Day 298: Skin

My acne has been worse again recently. Not bad enough to make me anxious, but enough to chip away at the edges of my self-esteem. 

It’s a weird one with acne. There’s a very clear point at which it transitions from annoying to actually traumatic. It’s like string bending on guitar (I’ve been playing guitar a lot today): you are playing one note, which you are bending upwards, and upwards, but it feels like the same sound, albeit modified - and then suddenly the pitch rolls over, and it becomes a new note entirely.

I don’t mind having a few spots. I always have a few, at the corners of my lips, under my beard, around my temples. Blotchy cheeks where I sleep against my pillow. Smatterings on my forehead if I have the audacity to wear a hat for even the half hour walk to work. I don’t love it - like a string bend, you can feel the note, in this case your sense of physical self, being stretched, becoming taut - but it holds. You don’t want a picture of yourself on a billboard fifty feet high, you get nervous when people stand right in your personal space, but mostly you’re fine.

But then the acne accumulates past a certain threshold, or you get a breakout of large swollen spots, or a nodule right on the end of your nose, and suddenly you’re in new territory. Suddenly it’s difficult to look people in the eye. Suddenly you sense the world noticing, you walk down the street and you have warning signals flashing in your head, you feel on edge, you sense that you stand out from the crowd. You get on a bus and you feel strangers doing almost imperceptible double-takes, or more likely holding themselves just slightly more composed than usual - the same tension you yourself feel when you have an interaction with someone who has a stammer, or a burn down their face, or a congenital hand deformity, or the like. Some straining in the present moment between you and them, some information you are both aware of and yet cannot state. This is what you feel from everyone when your acne is bad enough, that your skin stands revolting and seeping and pustulating out there in the space between the two of you, that it is a wall that blocks off even the gentle intimacy that may otherwise arise between strangers.

Or else you imagine this, from past traumatic experiences, from moments of adolescent social failure; you assume people notice more than they do. Certainly you yourself only pay brief attention to people you see with deformities, before going back to thinking about yourself. It’s safe to assume others are the same. But you can’t help that stress, that jaggedness. You tell yourself anything you want, it’s still there when you set off out of your house. 

When my skin is bad enough there’s no pep talk I have yet found that can make me confident in facing the world.

Perhaps it is something unique to acne. There are far worse deformities, to be sure, but they tend to be fixed. You are born deformed, and have a fixed image of yourself, or else you become deformed, and you readjust. Like putting a capo on your guitar and playing two frets up. The change is permanent.

Of course every deformity brings its own struggles, obstacles, suffering, pain. But the thing with acne is that your image of self becomes a note bent up and down continuously, the string pulled out of shape, sometimes close to one note, sometimes another, then back down to near where it started, then back up again. It is ever shifting. You adjust, and it changes, and you adjust, and it changes again. Maybe the best analogy I can think of is if you go to bed slim and healthy, and then you wake up having put on fifty pounds in the night. That weight falls slowly off you over the next two or three weeks, until you're back around where you were, and then another day you're ten pounds heavier, then twenty the next day, then forty the next, until a week later when you're severely obese. You stay that way for a week, then it falls right off, and you're back to being relatively thin - until a month later, when you balloon again.

Imagine that happening consistently from adolescence into your thirties.

My skin isn’t terrible at the moment, but it’s far from perfect. I’ve spent close to 20 years struggling with acne, I’ve tried every cream, wash, pill, and diet. It looks to be something that isn’t going away. I will be pushed into that altered state of anxiety by it again in the future. So I guess what I should focus on is getting better at talking about it, being more open about it, bringing the suffering out into the light - and in that way attempt to decrease its power over me.

......

Music: Crosscut Saw, by Albert King. I'm all about that classic blues at the moment. Just listen to that guitar. Sumptuous.

Day 288: Tenacity

Woah pickle. Let’s just pause a second. It’s 2am and I’m just home from work, run down, grumpy, feeling broken. But let’s just pause. This is my two-hundred-and-eighty-eighth day consecutively posting on this blog. What’s that in months? 288, divide by 12, times by 31, minus a leap year, carry the BODMAS...

It’s quite a few months.

I keep catching myself feeling worthless because the quality of the posts isn’t anywhere near where I want them to be. Occasionally I write something that I’m proud of, and it feels great, but mostly it’s just some random words scraped off the inside of my brain at 2am, some squidgy residue, gimpy and festering, scraped off and slung online, not sounding writerly, not saying anything vital, not being honest or poetic or entertaining, just doing it, doing something, doing anything.

But even that, if I pause, if I judge it the way I’d judge it if a friend was doing it, someone I cared about… Even that is incredible.

It’s setting down a habit. Ingraining the routine. It’s personifying diligence and perseverance, tenacity. These are not traits commonly associated with me. Not for so many years lost in the wilderness, assuaging pain with drink or drugs, feeling overwhelmed, procrastinating, giving up.

It was that learned helplessness stuff of depression that I wrote about before. That stuff is so hard to come back from. It infects everything.

