One of the many weird things about depression is that it retcons your life. Not only are you lying in bed feeling like a piece of shit and that everything is awful, but you start projecting those feelings back along your own time stream - you start low-key believing you've always felt this way, that nothing good has ever happened, or if it has it happened a long time ago.

On January 1st of last year I decided to start keeping a tally of good days and bad days, because I stopped trusting my brain to report on that accurately. I expected to come and look at the tally when I was depressed and go "oh, I had a good day only a few days ago. this hasn't always been like this."

What I didn't expect was that the process of asking myself whether a day had been good or bad would radically shift my perspective on what a bad day was and what a good day was. On the very first day, when I'd achieved nothing and had felt sad and slow all day, I went to put a notch in the Bad Day column before stopping myself:

wait, i thought. has today actually been bad? not bad enough to write it off. i played rummikub online with my partner. i drank some water. i had a long bath. no, today wasn't a bad day.

And so I put a notch in the Good Day column and went to bed. The next day I did the same thing, and the next day, and the next day. Just the process of going over my day every day meant that I found at least one good thing that happened every day. I had a good meal. I went to the pub and was around people, albeit quietly. I went for a walk. I saw a duck. There were days where truly awful, terrible things happened, but even on those days there was always something - even if the something was a simple as We Were There For Each Other or We Reminisced.

On December 31st I put the final tally down. Not a single day had been so bad that I could justify writing it off as a bad day. The bad day column was completely empty.

I'm still depressed, occasionally deeply, but I think I have more perspective. Depression is a physical feeling, and an emotional feeling, but even without trying *something* comes along every day that makes me glad I'm here despite that feeling.

This sort of thing is coming from the same place as my "write down three things per day that went right" method for getting out of depressive states.

The thing I find depression does is moves your mental "Overton Window" - it makes it so much easier to spot the miserable things, the horrible things, the annoying things, the things which went wrong, and it takes time, effort and above all practice to figure out how to shift your frame of reference back in a less negative direction.

local woman who claimed she will "cross that bridge when she comes to it" arrives at said bridge

crazy how this post is over a year old im glad it made such an impact on so many peoples lives

I think people have forgotten what an album is supposed to be

I remember the day that I heard taylor swift’s next album would be called the tortured poets department I spent the rest of it repeating the phrase over and over in my head because something about how it rolled off the tongue bothered me so badly

I texted my sisters like this sometime around then

while you were studying girls i was kissing the blade

who is laios

You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

IM SO SICK OF YOU ALL

No nuance allowed. please share for a bigger sample 💕💕💕💕💕

*by eat i mean how do you prefer your cereal.

I'm only mildly morally outraged by taylor swift. She's kind of the poster child for rich blonde white women but she's not the worst one yknow. She's like the hillary clinton of pop music but I'm grateful that she's not a politician. I do find her lyrics and the way swifties act about those lyrics REALLY funny though. God bless

Some people really whip themselves up into a frenzy about this white woman and her notes app poetry she's getting paid gazillions of dollars for and I'm not convinced it's that serious. Personally. But it's really really really funny. The whole phenomenon of swifties posting lyrics like Can you believe she wrote this herself she's a musical genius. & she's like "I wanted to fuck like a mountain rat / but you were a mouse trap / we're tom and jerry / but like in a straight way" and when you start giggling about it they're like YOUUU DONT UNDERSTAND ART

Reblog so she lives forever.

*if you are on more than one of the medications, choose the primary hormone/hormone you are mostly attempting to raise (like, if you are taking testosterone to transition but also take estrogen medically to treat vaginal dystrophy from T you would be primarily taking testosterone for gender transition)

absolutely criminal how falling into bad habits is the easiest thing in the world while developing positive habits feels like fighting a literal war

hey has tumblr.com as in like the actual website itself been running like dogshit lately. load times have been atrocious. stuff just isn't working. etc.

oh this is because tumblr was storing THREE FUCKING GIGABYTES OF SITE DATA IN MY BROWSER CACHE

FOR COMPARISON:

disturbingly average customer service experience