Depressed Tamar Was Depressed, part two.
So, I had a short downswing over the last month or so, and I want to document it and what I think helped. It was pretty nasty at the worst of it, in 'I haven't been this bad since I was fifteen' sort of way, and I let everything go for a bit. My house's cleaning shedule got fairly abandoned. It started a month and a week ago, which I know because I saw the doctor a month ago and mentioned that I thought I was going into a downswing.
Following that appointment I didn't really leave the house for a few days, and had very little anything to do anything with. Maybe for pub and RoY? Time looks very weird, because it doesn't feel like very long, but I have objective evidence that it was a month. I wonder if I say '[whatever] has been going on for a week or so' quite often when [whatever] has been happening for a while longer than that. There were quite long times where I didn't get dressed in the morning (or afternoon), and Alex was bringing me breakfast in bed before he went off to be useful and then we'd eat upstairs in the evening as well. Sometimes I helped with the cooking, but not really.
I kept inviting people over for Dominion on Fridays, and made at least an appearance at the pub on Tuesdays and larped on Sundays even if Alex had to hold my hand all the way there. (My 'list of things that it's unthinkable to miss' seems to expanded somewhat, which pleases me.) I had a few occaisions of going outside for the purposes of Having Fun, once even without someone holding my hand! (that was on Friday)
Things I think helped: When I had access to spoons, I used them on something either useful or pleasurable. Usually washing up, putting things away, or washing my hair. Things that would make things either happier or easier. When I felt up to getting dressed, I got dressed, even if that was just dragging on some jeans and socks with whatever shirt I picked up first. It's surprising how much difference wearing socks makes to how difficult impending tasks look! Sometimes I'd just put socks on, even if I was still in my pyjamas and was thinking about having a shower later. There are always more socks. It doesn't matter if I make washing, because they're socks, they don't take up much room.
Related to 'wearing socks' - if I was cold, I'd have the heating on (having the flu for the last two weeks made it a lot easier to stop feeling guilty about that). Being warm, being fed, having tea and having the curtains open enough that I could see the sky are all things that mean that my body/mind aren't diverting resources to compensating for those things, which means that recovering might have a chance of happening. If I'm dizzy and mood-swingy from low blood sugar or being dehydrated, I'm going to feel even more crap than usual.
I let myself rest rather than push through the fatigue, and I surrounded myself with people who love me and let them do things for me. Sometimes I even asked for things, like the breakfast-in-bed! I made an effort to believe their words when they told me that they loved me and that I wasn't terrible and that throwing my dressing gown at me from the door wasn't a super-huge favour of magnitude such that I could never pay it back, and while I didn't manage all the time, choosing that over and over often halted the bad-self-talk and self-destructive paranoia-cycles. When I started to feel it setting in, just over a month ago, but before it had hit properly, I invited as many people as I reasonably could over to my house to chat and eat tasty food in small groups so that I could reconnect with people who I like and be reminded that I have good friends!
My house has got to be a bit of a tip, especially given that roast dinners use a lot of pans and cover everything in grease (but result in MEAT and roast potatoes, which are good foods to make a person feel better and also the cooking of which awards Useful Person points if one is collecting those), so I shall have to slowly un-fuck my habitat now that I seem to be more okay. Today I got up, put clothes on, went to uni for a meeting (where I managed to get off to a good start Being Useful), and when I came back I did a load of washing up to start it off. Next I shall heat some soup in a saucepan for my lunch, and that shall be close enough to cooking, hopefully, to prompt my body back into the habit of cooking something when I'm hungry rather than looking mournfully around the kitchen and then sitting somewhere and crying about it.
Ooh, that's another addition to the 'list of things which help': having food in the house that requires little to no preparation time. Crackers (with or without cheese), yoghurt, frozen pizza, ready meals (well, not so much any more seeing as I have no microwave, but in That House a couple of years ago ready meals saved my life), granola (it's like flapjack without the butter and sugar!), tinned soup, apples and other fruit. The fish and chip shop around the corner meant that Alex didn't need to cook things all the time, as well, and I remember when I was living in Tuke Av before That House, the chippy around the corner meant that I could eat something hot (remember, warm = less drain on resources/spoons) before having to work out how to cook my dinner. Having a stock of takeaway places is also useful, and being able to order and pay online especially so (if I haven't left the house in days, I probably haven't visited a cash point either).
Being on the antidepressant meds seems to help, too - I swing down less frequently and for less time than I used to, though I also have some very weird moods sometimes and haven't had a super-super-super-focussed-productive wah-day since, but those were never especially common in any case, tended to make me feel like the world was about to collapse in on me, and hardly anyone could understand a word I was saying if I tried to explain anything. (It was one of those in second-third-year when I was fidgeting so much I got told to run around the building and then come back to work, took the sheet of paper I was error-checking with me and returned much quicker than they'd expected and having identified the error and solved the problem in my head.)
So yeah, long may 'feeling okay' continue!