And this is not that. For 288 days I have quietly and steadily fought against that, one little post at a time. I have come here and I have said to that inner critic “I am doing this”, over and over again.

Even if every single post was shit - and they’re not, not nearly - but even if they were it would still be such an achievement, if I was able to see it that way. And I can see it that way. I just have to turn away from the ways the old me would have viewed the situation, the negatives he would have picked out, like finding the worms in a field of roses - I just have to turn away from that and turn towards another way of thinking, another way of being. There are roses everywhere, and there are always going to be worms, too. It’s just changing your perception to not get caught up focusing on the worms, honing in on them, staring at them until you can’t see anything else. Because the roses really are everywhere. And if you stop to look, you will notice them more and more.

OK. Good. That’s all very rambling, but good. Going sleep now. Bubyeeee.

……

Music: Send Me a Postcard by Shocking Blue. Oh yeaaaah. Late 60s Dutch psychedelic rock. I mean, just look at that album cover. If you had to invent the album cover for a late 60s Dutch psychedelic rock outfit, you'd come up with exactly that. I love it. It's Jefferson Airplane but even more so. Awesome.

Day 277: Back on track

OK, time to get myself back on track. I knew when I woke up today that I had spent enough time convalescing, that the worst of the depression was passed, and any more time on my back would cross the line into self-pity and self-indulgence.

But still I lay in bed wallowing. I got trapped in a social media loop on my phone, scrolling and scrolling, bingeing on empty novelty, finding nothing nutritious, repeating the same actions anyway. The equivalent of eating through a sharer bag of Doritos, avoiding pain with repetition, the addictive behaviour bringing up guilt and shame, sadness, helplessness, but burying all that with yet more of the addictive behaviour.

Finally I realised I had to move. I thought about what the most important step was right this moment - out of all my worries and issues, what was most pressing right now?

It was getting out of bed. So I forced all my energy into doing this. Then, once up, I made my bed. I took a shower, put on clothes. I tidied my room. It wasn’t exactly messy, but I did what there was to do, put books back on shelves, lined up shoes and slippers, threw food wrappers away, put my camera in its bag and put the bag where it belonged. I meditated. Went downstairs and made coffee, ate a banana, had cereal. Put clothes to wash. Did some reading about depression - know thine enemy - and did some CBT work - know thyself.

- - -

Often, in the depths of depression, one thought above all others ricochets around my skull. “Is this my fault?” Regardless of what I know about the very real and external causes of depression, when I’m suffering and the pain overwhelms me I can’t seem to shake the constant nagging fear that maybe it’s just me being weak and pathetic, maybe I’m bringing it all upon myself by giving up.

I don’t want to get into too much detail here, but suffice it to say my conclusion, which I have arrived at many times before, and need reiterating for myself now, is this: The entire universe is to blame for depression. Every blade of grass, every atom, you, me, God, all the gods, the whole cosmos, it all swirls together in sometimes beautiful ways, and sometimes ways that lead to immense suffering. Depression is part of this. Don’t worry about why it happened and whether you were at fault. It’s here now. It is real.

And yet victimhood is not the correct response either. The locus for change, the pivot point, is the personal self. Your depression will not improve simply by understanding its etiology, nor by blaming others, nor yet by changing laws, by making society more just - you cannot remove past trauma, re-engineer your genes, prevent troubled childhood experiences from causing skewed schemata in your brain from forming. These things need considering, understanding. But they are not the hill upon which you must fight. That hill is the present moment, and the manifesting of all your problems in it. Avoid negative behaviours, ingrain positive behaviours, and you will slowly change your brain chemistry. This is a fact.

As a general rule, action is better than inaction. Even the smallest, most stupid sounding goals can have profound effects when continued over long periods. Don’t stay in bed. Always shower. Eat a piece of fruit. Walk round the block. Do 20 press-ups. Meditate for five minutes. Write a paragraph a day. Create to-do lists for the day and cross them off one at a time, put yesterday’s unfinished tasks at the top of today’s list. 

Doing things helps.

But while doing things, problems will arise. Here, to help me, is a list of some of my problems, and what I can do about them:

Automatic negative thoughts (ANTs) are one of my demons. They arrive suddenly, from nowhere, crashing in. “This is pathetic. You’re worthless. What a waste of time. You're ugly. Repulsive. Stupid. Talentless.”

- What to do: CBT helps here. Catch the thoughts. Notice them. They arise, exist independently for a moment, then I swallow them, digest them, assimilate them, and they are part of me. Note down every time I become aware of one, and it gets easier to catch them in that moment before they dissolve into me. “Aha, that was an ANT. I see you.” That is all that is needed. Make tally charts of every time they arise. For ones with more force do CBT work to challenge them, question their validity. For example: “Do I know with absolute certainty that this blog post is worthless? Can I think of any examples why it is not worthless?” Brought into the light of awareness ANTs tend to shrivel away into nothing.

