I feel almost obliged to assure whatever readers I have that I'm not nearly as depressed of a person as my posts make me out to be. I'm pretty happy on a day-to-day basis, but I guess it makes sense that I would tend to blog when depressed.
Anyway, I'm not depressed right now, but I've been in a very reflective mood after reaching a certain age milestone. Thinking about how I could have lived my past couple decades differently, but also thinking about how I could not possibly have avoided the many regrets of those years without the recovery process I'm going through now. I'm grateful that I can look back on those years and see a person in terrible, unspoken pain, and not the selfish asshole I sometimes fear I am.
I think about the person I could have been had it not been for my parents' constant emotional abuse and neglect since infancy. I probably would have been faster, more confident, maybe even an extrovert. Would I have developed the same interests? I don't know. Where would I be now? I'm not sure the question even makes sense, considering that I never was that person. In a way I'm asking about another person's life, because that person wouldn't be ME.
I think I still have a lot of mourning to do, but not for the childhood stuff that I've been working with lately. My adulthood has been emotionally tumultuous, even if my relationships and career have been mostly stable. I was an alcoholic for a long time. I think I spent a lot of time self-soothing by perfecting my work in an OCD sort of way. I say “emotionally tumultuous,” but really I was numb and self-medicating. This disconnection from myself led me to make a lot of mistakes and miss a lot of opportunities.
Sometimes I feel extremely bored with life. One day fades into the next. I have chores. I have work I want to do but probably won't. I have to eat, even though I don't want to. The same circadian mood and motivation shifts, day after day after day.
I was just thinking about how I have nobody to talk to, and then I remembered that I have this blog. It's been an emotionally draining few weeks. Nothing particularly dramatic going on, just everything seems to be going slighty wrong or sideways in one way or another. My wife and I have another “divorce” fight. Long, draining road trip. Big, teary makeup session. A small professional setback. I get another batshit email from my mother. I process an important childhood experience. A health flare-up. Therapy.
And any time I'm not dealing with a crisis, I'm trying to catch up on household tasks that the previous crisis kept me from.
And stellar energy and emotional resilience aren't exactly my baseline.
I definitely need to rest, but I feel silly saying that, because I've spent much of my time bedridden (couchridden). I need to reset, which means couching it for a little while longer, as much as I hate doing so. I've always been a low-energy person who needs a lot of rest (thanks CPTSD); I take things slowly because rushing is triggering to me. So anything that slows me down is only compounding an existing problem, and I have things I want to accomplish.
Had my first real IFS session with a real IFS-trained therapist, and . . . I didn't get past the initial relaxation exercise without breaking down and crying.
I'm definitely in a depressive rut. I don't know why I feel like that's such a profound thing to say, especially for me. I just think it's important to honor feelings like that, especially when they're as simple and free of conflict as this one is. I guess it helps me avoid CPTSD spin-outs, too.
. . . after some reflection, I wonder if I'm not depressed so much as releasing some of the unhealthy anxiety that has been driving me since I was . . . uh. . . . born. I get this idea from the fact that I'm doing something that I've only done in very rare periods of my life: procrastinating on work and not constantly looking for work to do. I know these are things that most normal people do instinctively, which is why they so easily become bad habits. Right now I'm lounging on the couch writing my little blog while my wife thinks I'm preparing to teach. I almost never play that kind of hooky. And the times when I have been this easy-going have tended to be the happier periods of my life. I also think I might not be depressed because I'm actually feeling more confident in my work and relationships lately, and I'm getting better rest and exercise. It's easy for the trauma survivor to mistake a change in pace for the all-too-familiar downward spiral.
It also feels like I'm no longer trying to take neurotic control over the world around me -not in a particularly assholish way, just obsessively “doing” all the time so as to not feel the guilt of resting and being passive. Anyway, that's how it feels now that I've had a good cry about it.
Ok, this has been a good example of writing helping to clarify my thoughts and feelings. I need to do this more often.
