managing it. My depression is not caused by not doing things, but not doing things can exacerbate it.
Thinking that “all there is to life is doing” felt like a depressive thought yesterday, but pragmatically, it’s just a general description of activity. There are so many variations possible within those loose guardrails.
I had my bike tuned up the other day. It’s a pain in the ass to get it up to street level from our apartment, and it’s a pain to get it out of the apartment complex too—I either have to half-carry it down a cliff, push it up a hill that is a struggle just to walk up, or shove it into the back of my car and take it somewhere else. But cycling is something I used to do all the time, regardless of the effort involved, because I loved it. Hopefully, I can recapture that feeling. Hopefully, I can start wanting to expend effort on doing things outside the home again.
Until today, I hadn’t updated since October. There just hasn’t seemed to be much to update about. Sure, I’ve done things, but they aren’t particularly exciting. I’ve posted a few photos on social media here and there when I’ve done things like redecorate the dining room. But posting on my blog seems more “official” than social media, like I need to craft something rather than just sharing. My previous post is probably a reaction to that.
It’s also a reaction to the fact that the pandemic is still happening.
This whole situation has been wearing on me so much. I’m just tired. I want to be able to do things again. I want to see my family. I want to spend time with friends.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter, tweeting with lots of people and having fun. It’s not the same as seeing people in person, but it at least felt like being with others. I have grown to really like and care about many people there. It turns out, though, that Twitter is not a substitute for real interpersonal relationships.
I wish I had posted on Saturday, because I was in a decent mood then. I baked some fig thumbprint cookies using a bunch of figs I got from an online friend who has a huge fig tree in her yard, and they came out pretty well. But I just didn’t get around to posting, and then yesterday I woke up at 4:45 due to anxiety about the situation the US is currently in, and from there I plummeted into a deep depression. I hate to only write when I feel terrible. I need to think to do it more when I’m happy.
Anyway I spent the day watching stuff on Disney+: Treasure Planet, The Mighty Ducks (first film), and DuckTales (2017). I forgot to take my antidepressant at lunchtime, which may have been a factor in my feeling awful all day. However, I am attributing this particular low to stress and anxiety and fear, about basically everything.
I took today off because I’m in no state to accomplish anything.
I had another low point recently. I was in the middle of it when I wrote my last update on Sunday, and then it got worse. I came out of it on Tuesday the 21st, and this week has actually been pretty good: I got a lot accomplished at work and ended the work week on a high note.
I was telling Sean last night that I’m still not sure if there’s something that kicks these lows off, or if they’re just something that happen to me. I don’t really know what to measure in order to look for a cause. There are so many potential variables: food, my period, how much physical activity I’ve had, stress from work, stress from the state of the world, etc. Just the thought of tracking the depressive periods themselves is daunting; I’ve never been good at maintaining a daily log of anything. (I’m a free spirit!)
This blog has a long archive of my depressive periods; I wondered about them back in 2016 when I hit what seemed to be a permanent low. Things have gotten better since then. I found medication that mostly works and I have a good therapist. But the lows do still come, even if they don’t last as long as they used to. It seems like all I can really do is try to wait them out.
Anyway, I’m feeling better now.
I finished Chihayafuru season 3 and oof. I didn’t realize it would be cliffhangery. It apparently took nearly 6 years for this season to come out, and it ran from last October to this March, so it will probably be some time before we get a resolution, if we get one at all. Maybe that’s for the best, though; I can pretend Chihaya and Taichi and Arata live happily ever after as a triad.
My uncle Steve went to the hospital recently and is now in a care center, working to get well enough to go home. (It’s not coronavirus.) He’s not dying necessarily but he could, so that’s been on my mind. Uncle Steve is Dad’s younger brother, though not the youngest. He and Mom are the same age (they’ll be 72 this year) and they get along really well. They have this cute kind of sibling relationship. So she has been checking in on him and watching over his care, which as a former nurse she is highly qualified to do. Uncle Jeff (the youngest Aubrey boy) is also checking in on him frequently. AJ has been visiting Uncle Steve regularly for a long time now and I’m sure he’ll keep that up. I worry about all this, what with coronavirus, but I also know that Uncle Steve needs people right now. It’s a hard time for him. So while I worry, I’m really glad he has everyone.
