Tag: depression

Achievement with anxiety

Bones

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When you have anxiety and/or depression, your energy levels are depleted, and so your available energy for normal every day tasks is limited.  This is actually a surprisingly hard concept to get your own head around, let alone for your friends and family to understand.  It took me until very recently to realise that I can’t do everything I set out to do and so I have to adjust my expectations of myself to match.  More importantly, I have to adjust my expectations of myself to reduce my anxiety.

Because I get all these grand ideas about cleaning the house, or knitting a thing, or organising the garage and then the weekend gets here and I hardly have the energy to leave the couch.  I take the dog for a morning walk and then I get back into my PJs and cuddle up on the couch.  Sometimes I have a nap.

And all of this is totally okay.

So what if the floor doesn’t get vacuumed this week or next.  So what if I don’t fold and put away all my clothing.  That is totally okay.  These are inconsequential things that are not actually that important.  I’m conditioned to believe they are important, that if I do not maintain a beautiful spotless home and keep all my clothing tidied up, I am somehow failing as a woman and as an adult … but to me, in the overall scheme of things, they are really not that important.  So I will save my energy for completing tasks that are important to me.  Like walking my dog, and keeping my kitchen clean, washing my work clothes, and sorting out prep-for-university tasks (I’m going back to university again-again-again-again).

Then, if I have energy left over after what I’ve deemed are my essentials, I’ll do some cleaning.  But if I don’t, I don’t push it, and I try not to let myself feel guilty for not doing it.

The walk to wellness begins in the rain

Bones

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The walk to wellness begins in the rain.

For me, it began out the other side of a mental breakdown, after I had hit the lowest point in my life yet and clawed myself back out (with the thanks of the most amazing friends and a timely holiday), when I got sick and had my period at the same time as a storm rolled in.  A real one, with dark clouds and rain and thunder and lighting.

My anxiety had been overwhelming.  I’d begun a new job, I was working with new people, and I was undertaking new tasks.  I was overtired.  It was the first real chill of winter, and my mood dropped.  I didn’t want to do anything, I didn’t want to get out of bed.  I just wanted to be an amorphous blob.

It was during that time I realised something had to change, and it would need to start now.  So on my way home from work I went past the supermarket and picked up magnesium, vitamin B mix and vitamin D.  There was a sale on all vitamins at the time – it was a sign that it was time I got myself into gear and start taking better care of myself.

This was about 3 weeks ago.  I’ve been on them since, which has improved my energy levels and plateaued out the extremes of my anxiety.  6 days ago I began meditating for 5 minutes every morning, which has helped to calm those extreme peaks even more.  Yesterday I went to the doctors and came away with a script for fluoxetine, and I’ll begin that in 10 days.

This blog is going to be a way to chart my walk to wellness (more of a shuffle, really), with all the difficulties involved with recovering from narcissistic abuse, sexual abuse, anxiety and depression.  Add a dash of autism in there and we’ve got ourselves an interesting ride, folks.