Rumination is another demon. Related to ANTs, but not quite the same thing. Sometimes it’s an ANT that starts up the ruminative process, but the process itself is the obsessive worrying, round and round, about problems, without coming to any conclusions. Obsessing over why I’m like this, rather than how to fix it. 

- What to do: As soon as I notice myself ruminating it is vital to disrupt the pattern, to get out of that neural network. Concentrate on anything else. If it is necessary then write out everything I’ve been worrying about, put the worries into order of importance, and brainstorm simple plans to tackle the first items on the list. Later worries can be shelved for the moment.

Learned helplessness is something I’m not sure I’ve written about before. It’s a major component of depression, in some models in fact it essentially is depression, the perceived lack of control of situations learned through previous uncontrollable stress and trauma. You can instil learned helplessness in a rat by shocking it or dunking it in water randomly and continuously, until eventually it won’t try to escape even when escape is possible. 

For me learned helplessness manifests as that “woe is me” mentality, overly dramatic, wanting to fling myself on my bed at the first sign of difficulty and tell everyone to leave me here to rot, that it’s too late for me, it’s all hopeless.

- What to do: Again, mindfulness is important. Noticing the thoughts as thus. “This is learned helplessness I’m experiencing right now.” To ask whether past experiences are clouding my current judgement. “Is there actually no way over this obstacle, or do I just feel that way because of learned helplessness?”

(I just felt it then. “There’s no way to finish this blog post. It’s sprawling too far. It's too long. I can’t do it. I need to give up.” So - note it down. Recognise it for what it is. And get back to work.)

Learned helplessness is a system broken through trauma and stress. But the system can be fixed. What was learnt can be unlearnt.

Self-esteem is yet another issue. A far-reaching and wide-ranging sense that I am not good enough, a sort of shadowy lack of confidence leering behind all things.

- What to do: Small actions help. Make lists of accomplishable tasks, and accomplish them. That builds pride. When the feeling comes on, know that it’s a demon, that action is called for. Do not sit and think about the low self-esteem, do not let rumination start up. It’s addictive and ingrained and feels like the right way forwards. It is not. The way forwards is to recognise the danger and immediately act, rather than ponder. Tidy my desk. Do some press-ups. Read a page of whatever non-fiction book I’m reading, to learn something new. Write mindfully about what the low self-esteem feels like, where in the body it is located, how physiology changes. Accomplish even the smallest thing, push forwards a millimetre rather than stay and be pulled back by the demon.

Full depression. And then there are the deeper symptoms that manifest when those others have shunted me fully into a depressive episode. Anhedonia, grief, psychomotor retardation, restlessness, sleep problems, all the rest. That’s where I’ve been the last few days.

- What to do: When this happens think of it like coming down with a bad case of flu, like breaking my leg. Accept the severity of the situation. Drop all other concerns and focus only on allowing myself the time to get better. Treat myself gently and kindly. Call or message people I trust. Go gingerly, but gracefully. Do not reach for pain-relieving vices that will cause more harm than good. Do not drink or do drugs. Do not eat junk food. Shower, if possible. Take short walks, if possible. Watch things on TV I would have liked as a child, guilty pleasures. Give myself little treats. Expect almost nothing, but try not to run to harmful things either. The dark clouds will pass. The sky will be clear once again.

...That's all a loose list, and there are things I've left off, but it's a good start, to help me get back on my feet. Do the things I need to do, stay active, keep ingraining positive habits and behaviours, and when those specific demons show up, as of course they frequently will, deal with them in the ways that have been proven to work.

I am doing so much better than I once was. Healing is not linear, but, wobbly, in spluttering fits and starts, it happens nonetheless. Upwards!

Day 276: A different realm

Took the day off work today to look after myself. It’s hard calling in sick for mental health reasons, I feel like it’s an excuse, like it doesn’t really count, like I’m making it up because I want a day in bed. But the last few shifts I’ve forced myself in, got on with things, and come home at the end of the day worse off than when I began.

I think there’s a difference between how you should act when you’re trying to keep depression at bay - maintenance and upkeep of your mental health - and how you need to act once the worst happens and you fall off that shelf into the trench of depression. Getting exercise, fresh air, socialising, going to work, making plans, pushing yourself - as with physical health, these are good ways to keep existing health up. But if you broke your leg, or came down with gastroenteritis, no one would tell you the solution was to go out jogging until you felt better. Past a certain point convalescence becomes integral to recovery.

Depression is a different realm, with different rules. It is a holistic experience - not the difference of a symptom, but an entire reality, a mode of being that is not the same as the mode of being when you are well. Everyone has experienced elements of depression in the regular unfolding of their lives - sadness, or grief, anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure), anxiety, rumination, troubled sleep, stress response, psychomotor retardation (the slowing of muscles), concentration problems, difficulty making decisions - but depression itself is a state, a world, containing all these elements but larger than their total, a gestalt, and once you are in it the usual rules don’t apply.