As a side note, I really admire how much AJ does for his loved ones. He does what he can to take care of everyone: visits, cooking, organizing parties/camping trips, mowing lawns, and building things (he has some serious carpentry skills). I’m so glad Mom has him to look after the house and yard. I’m also glad he’s such a good example for Connor and Logan and all their friends, and Krystal’s kids too. He’s just good with kids in general. He wasn’t always, but he is now and it’s great to see.
Anyway, aside from all the bad things happening generally and specifically…it was a pretty decent day. I had Shane’s for lunch and sushi for dinner. Can’t go wrong there. I also did a fair bit of writing, which was great, since I’ve been in a bit of a lull since before the depressive period hit. I hope to write more tomorrow, and I think I should probably also get outside some to get some fresh air and vitamin D and hopefully avoid getting down in the dumps. For now, though, bed!
Please be warned: this post has a lot of depressive thoughts in it. I am just venting. I need to get it out somewhere. Don’t read it if you aren’t feeling strong, please.
Not having a great time at the moment.
I ran out of my antidepressant on Thursday morning, and I have no idea when my pharmacy is going to refill it. I’m skating around my usual depressive thoughts of “what is even the point of anything?”, wanting to dive into them and indulge in misery but also knowing that it won’t help me.
I feel like I should document stuff but I also don’t feel like documenting stuff. I’m tired and nothing seems worth doing.
That’s it, I guess.
haha, the last update was posted on May 4, and it’s now May 26. Amazing.
I wrote this on May 18:
I’m doing okay, except not. It’s super weird. I’m going about my business, working, doing creative writing, eating and sleeping properly. But there’s low-level anxiety at all times, and I feel trapped. My birthday’s coming up, and I’m getting a nice four-day weekend, but I’m unhappy because I can’t go anywhere. I want to leave. I want to be somewhere else.
Now I’m at the end of that four-day weekend, and I’m feeling pretty crappy. I have gone on one walk, and I went to pick up food a couple times, but otherwise I’ve just been in the apartment…unsurprisingly. I did get a burst of writing done on one of the days, but it wasn’t on my WIPs, it was all new ficlets. Yesterday (Monday) I did a little cooking (that worked out) and baking (fucked it up) and watched NCIS all day. Today I am severely depressed and it’s really frustrating and annoying.
Anyway, here are some bullet-list updates for every day since May 4 based on the photos I took.
This is the update for Tuesday, April 21, 2020.
I haven’t written anything creative in I don’t know how long—a week? Longer? I don’t feel like there’s much to look forward to right now. With so many people, including the governor of the state of Georgia, being shortsighted and foolish about this pandemic, it seems like shelter in place will never end. Not having an idea of when it might end makes it hard to be positive. I can’t make plans. I don’t know when I’ll see my friends and family again.
I went to the store this morning because I had a prescription ready. I covered up as much as possible, including wearing a hat and tucking my pant legs into my socks, and of course I wore a mask and gloves. While I was there I looked for a few things that we didn’t get in our curbside pickup order on Saturday and that Sean wasn’t able to find in the store when he checked that same evening. I snagged some toilet paper and paper towels (which I had been really worried about), some frozen fish and veggies, a couple frozen dinners because I figured I could make them fit in the freezer (and I did, with effort), some more dinner sausage, lunch meat, cheese sticks, Slim Jims, various Knorr noodles, two boxes of au gratin potatoes, and soy-flavored ramen.
The only thing I really wanted and couldn’t find was Knorr Alfredo noodles. I got a bunch of imitation crab, so I hope I can find Alfredo noodles online or something. Maybe the crab would be okay with garlic shells? I dunno.
I miss sushi. I’m going to look into whether any sushi restaurants are doing takeout. Maybe we can have some on Friday. That would be something to look forward to.
