Start All Over. Make a New Beginning. Again.
So how do I dig myself out of this one?
As I alluded to in my last post, I have hit a sort of cognitive rock bottom. I say cognitive, because it’s not rock bottom in any other sense of the term. Life is pretty good. I have a wonderful husband, good friends, a loving family, a nice apartment in a safe city and warm fuzzy cats to snuggle. So life is by no means rock bottom. And emotionally, I could be a lot worse, I could have spent the past month in bed, but I haven’t. The truth is, I have managed to keep up with the housework and aquarium chores at a passing grade. I’ve watched some TV series and thus have not abandoned television, one of my passions. So emotionally, I could be a lot worse too.
But cognitively I couldn’t be much worse. This goes back to the whole “I am nothing” mantra that I have taken upon myself to repeat endlessly until I believe it. Or, as I should clarify, my depression has taken upon itself to repeat to myself until I believe it. Because I am not my depression. My depression is its own evil entity that lives in my brain and tries to control me. And it has succeeded for a long while.
Time for it to not for a while. So how do I get out of a cognitive space that’s telling me I’m nothing? My therapist has said I need to just not think these days, to be distracted as much as possible, rather than to replace the thoughts with better thoughts. Don’t replace thoughts, just don’t think at all. But I am a chronic over-thinker and he has yet to tell me just how to accomplish this no-thinking thing. Maybe that’s for the next session. But now I’m feeling a little better and my depression is indeed sufficiently distracted that I’m wanting to bite off a little bit more of a challenge: getting out of this.
So how do you challenge the belief your depression has instilled in you, in my case, that I am nothing? Now of course, the deepest way is to learn to be OK with being nothing. To accept it, to love myself anyway. Yeah, right. Like that’s achievable any time soon. No, the best way to tell my depression it’s wrong is to prove that I am not nothing. So how am I doing this?
The first thing I did was on Saturday. I have this app for my MacBook that allows me to post pictures and notes to my desktop like it’s a virtual corkboard. I have Twitter going on one side of my screen (good for that distraction thing), and I have a gTalk window, and then I have pictures and notes in the remaining space. I chose on Saturday to restart this app, as it were, by going through my iPhoto and throwing up photos that remind me I am not nothing, remind me of the things that bring me joy, that I am capable of, that I have enjoyed this year. So my desktop is currently a collage of drawings I’ve done this year, a pie I made that was a huge success, flowers I bought, my new aquarium fish I love, an event I went to recently that was pure joy, and a graphic I did in the spring for the title of my novel. They’re just gentle reminders to myself that I am not nothing. I am something. I am capable of things.
Then today I’m starting to contemplate the next step. Should I get back to my daily routine which I keep track of with the Habit List app? Or do I return to RPGing my life, something I haven’t worked on since March? I looked at my personal character tome for myself and discovered that since I last looked at it, I have completed a lot of goals. That’s not nothing. I think today I will start from scratch with tracking my experience points and levels for the various categories of my life. (For more info on how RPGing your life works, and it’s one of the best tools I’ve come across, check out the book The Nerdist Way by Chris Hardwick.) In other words, I will start writing down what I accomplish (eg. ate healthy non-ice-cream breakfast, showered, did the kitchen, wrote this post), and gently start working towards some goals perhaps. Also, I downloaded a new composition app that gives me a fresh place to write, one without any emotional baggage. That has helped, as you can likely tell.
The thing about hitting rock bottom, in whatever sense of the word, is that there is only one way out: up. And it’s a chance to rebuild your life, and such chances are frequent when you have depression, but still golden opportunities. Every day is the first day of the rest of our lives. Every day is not too late to get better, to do better, to be better. To be not nothing.