So right now I am going very slowly, asking almost nothing of myself, trying to get better. I am having a rest day, and it’s my day off anyway tomorrow, and I am treating myself kindly, watching simple programmes on Netflix that I might have enjoyed as a child, but also showering, wearing clean clothes, eating a piece or two of fruit, still writing this blog.

I have almost no energy, but the energy I do have I want to spend in the right way.

Day 275: Grimace

Depression still on me. Still feeling crushed by everything. Don’t want to speak to anyone, see anyone, do anything. Want to get in bed and stay there forever. Yuck. I feel yuck. Everything is gross. My mind is silt and sludge in all the synapses. The world feels desolate. Going outside is like putting on a suit of armour over all my wounds, my broken bones, and I can stiffly walk back and forth in the armour, all you’d notice would be my face curled into a slight grimace, but I come home and there’s blood pooling in the folds of metal, I take the plates off and slump to the floor.

I’m watching Star Trek Discovery. Just to have some company. I can’t bear to be around anyone but I don’t want to be alone. The sounds of television are comforting.

I can’t remember why I got like this. Whether it could have been avoided. My mind isn’t working clearly. One thought follows sluggishly behind another, trailing, fizzling into nothing. Living in a shadow realm.

I don’t know. Maybe hyperbole doesn’t help. Feel a pull towards doom laden hyperbole when I’m like this. But maybe I’m just trying to adequately describe the pain inside. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

Brain hurts. Want to be positive but none of the words fit. Clumsy. Defective. Inoperable.

Is there anything in my present circumstance I can get curious about? Well. There’s something that feels… compulsive. I’m compelled to grasp and clench at the pain, even while it burns me. I think that’s rumination, or there’s an element of the ruminative mechanisms at play.

So I guess it’s interesting to note that. I can’t make any sense of it or work my way out of it right now, but it’s interesting to note. That’s something. That’s as mindful as I can be tonight.

Day 274: Ringing

Depression pinning me down. No use pretending otherwise. It's right on top of me. Been home few hours, watching Star Trek Discovery, simultaneously playing my Switch, trying anything to distract myself. Not enjoying Star Trek, it’s just on, some colours, voices, changing situations. Vaguely following the plot, don’t want to pay too much attention. Hurts to pay attention. Depression is like a ringing in my ears. Like the warm attraction that glues particles together in normal functioning of life has been reversed, and every atom repulses every other, gives off faint howl, the accumulation of every atom howling makes a ringing in my ears, and engaging the part of my brain that usually cares, that considers, that loves - this simply intensifies the ringing, until I want to be sick.

So instead put on formulaic television, play arcade racing games, eat food out of brightly wrapped packets. Try to pass another night.

It is exhausting to live like this. But I guess a year ago it was happening for weeks at a time, regularly, and I was drinking and smoking weed to escape. And now it is not so regular, and it lasts for only days, and I’m more aware while it is happening.

Awareness helps. Pain is only an experience, something with specific dimensions, a size and shape, and can be explored like anything else, can be seen and felt. This is a sharp experience, yet a dull experience, jagged and oppressive both. Be curious. Disrupt the negative rumination. Distract myself with loud television if I have to. Be gentle with myself, yet firm. Don’t slide into self-loathing. Let go. Don’t worry. Go through hell and just keep going.

This always passes. The clouds clear and the sun comes out again.

Day 273: Blue skies

Trying to avoid negative rumination, though feel vulnerable to it, “primed” is the term I’d use. Tough to write when I’m like this, because it’s precisely the act of opening the brain up to pondering, to thinking deeply, that initiates the rumination. In fact it’s like the wide open beautiful mulling aspect of the brain that makes writing even possible, but taken and twisted by negativity, poison entering the system, travelling around and around, until everything is tainted.

Trying to disrupt the ruminative process every time I catch it. Force thinking away from that swirling maelstrom, onto anything else. I’ve been literally forcing myself to read shop signs and say the colour of cars in my head and go over the types of coats everyone is wearing, to wrest attention back from rumination. “No, don’t go down into it. Back here. Back here. Back here.” Snapping my fingers at myself, pulling myself away.

At home I’ve been playing OutRun on my Switch, the 1986 arcade classic racer, which is good distraction. Blue Sega skies, luxurious breezy chiptune music, chunky sprite-based worlds rolling by around your bright red Ferrari, and always having to focus on this moment, on the curve of the road, the cars ahead, the timer ticking down. The timer, the cars, the road. Curving road. Cars. Timer. On and on, the sprites spat into existence at your wheels and burning into oblivion just ahead, the acid trip ever-flow, the past gone, the future not arrived, pivoting your car, the chiptunes in your ears, the Sega sky vast above, roaring forwards until the timer runs down, and then one more go, maybe just one more go.

...... 

Music: Lay My Love, by John Cale and Brian Eno. 

Day 270: Rumination

I was not in a good way yesterday. Not at all. But I spent today before work researching and reading, and I've got a better handle on an aspect of my suffering that has until now eluded me.

That aspect is something called rumination. It's something that I knew bits about already, but I had never looked into it in detail, and now I see that it has affected my life for such a long time.