Today I had planned to do a video chat with a coworker and friend at lunch, but I wasn’t feeling up to it, so I rescheduled with her and spent my break watching Haikyuu!! instead, starting season 3. Seasons 1 and 2 had kind of accelerated pacing; character arcs I would have expected more time to be spent on were done very rapidly, with some even wedged in as retcons/flashbacks. It wasn’t bad, per se, but I like it when the story spends a little more time on things like that. Season 3, on the other hand, is all about a single 5-set volleyball match, the final prefectural match before nationals. They stretched things out so much that an entire episode was spent just on the opening ceremony. It’s quite a contrast to the first two seasons, but I enjoyed it. I enjoy the show in general; all the characters are really fun. I finished season 3 after work and look forward to checking out the OVA and what’s out so far of season 4 soon.
I’m at a point with a lot of my work where I have to wait on other people, which can be hard for me. I also had a lot of trouble focusing for much of the workday, I think because of anxiety over going to the store/the situation in general. I had to drink some sweet tea in the early afternoon to get myself back on track. Fortunately, it seemed to work. My brain got unstuck and I was able to make good progress on a project that involves a lot of problem-solving style thinking. By the end of the workday I was actually feeling pretty good.
After work I made frozen fish, creamy garlic shells, and Italian-style veggies (Sean did not care for that mix of veggies) and we watched Haikyuu!! and an episode of NCIS.
I went to bed feeling pretty decent.
Today is bad.
I was very anxious yesterday and that seems to have bled into today. I read a description of what it’s like to die of COVID-19, which was probably unhelpful. I also saw a bunch of news stories about the morons who are protesting shelter-in-place because they can’t stand being inconvenienced and don’t care who dies as long as they can get their hair cut. Out there spreading the virus around even further, trying to kill everyone.
I got up sometime after 8 and sorted my pills for the week. I didn’t bother getting dressed. I warmed up the leftover sweet and sour chicken and rice from last night and ate it over the next few hours as a combined breakfast and lunch. My day started at the dining table, but I got really upset and started crying, so I decided to go back to bed. I took my laptop and watched some Haikyuu!! and tried not to get any more anxious.
I’m afraid Sean was exposed to the virus when he went into the Kroger and he brought it back to me and I’m going to get sick. It’s not really an irrational fear, but it’s certainly an unhelpful one.
My chest feels congested and I’ve been coughing the past couple days, but this could be related to pollen. I’m really trying not to overreact to everything.
I’m just a giant ball of fear and anxiety and despair today. It’s not pleasant.
This is the update for Tuesday, April 7.
It wasn’t a great day. I didn’t go on a walk…I’ve been avoiding it ever since my walk at the river where there were five billion people around me. I also only took two pictures, and they were both of my dinner.
At lunch, I wrote:
I just want this to be over.
This morning I let myself sleep in for 20 minutes. When my timer went off I didn’t get up and I didn’t reset it. Fortunately I was awake enough to finally force myself to get out of bed. It helped that I had to pee.
Today has been the worst in terms of focusing on stuff. I feel like my brain doesn’t work. I’m taking Friday off, but I don’t know how much that will help.
Today’s food:
Around mid-afternoon I started to spiral into depression, but I was able to talk myself back out.
So I see from old posts that I’ve been over 150 since the end of March. I was wondering how long it’d been. I had to buy new jeans, size 12, and even those are now getting tight. I don’t know why I am retaining so much weight. I briefly tried to diet a couple weeks ago and I felt like I was starving the whole time. I feel awful, I have digestive issues, and lately I have acid reflux as well. I guess I am just eating badly and not getting enough exercise. I’m also really stressed out and generally unhappy.
I’m going on vacation soon, and I’m hoping that will give me the opportunity to relax and remember what it’s like to enjoy myself.
One good thing: I started taking Super B Complex, and I no longer have the sort of depression where I loathe myself. I still get depressed, but it’s more over feeling trapped and helpless than over feeling useless and stupid and ugly and terrible. So that’s been a nice change, at least.
I feel shaky and nauseated and I can’t really concentrate well. I just want to sleep for real and not this weird half-asleep thing. I am yawning a lot and that makes me feel like throwing up and then my hands get all shaky. Please let me adjust to this new medication soon.
I just found out (4:15pm) that a former coworker of mine passed away this morning. I don’t know how or why, possibly due to an illness? He had just updated his profile picture yesterday, and responded to a comment on it this morning. He was not particularly old, maybe 40s or 50s. I am just sort of stunned and sad and I wish we had spoken in greater depth than Facebook “likes” recently.
