Apathetic Slip-N-Slide
Reading breakinglight11's post about a sense of imminent depression prompted me to comment on my own state lately.
Things are good, on paper. John and I are very happy, there isn't too much financial stress, and I am participating in lots of things that I enjoy. But I don't feel like everything is great. I feel like I'm waiting for my incompetence to come crashing down upon me. The sense of impending struggle and shame isn't really the worst part, though. It's the knowledge that I'm not really doing anything about it. The idea that I can watch the storm come in and not even try to take shelter in anticipation makes me wonder if I really have grown at all since my homework-induced freak-out days of undergrad. Have my coping mechanisms been set aside or did I only ever have a tentative grasp on them? I just want to sleep all the time. I am regularly sleeping 10+ hours a day, when I can get it. Though, because of my schedule, any sleep pattern is regularly interrupted when I go to school. My low-energy mood is affecting my work, my classes, and my socialization. In the past, such energy dips and fatigue have been a stress response for me. A negative coping response to feeling overwhelmed. Still, part of me wonders if it could be a form of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) or if I have some additional hormonal imbalance due to the periods I have missed recently. No, I am not pregnant. My uterus just 'decided' that when I got married it only wanted to work part-time, so ever since June I've only been having periods every other month. I don't know why. Anyway, all of this sums up to me wanting to spend every day curled up in bed watching Star Trek: Voyager, when what I really should be doing is writing papers and doing readings. Nothing has crashed and burned because of my mood-change yet, but (as I mentioned before) I feel it is inevitable. That's probably part of the problem, really. Once you accept something as inevitable, life becomes a slip-n-slide of apathy towards that inevitability. I would care a lot more if it didn't require me to care. :-P
Listening to myself here, I guess I am depressed, even if it's a far more subtle and far less dabilitating version of depression than I used to experience. The questions is: What am I willing to do about it?
Things are good, on paper. John and I are very happy, there isn't too much financial stress, and I am participating in lots of things that I enjoy. But I don't feel like everything is great. I feel like I'm waiting for my incompetence to come crashing down upon me. The sense of impending struggle and shame isn't really the worst part, though. It's the knowledge that I'm not really doing anything about it. The idea that I can watch the storm come in and not even try to take shelter in anticipation makes me wonder if I really have grown at all since my homework-induced freak-out days of undergrad. Have my coping mechanisms been set aside or did I only ever have a tentative grasp on them? I just want to sleep all the time. I am regularly sleeping 10+ hours a day, when I can get it. Though, because of my schedule, any sleep pattern is regularly interrupted when I go to school. My low-energy mood is affecting my work, my classes, and my socialization. In the past, such energy dips and fatigue have been a stress response for me. A negative coping response to feeling overwhelmed. Still, part of me wonders if it could be a form of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) or if I have some additional hormonal imbalance due to the periods I have missed recently. No, I am not pregnant. My uterus just 'decided' that when I got married it only wanted to work part-time, so ever since June I've only been having periods every other month. I don't know why. Anyway, all of this sums up to me wanting to spend every day curled up in bed watching Star Trek: Voyager, when what I really should be doing is writing papers and doing readings. Nothing has crashed and burned because of my mood-change yet, but (as I mentioned before) I feel it is inevitable. That's probably part of the problem, really. Once you accept something as inevitable, life becomes a slip-n-slide of apathy towards that inevitability. I would care a lot more if it didn't require me to care. :-P
Listening to myself here, I guess I am depressed, even if it's a far more subtle and far less dabilitating version of depression than I used to experience. The questions is: What am I willing to do about it?