Rumination is when you continuously and obsessively think about the same upsetting or negative thoughts, swirling on in your head, spiralling down, unable to stop, but also unable to reach any useful conclusions. It is a key component of depression. A bout of rumination is a good predictor of the onset of a depressive episode.

People tend to ruminate, according to Healthline, if they have a history of emotional or physical trauma, or if they’re facing ongoing stressors that can’t be controlled. And people with certain personality traits are more at risk of rumination - traits including “perfectionism, neuroticism, and an excessive focus on one’s relationships with others.”

Which, like, Hello.

So rumination is obsessing over something, usually something negative. But then that thought pulls in a whole bunch of other thoughts, because of the way memory and association works, the neural networks we create, once you’re trapped in negative thinking you find yourself remembering all the other times in your life that corresponded to this negativity, and it becomes all the harder to pull yourself out.

Ung, I’m struggling writing this, you know. A bout of rumination, which is what I was going through yesterday - it’s what I always go through in my depressive episodes - makes me feel so wiped out the day after. It’s like all the synapses of your brain squeezing tight, it’s like your face being pressed against some horrific cosmic grindstone, and it goes on and on and nothing gets solved.

Well it really fucked me up yesterday. And today I couldn’t get up. I’ve had so many mornings like this, the feeling of being run over by a tank, of having a brain totally wrung dry and twisted in knots and just utterly fatigued - looking back it’s always after periods of rumination - which before I just thought of as “being depressed”, it wasn’t something I’d separated out as distinct from the rest of the symptoms.

But while it is inextricably linked to depression, is a key pillar of depression, it isn’t the same as the anhedonia - the inability to feel pleasure - or the grief, or the psychomotor retardation - the slowing down of all your muscles.

Rumination is its own thing, that nevertheless goes with those other things to make up the vague larger thing we call depression.

So, what is it? It’s the pathological dysfunction of the problem solving mechanisms of the brain. It is going over a thought without completing the thought, without solving it, without finding closure and solace.

If you have a lot of trauma and stress in your life then you will think about these things, how to solve them. But thinking about trauma and stress makes you traumatised and stressed. It engages your stress response system, floods you with cortisol, tightens muscles, increases heart rate. You get anxious. Thinking becomes narrow, as happens in stress response, to focus you on fleeing danger.

And all of this makes it harder to solve whatever problem you are thinking about. It’s like PTSD - you don’t process thoughts, they stay in your brain, stay current, continue making you traumatised and stressed. And that interferes even more with your problem solving ability, and that makes you more stressed, and on.

It’s self-perpetuating, because when you think about trauma and stress your thinking becomes more inflexible, and when your thinking is inflexible you can’t see a way out of your trauma and stress, and that makes you more traumatised and stressed, and that makes your thinking more inflexible…

……

I can’t write this now. My brain fucking hurts. I can actually feel it trying to start up into a ruminative state, I can feel the gears grinding, feel it searching for all the instances that correspond with the negativity (“this writing is crap. All your writing is crap. Remember the other day when your writing was crap. And a few days before that. And BLAH BLAH BLAH.”

And it really hurts. My poor brain is exhausted - stress is exhausting, the release of cortisol, the high alert, the jangling nerves.

But it’s so important to do what I’m doing now. Because here’s how you combat rumination, according to everything I’ve read:

1) You disrupt the negative thinking. Focus on anything else. Get out of the loop. Play a nice game. Read a passage from a favourite book. Colour something in. Watch a TV show. Do a crossword. Something you personally find enjoyable, and something that takes your full attention, because otherwise your thoughts will wander back.

2) Go back when you’re calmer and write out the problems you were ruminating about, be specific, break the problems into all their component pieces, look at which parts you can do something about, and make realistic plans to tackle them, and for the things you can’t change downgrade them from problems to worries, set a date in the future to check in on them and see if anything has changed and if you now have the ability to affect them, and until then, forget about worrying.

So right now, in the danger zone for rumination, it’s imperative that I disrupt those negative thoughts every chance I get.

So I’m sorry, this blog post is loose as all hell, and probably makes no sense, but it is me fighting back. I can’t stop and plan it out and rewrite it, because it’s taking all my focus to simply pull myself away from the whole sticky addictive pathways of negative thought that are trying to swirl up and overwhelm me.

But it’s real progress. My brain feels like mashed potato, but it's good understanding why it feels this way, and that there are very real and practical steps I can take to work on making this better in the future.

Just got to go gently, avoid the swamps of rumination, and make gradual plans face all the problems in my life. Easy.

Day 269: Grinding

Been napping. Mind is grinding too tight, can't get words out. Work was fine, but got back and couldn't get words out. Edited photos. Watched Always Sunny. Ate food housemate brought me. Napped.

My problems are not writing related but mental health related. I need to address my problems. Don't know how. Need therapy but can't afford therapy. Maybe I could, and I'm just using it as an excuse. Paying £50 a week would take everything I've been saving and more, but maybe income-dependent would be cheaper, and I could make it work if I stuck to the tightest budget.