Time to take evening pills, including the second dose of the new antidepressant…I’m a little nauseated already, here’s hoping it doesn’t get bad…
I feel better than I did last night, but since I didn’t sleep well last night, and I’m tired now, I’m going to try to get some rest. Back to work tomorrow.
Should I be concerned? Part of me wonders that, and the rest of me is like Good, let me just keep losing weight, that is something that culture approves of and nothing else matters.
Whatever.
My to-do list right now is:
These are not in any particular order. I just wanted to visually differentiate “to-do” from “ta-da”.
I thought about putting “kill myself” on there as a joke but decided not to.
#2 is ridiculous. As I said to Rae, “You know that thing you’ve been trying and failing to do for 15 years? Do that today.” I also told her, “I feel like I am screaming at the world, ‘I can’t do this by myself,’ and the world is answering, ‘Too bad. Do it anyway.'” She’s been having her own extremely rough time so she sympathized.
Anyway today I will try to create some sort of schedule system that will be able to take Sean’s work into account. Somehow. Maybe. I should ask him for input but he is at work.
I wonder if, like the day before yesterday, I will suddenly get in a good mood this afternoon. And then the good mood will last through tomorrow morning, and then I’ll be depressed again. Wouldn’t that be a hoot.
So I ate a bit of the leftovers but not very much. My mood started really spiraling. I had a very disturbing thought, which I do want to share but at the same time I don’t because it would worry people. Although given that I mentioned the whole putting “kill myself” on my to-do list thing, I imagine you can guess the nature of it. It scared me a lot and I wanted to tell someone but I wasn’t sure who. I looked at the side effects for my depression medication and it said to tell my doctor if that sort of thing happened, so I called his office. At that point I was terrified so I was crying on the phone. They had me come in right away. I put all the food I had made in the fridge and got dressed and went in.
I explained to Dr. M how I’ve been feeling and what my stressors are, and we decided to try a different medication. We will evaluate in a few days and see if we think anything else is necessary.
I went straight to the pharmacy to get the new medicine, but it turned out they didn’t have it on hand, so they called it over to another Kroger for me. I drove over there, stopping for a chai tea latte on the way. Once there I had to wait a little bit. At one point I almost spilled my chai on myself. But I was feeling better knowing that I had a plan of action. I guess I can be optimistic sometimes. Or it was the placebo effect.
I got the medicine finally and came home. Sean was asleep. I decided to go ahead and take the medicine with a snack cake and then get dinner later. This turned out to be a mistake; the medicine made me extremely nauseous and fairly dizzy, and I had to lie down for a full hour waiting for the feelings to go away. When I finally did get up at around 8pm I was still feeling a little off, but I went and picked up dinner (chicken tenders) anyway, because I had barely eaten anything today and I needed some protein and calories.
I am still nauseated, especially when I yawn or otherwise open my mouth, but I am determined to finish one chicken tender before I go to bed for real. I hope I can sleep.
So I guess in list format:
I am not sure I really slept? It felt more like a not-restful haze that I would swim out of whenever I heard a noise or saw a light. (I’m not sure what the light was, maybe a car’s headlights?) My muscles were twitchy and when I got up I felt dizzy. I decided to try to eat more of my dinner, since I am not nauseated now. I do seem to be feeling better now that I’m eating.
I think I could have slept longer, but I’m also not sure I slept well, because I remember my dream. (It involved me propositioning someone for sex o_o) Regardless, Sean was watching some sort of video and the sound woke me up, even though he was in the living room and I was down the hall in the bedroom with the door closed. Sound really seems to carry in our floor plan. Though I’m not sure there is a floor plan where it wouldn’t.
She asked if I was doing anything for Halloween and I said no, then launched into this whole explanation wherein I made myself out to be some sort of victim just because Sean doesn’t like holidays. Okay, fine. I wish he liked holidays. I also wish we had a kid and I could do holiday activities with them. But just because neither of those things happened doesn’t mean I can’t do holiday activities.
I mean, I know this. Sometimes I’m just like, but it’s a lot of work just for me, and no one will help me. Well, so what.
