Keeping my head above water
Nov. 24th, 2019 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
breakinglight11As I mentioned near the beginning of the month, I am not doing well now in terms of mental health. Haven’t been for some time now. I am more or less keeping it together, taking care of my commitments and responsibilities about as well as I ever do, but I’m pretty ragged mentally and emotionally and it’s been hard to feel this lousy all the time.
My willpower is so shot right now. It makes it hard to take a lot of steps to take care of myself, to build habits that will make me healthier. I am basically a sugar vacuum, completely unable to curb my intake of my two worst eating habits, Coke and chai lattes. I’ve been trying to stick to a social media diet, as all the sad things in the news make my anxiety skyrocket, but I have no discipline to keep myself off of it. I think both of these things are really hurting me in my efforts to manage my current mental state. I feel like a small child that needs a nanny, to pack her a healthy lunch and pry the smartphone out of her hands.
I have managed a few positive things. I’m lucky that I can basically always make myself keep exercising, so at least that hasn’t fallen by the wayside. I’ve even instituted a few new good things. Since Inktober 2019, I’ve been drawing almost every day. Lately I’ve been doing portraits of people’s faces, usually somebody in a television show I’m currently watching. I’m not very good, but I am getting noticeably better even over the course of just two months, which pleases me.
And I’ve been managing to make myself read a little from a book most days. My focus for reading anything long form has been HORRENDOUS in the last decade, after being a voracious reader as a child, which is a source of extreme frustration and shame to me. I keep trying to get back in the habit and failing at it; I think I’ve managed maybe one or two books a year in the last ten. But I saw an article recently that recommended setting a ridiculously low bar for anything you wanted to make yourself do that didn’t come easily— like setting a timer for as little as ten minutes a day. This has helped me get into Daughter of Empire, Pamela Mountbatten Hicks’s memoir, slowly but surely, as sometimes I find I can continue past the ten minutes. I really hope I can keep this up. I’d rather read books slow as molasses than continue not reading them at all.
And I’ve been buying these little precut packets of carrots, celery, and snow peas from the grocery store. They’re cheap and I can throw them into my bag in the mornings. Even though I can’t seem to curtail my sugar habit, I am at least upping my vegetable intake. I tend to consume my sugar drinks on top of a basically healthy diet, but this counteracts when I don’t have time to cook for myself, as is often the case lately.
Overall I’m still pretty down, low in emotional fortitude and feeling weirdly raw. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how while I have a lot of basically good structure in my life, I have been unable to make any meaningful change to it in a very long time, and it makes me frustrated and sad. But it would mean a lot to me if I can get these things to stick. Even if they don’t fix how I’m feeling, it would be nice to feel like I was making some kind of forward progress— that change for the better was somehow possible.
My willpower is so shot right now. It makes it hard to take a lot of steps to take care of myself, to build habits that will make me healthier. I am basically a sugar vacuum, completely unable to curb my intake of my two worst eating habits, Coke and chai lattes. I’ve been trying to stick to a social media diet, as all the sad things in the news make my anxiety skyrocket, but I have no discipline to keep myself off of it. I think both of these things are really hurting me in my efforts to manage my current mental state. I feel like a small child that needs a nanny, to pack her a healthy lunch and pry the smartphone out of her hands.
I have managed a few positive things. I’m lucky that I can basically always make myself keep exercising, so at least that hasn’t fallen by the wayside. I’ve even instituted a few new good things. Since Inktober 2019, I’ve been drawing almost every day. Lately I’ve been doing portraits of people’s faces, usually somebody in a television show I’m currently watching. I’m not very good, but I am getting noticeably better even over the course of just two months, which pleases me.
And I’ve been managing to make myself read a little from a book most days. My focus for reading anything long form has been HORRENDOUS in the last decade, after being a voracious reader as a child, which is a source of extreme frustration and shame to me. I keep trying to get back in the habit and failing at it; I think I’ve managed maybe one or two books a year in the last ten. But I saw an article recently that recommended setting a ridiculously low bar for anything you wanted to make yourself do that didn’t come easily— like setting a timer for as little as ten minutes a day. This has helped me get into Daughter of Empire, Pamela Mountbatten Hicks’s memoir, slowly but surely, as sometimes I find I can continue past the ten minutes. I really hope I can keep this up. I’d rather read books slow as molasses than continue not reading them at all.
And I’ve been buying these little precut packets of carrots, celery, and snow peas from the grocery store. They’re cheap and I can throw them into my bag in the mornings. Even though I can’t seem to curtail my sugar habit, I am at least upping my vegetable intake. I tend to consume my sugar drinks on top of a basically healthy diet, but this counteracts when I don’t have time to cook for myself, as is often the case lately.
Overall I’m still pretty down, low in emotional fortitude and feeling weirdly raw. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how while I have a lot of basically good structure in my life, I have been unable to make any meaningful change to it in a very long time, and it makes me frustrated and sad. But it would mean a lot to me if I can get these things to stick. Even if they don’t fix how I’m feeling, it would be nice to feel like I was making some kind of forward progress— that change for the better was somehow possible.
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Date: 2019-11-25 03:54 pm (UTC)Depression (and some medication for depression) can really tank your ability to focus on books. I've had a lot of problems with it, even when I'm well. I found that reading books electronically helped some, but it can still be a struggle.
I hope things improve for you soon. Sometimes the most you can hope for is to endure the down times, so don't be too hard on yourself if that's "all" you do.