It's so hard going on like I've been going. I'm ill all the time. It's always in the background, and comes out and knocks me down once or twice a week.

I am doing better than a year ago. But only because I'm forcing myself to get more done, despite the pain. I'm in as much pain.

Mental health is the hardest. This is not something I would wish on anyone.

Back to bed now. Might watch another Always Sunny to drift off to. At least I can enjoy comedy. Can't watch comedy when I'm at my lowest, can't derive pleasure from anything. I'm not at my lowest, not nearly. And I haven't been down that far in a long time. Maybe things are improving, just incredibly slowly.

Yes. Let's go with that.

Day 268: Alleviate

Wiped out today. Recovering, watching shows, playing games, doing some gentle reading, writing bits and bobs. Wanted to have an organised and productive day, making strides forward, but clear when I woke up that that wasn’t happening. But that’s OK. Rest is important. Self-care is important.

Mmm. That’s disingenuous. Self-care is important, but I wasn’t really caring for myself today. Spent a lot of it feeling stressed and anxious, unmotivated, angry at myself for not doing more. All this research into depression has brought up a lot of stuff, all the stuff I haven’t dealt with, the sense that although I’ve gradually forced myself to face a few of my issues over the last year there is still an ocean filled with monsters moving below my conscious awareness. Thinking about depression has made me acknowledge the size and depth of this ocean, and now I feel like a tiny creature bobbing on the surface, alone, doomed to be swallowed at any moment.

Shit. I do not feel good at all. I feel like screaming, tearing out my hair. I feel really bad. That’s what I’ve been doing today, medicating against this pain exactly like I was talking about yesterday. Watching YouTube, scrolling down social media, distracting myself, eating junk food. All things to alleviate pain in the present, while doing nothing to work through the stress and trauma that cause the pain in the long term.

And, more, I’m aware of this, and so feel guilty and ashamed about it. Maybe that’s important to realise. The guilt and shame do not help. They make it worse. Yes, taking paracetamol isn’t going to heal a broken leg. And if you keep walking on the leg wrong then you’ll prevent it from healing at all. But some nights you need that paracetamol regardless.

And, yes, I’m not going to overcome my depression by playing videogames and eating takeaway pizza. But I am getting better at doing the things to heal myself, and though it’s a slow process I am making progress. But some nights it’s just about surviving the night.

Yes, there’s always a risk that you’ll develop a reliance on pain relievers and thus never face the problems that cause the pain. But I don’t want that. I want to get better. I want to change. But when the pain is too great that stops being possible.

Going to try to end the night being kinder to myself, then. Get to bed, get some sleep, in work for 8am tomorrow.

...... 

Music: Brand - New - Life, by Young Marble Giants.

Day 265: Red alert

Been deep down the word mines, working on a longer piece about depression, which, in truth, I'm very much enjoying. Elucidating and therapeutic, although exhausting. Here's the rough draft of a bit of it...

When animals run into dangerous events they have a number of automatic responses that come into effect to cope with these events. These responses are about preventing, mitigating, and recovering from harm. The extent each of these is possible depends on the severity of the event. If you see a hazard on the ground then you may instinctively leap to avoid it, and thus prevent any harm whatsoever. But if you see the hazard too late then your instinct will instead be to put your hands out, which will hopefully mitigate damage to your head, your most vital asset, but at the cost of damage to your wrists, your arms, the skin on the palms of your hands.

Life is chaotic, fraught with danger, and your being - your body, including your brain - has no way of knowing what is coming next. But through millennia of trial and error a number of heuristic systems have evolved that make decent guesses when forced to act, because guesses are better than nothing. Thrusting your hands out as you fall might give you blood poisoning and end up killing you, where a little bump to the head would have damaged you less - but your body and brain don't know this, in the split-second of registering the danger and type of threat, and over a lifetime, for each member of each species, thrusting your arms out is generally better than not.

All of which is to say: an awful lot of what we do in life occurs below the level of conscious thought, and runs off relatively simple rules that we apply to a vague and complex and ever-shifting reality.

So it is with depression. Every aspect of this debilitating and much misunderstood disease can be explained by reference to an animal's natural responses to events of major stress and trauma, and to the ways in which these responses can become tangled and counterproductive - to the point of extreme distress - when deployed against the psychologically rich and confusing worlds that humans, with their pre-frontal cortices, inhabit.

Think of the underlying systems of depression as like a sci-fi show where the captain of a spaceship orders all power to be diverted to shields and weapons, because dangerous alien craft are attacking, and it's life and death. But these aliens are new and advanced, data on their tactics are not in the computer's database, and they attack in ways that the shields are powerless to stop, and they cannot be hurt by the weapons the ship possesses.

The aliens attack, dart away, attack again, vanish into the darkness of space. They may strike again at any moment. Meanwhile the ship is still in red alert - the danger hasn't subsided, so the protocols are still active, yet they do nothing to help when the attacks do come. But the captain has no other ideas. And all the while resources are being burned powering the shields and weapons, the crew are pulling triple shifts with no sleep, everyone is keyed up, no messages are getting back to the fleet, no one is free to plot courses or play on the holodeck or cook meals or think of the wider mission. The ship just spins, it limps onward, it drifts.