I keep coming back to one main point, which is: if I want something, I need to do it myself. And this is not an excuse to sit around being miserable, this is a reason to actually do things.
(I feel like this is part of my cycle, though? I get really depressed for awhile until I can’t stand it anymore and then I get all Determined to Make Changes and then I don’t actually do anything. Rinse and repeat. Should I start doing FlyLady again maybe? Have some sort of system for goals and things?)
I am really excited about this! I walked all the way to the end of the entire apartment complex, which is kind of three complexes in one, connected by two bridges over some…ravines that lead down to the river. (I’m sure there is a word for that.) So each branch is the size of a regular apartment complex, basically. I got to the end and while walking back I went down every single side branch and loop. Each main branch involves going down a hill and back up, and then some of the side branches also have hills. There is a fairly steep but short one down on the other end, and then there is an intense, long hill off our branch. I DID EVERYTHING.
I’ve been wondering how much distance the whole complex is, and now I know! Next time I want to do a 5k without having to guesstimate distance, I have an option besides going down to the river.
…okay I just looked at the map and realized I actually missed a loop, because I went alongside the apartment clubhouse instead of staying on the street. But the length of that loop isn’t much longer than the distance I actually walked, so it still works out about the same. ;P
That was great. The weather was gorgeous and I got several pictures of beautiful fall leaves. I’m glad I decided to try for a 5k today :)
Sean is at work, but not feeling well :/ He may need to go to the doctor.
While I was out on my walk I received an email confirming my return to work date. I’ll be back full time this Thursday. I’m a little nervous about how suddenly not having nine hours every weekday will affect my recovery efforts. One strategy might be to take my walk at lunch, but I’m iffy about it because I don’t want to sit around sweaty for three or four hours afterwards :/ Maybe I’ll try to do it in the morning, although that would mean I wouldn’t have much time for anything else then. Hmm. I may think about logistics more in a separate post.
Well, that was disheartening.
Mood swings are fun.
Yesterday it was horrible mood to good mood. Today it was great mood to horrible mood. Just stop.
I am hitting that wall again of “if you want things to change, do it yourself,” and I feel overwhelmed by it, and it seems easier to just do it the way I’ve always done it even though that way is terrible and will burn me out and stress me to hell again.
I want somebody to just…come in here and figure it out for me.
Sean had forgotten we had couples therapy today and so he was napping on the couch in his pajamas. I asked him if he wanted to cancel. He said it was up to me. My reaction to this was to think Everything is always up to me and to say aloud “I don’t know, I feel awful right now” or something to that effect. He asked what was wrong and I said it was the schedule possibilities I came up with and how little time that left for anything and how people say I should share chores but that means I have to figure out how and wouldn’t doing all that planning take just as much time as me just doing the chores myself? Then I said “I hate everything! I just hate everything!” and burst into tears and went to bed.
I am 38 years old.
Anyway, Sean came in and started getting dressed so I emerged from the covers and said “You want to go then?” and he said “Yeah.” So I got up and we went.
Due to Halloween traffic, the drive took an hour and a half, meaning we were a half hour late. Thankfully our therapist didn’t have anyone after us. I’m not sure how useful a session it was. Sean expressed that he is very tired. I expressed that I feel overwhelmed. No solutions were reached. We spent a long time discussing the election, as worry over that might be factoring into our feelings.
Sean is sick and has been having trouble eating. We’re not sure if it’s allergies or an actual illness. But he was not hungry when we got out of therapy even though it was 7:30pm. I said we didn’t have to have dinner, and I was inwardly thinking that I would just skip the entire meal and go to bed. He said that he supposed we had food at home like sandwich makings, so he missed that meaning, which is fine. My disordered eating is yet another thing to worry about.
Anyway he said he didn’t know what to do. Hibachi would be too much. So I said we should go to the seafood restaurant and he could get something small like an appetizer. He realized he could do a bowl of soup, so we did that. This is good because I had not planned on cooking and I literally was thinking of going to bed without eating.
I don’t really remember what I did at home. Got dressed for bed. Poked around online some. Felt awkward and weird and like I would say something wrong to anyone I spoke to.