It took a few days for me to get up the motivation to try my new resolution at all. I just don't . . . want to do it. I don't want to meditate or do cardio. I'm definitely depressed. I don't think I've had quite this flavor of depression in a long time. My usual energy is actually quite nervous, always looking for and usually finding things to do to occupy my mind. I'm always trying to think of things I can do to “save time” later, even though I never seem to take advantage of that time with rest. An avoidant anxiety, to be sure. But lately I just can't care what I'm doing. I'm fine whiling the day away playing games on my phone. I don't want to improve anything. I don't want to work. I don't want to exercise. I don't even want to rest. I just plainly and petulantly DON'T WANT TO. And I feel this strange moral right to not want to.
I think I'm just crashing, to be honest. I finally got some real rest this weekend after weeks of one stress after another. That's probably the only reason I had the energy today to hold off on weed until 3 pm (my daily life is extremely boring) and do 30 mins of cardio early in the day. Baby steps.
Several factors are colluding and pretty much necessitating that I make some changes for my physical and mental health. I'm starting to get winded after alarmingly little exercise, and being high all day is becoming more of a burden than a crutch, so I really need to cut down on the weed and start doing 30 minutes of cardio each day. I also had my first session with a trauma-informed therapist today, and he advised me to do ten minutes of meditation each day, so there's another reason to cut out the weed.
I'm not very good at sticking to habits like these, but I think it will help if I keep thinking of the problems and solutions as all interrelated, as I just described. Once again, I feel like I'm starting a new period of my life, with new habits and attitudes, and the changes seem to be coming about naturally, in a weird way. It's surely because of a lot of hard work on my part, but I also feel like I'm just maturing out of things that have served me poorly at best. With the exception of the past couple years, I don't think I've been happy in 20 years, since I was 19.
I've been dreading turning 40, and I'm still not looking forward to it, but there are certainly worse ways to start a fifth decade.
Today in the garden I got caught up in a ridiculous activity: trying several different methods, manual and electric, to remove a splitting wedge that I had foolishly and needlessly pounded into a stump, because I had set it in a place too thick to split. I wasted over an hour on this endeavor, and the wedge is still there. I gathered and bagged up the chips and sawdust for mulch, just to have something to show for my efforts.
Thing is, I didn't really need the wedge or the wood I would have gotten, and that kind of time-wasting usually bugs me. But this time I noticed a certain clarity and calmness of mind afterwards and realized that I had lost myself in the activity, in a healthy processing sort of way, exercising my creativity. Sometimes when this happens, especially in the garden, I think that this is my way of learning to play as an adult, and not only play, but reap the psychic benefits of it.
I think I made a minor breakthrough in my CPTSD recovery today. I was thinking about my emotionally immature parents' particular style of neglect, which involved providing for all of my physical needs while completely ignoring a child's need to be guided through developmental stages and to be taught age-appropriate skills. I was thinking especially about the very basic skills that my parents never bothered to teach me at a young age, like tying my shoes. I spent many years embarrassedly asking peers or teachers to tie my shoes when they came untied, sometimes pretending some reason I couldn't do it myself. As I got older, these missed skills, like cooking, doing laundry, dishes, etc., piled up, and I became adept at avoiding doing or talking about skills that my peers had but I didn't.
This isn't the breakthrough. I'd been thinking about that for some time, and I knew that I had some trauma around issues of competency and intelligence because of it. Of course it's hard for a kid to deal with that vulnerability, even more so completely alone, so that aspect is traumatic enough in itself.
The breakthrough today came when I realized that childhood me must have wondered why his peers had these skills and he didn't, and I wondered what childhood me thought the explanation was.
Of course, what childhood me actually thought is less important than what my inner child spontaneously blurted out when I first pondered the question, which was, “I wasn't good enough for my parents to teach me.” That is probably what childhood me thought. Now another thing I was thinking about today is how children can lose their sense of humanity when a parent is extremely neglectful or hurtful, because the parent's perspective defines the young child's world and sense of self. And then it hit me. By avoiding revealing my ignorance of those skills (which is the same as pretending I had them), I was doing much more than avoiding uncomfortable embarrassment. I was defending, or perhaps faking, my human dignity, which my parents' neglect seemed to confirm I never had. So my sensitivity about competence is really about this anxiety about falling out of the human community out of ignorance.
I haven't yet figured out how to really process this realization, but I feel I connected some important dots.