... Anyway, gotta stop there, brain is fried, it's 2am, I'm done. I'm not sure exactly what I'm saying yet, but I'm enjoying figuring it out.

......

Music: Streethawk 1, by Destroyer.

Day 234: Clean your bathroom

I felt depressed today, so I cleaned my toilet. There’s nothing better for depression than cleaning your toilet, scrubbing your sink, unclogging the hair from your shower drain, and scouring the pink mould from your tiles.

I’m not being facetious. If you’re depressed do these things. They will help. Clean your bathroom. Shower. Put on fresh clothes. Eat a piece of fruit. Walk somewhere.

It might make you feel better. And if not at least you’ll have a clean bathroom, smell nice, etc.

Depression, I find, twists about your ankles, creeps up your legs, makes its way to your throat, where it swirls down into your soul. Sometimes the basic act of doing something worthwhile, however mundane, when you start to feel those first coiling tendrils moving up your feet can be a radical act in fighting the disease.

Of course, the trick is in making yourself do these things when you're already beginning to feel depressed and they’re the last things you want to do. As to that, I have no real answers. Don't do it enough times, and suffer the consequences, that you eventually start to see how silly that course is, perhaps. Notice how when you let the depression climb up you it lays you out flat, turns everything to dirt, ruins you for days. Watch this happen, time and time again, until finally you're just bored of it. Start to get curious about what's actually going on inside you, be mindful of the actual size and shape and weight and emotional valence of depression, as it comes on, and get better at noticing the inciting incidents, and their repercussions.

And then stand up, walk yourself to your bathroom, and get scrubbing.

It will help.

......

Music: Mainland by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - jangly indie rock with melodic vocals and a languid, shifting weightlessness. Nice.

Day 229: Wailing

Pffffft. Brain fog of depression is here again. Hello, you. Nice to see you. No, that’s a lie, it’s HORRIBLE to see you, because you’re a JERK. I was trying to be be polite. It’s good to be polite. And, hey, don’t wail out there in the cold. Come in and sit by the fire. I’ll make you a brew. Crumpet? Croissant? Help yourself.

Partly I’m saying that because I’m so nice, and partly because I know you’re not going away. You’ll either wail outside the door in the cold, and I’ll plug my ears and mush my head between my cushions and turn the TV volume up to full, yet still I will hear you - or I’ll let you in and you’ll sit here in my front room and… be nice? You’ll be nice, right?

No, OK, you’ll sit here and wail. OK. Well that’s pretty annoying. But I know you’re hurting, so just stay here, and we’ll do the best we can.

Umm. Let me try to think. It’s hard. I’ve been off today. I’ve washed clothes, eaten fruit, read my book, checked in with the news, thought about Christmas presents, done weights and push-ups, finished a quick crossword (cheated a few times), cooked proper food, washed up, tried a few blog post ideas that didn’t work, and played Zelda on Switch to inch closer to completing it.

Day hasn’t been bad. But here’s this foggy depression jerk sitting here wailing.

Well, what you gonna do? When I try to push him away he just wails louder, stamps his feet, screams until the walls begin to shake. So I’ll let him stay, bring him cups of tea, try to get on with things. It isn’t easy, but nothing ever is.

Day 227: Pushing it

It’s pushing it to write my daily blog at four in the morning after napping half of the night, but what are you gonna do? I’m all about pushing it.

I’ve been struggling the last few days. It’s been creeping up on me. The old feeling that everything is inescapable fucked, that I’m too far gone, that I can’t write for shit and… all the usual stuff.

It’s not reality. It’s not. Just negative voices, always saying the same things. Judgements, skewed thinking, with ulterior motives. Uhhh. It’s hard though. It’s so hard.

I get better for a few days, I’m productive, I’m enthused, I have newfound energy. And then I fall back into the clutches of depression. And I go through the routines, but it feels like there’s nothing beneath it, no warmth to my soul, that it’s all a sham, everything is a sham.

But I come back out again. I do. There are days when the depression isn’t there at all, or where it’s retreated enough for me to find space to breathe.

That’s better than it was.

Depression is a poisonous gas that seeps in, entwines around all your cells. It takes supreme effort to rise above it, to hoist yourself out of the miasma, hand over hand. When you’re tired you start to flag, you climb slower, maybe slip, and the fog begins to wrap around you again. And once the fog is in you it’s even harder to climb, and you are caught even worse.

But I’m used to all this. And it’s better than it was.

I will go back to bed now, try to sleep, to put no more pressure on myself. We’re all doing the best we can. It’s not an easy climb. No one said we had a right to an easy climb - no one who was telling the truth, at least. But we do get to try. And, despite everything, that’s still pretty cool.

Keep going.

Day 209: Present

Voice of negativity has been howling of late, stomping its feet, threatening to blow down all my houses of cards. "Blog is pathetic," it screams. "You're a heap of dirt. You're grosser than the matter you find collected under the nail of a big toe."

The voice wants me to give everything up, crawl back under the covers, slink away to where it's dark and silent and safe.

Yeah, it's been howling. And in fact it turned up just then. "How many times have you written this exact post? How many times have you thought you had something interesting to say, but you never learn, you never move on. You should just admit that you're making a fool of yourself, and quit this blogging nonsense once and for all."

But it's good to hear that voice. Good to be present as it attacks. Because normally it sneaks in the back entrance, slinks up the stairs, and before I know it there it is in the control room of my brain manoeuvring me around without me ever giving permission.

I'll be distracted, lost in this or that, and then from the depths of my mind a thought arrives, like I'm figuring something out, finally recognising, that, for example, everything I create is worthless - and there's no arguing, because it doesn't feel like an opinion with which you can argue. It's more that I myself have finally noticed, or perhaps admitted, something that has always been present in reality. I have always been pathetic. Every word I write has always been atrocious. Yes, I am like that sad hopeful in every season of X-Factor, shuffling into the audition room certain of their secret ability to sing, but they can't, they can't sing, and it's clear to everyone else, and they're not the freak show or the star they're just another nobody, filled with delusions, to be summarily dismissed halfway through a long day with the judges thinking only of how long they still have to wait before they can break for lunch.

And there's always the sense of shame and despair in recognising that to be true, the feeling of all the energy seeping out of my muscles, and the voice becomes self-loathing, gathers momentum, spirals, and soon I'm actively searching out every example in my life that proves the initial thought to be true.

But it's not true. It's not reality. It is an interpretation of reality. An opinion about reality.

And, like the voice of a smoker screaming that they have to have a cigarette, that they cannot cope through the day without one, the voice of negativity has a motive. Addiction wants the smoker to smoke, and will tell any lie, warp reality in any way, to make it happen. But if the smoker doesn't take up the impulse, if they watch the craving, then the craving will rise, and peak, and fall back, and the person will be left, still there, like a beautiful blue sky after a storm.

And so it is with depression, with that voice of negativity. It wants me to give up writing, because writing is scary, and leads into unknown places. It wants me to stay small, and beaten, and not make a fuss. And so it twists truth until it has ammunition to use against me, and it deploys it, in a voice engineered to be effective. It explains, beseeches, begs, or shouts, depending on what works best. It doesn't want discussion, ambiguity, consideration of alternatives. It wants to take control, and to have its way, and everything it says works to further those aims.

But smokers do give up smoking, although the urges always stay with them. And I will give up depression, although that voice will always remain.

I'm getting better at catching the voice. Standing here, in the light of awareness, and watching the creature creep up the stairs, settle into position, clear its throat.

I'm getting better at staying present as it speaks. Hearing how what it says is not reality, but the same old voice spouting the same old warped interpretations of reality.

The creature turns malicious, thunders, threatens to smash apart the world. And I'm getting better at remaining still, giving the voice space, and letting it thunder out of steam, falter, fall silent. I stay present, and the creature sighs, retreats, slinks back into the dark.

Until, of course, thirty seconds later, when it returns for its next attack. But it has only a few strategies, it's all bluster and no bite. My approach need never alter. Be mindful. Be here. Be awake to watch the voice arriving, to not react, to let it exhaust its bag of tricks.

Negative voices can do nothing without our permission. We need only be alert enough to ensure we do not give it.

Day 207: Remember

Been off work with a sick bug today, spent last night throwing up, today huddled in blankets eating soup and fruit and watching Netflix.

Not feeling as down on myself though. The world is difficult and painful enough, there's no need to heap more suffering on my shoulders in the form of self-loathing.

The old negative voices have been seeping back in steadily for a while now. Been falling back into unhealthy habits, sleeping all day, staying up all night, eating junk food and staring at Youtube and scrolling down social media, squeezing out a few meaningless words onto the blog last thing before bed, feeling the pressure of depression forcing me down as a voice of shame whispers that I'm 33 and I just work in a bar, I can't drive, I'm going nowhere with this blogging and I've got no forward momentum and I've saved up no money and my skin is awful and I've utterly failed at life.

But you know what? That voice can get fucked. Can get itself directly to fuck.

I've heard that voice so many times before, and dealt with it so many times before. I know how to deal with that voice. I know what to do. I've forgotten to do it of late, because I've been tired and stressed, and worried about breaking up with Fran, but I do know what to do.

It's like meditation. You bring your attention to your breath, you forget, you bring your attention back, you forget again. Over and over. You don't fail because you forget. The forgetting is part of the meditation. It is training.

Well, here I am remembering. Bringing my attention back.

I know the steps. Be mindful of the negative voices. Hear them, acknowledge them, bring them out into the light. Then challenge them. Find alternative interpretations for reality. Keep working. Keep taking baby steps. Focus on the positives. Accept help. Accept praise. Work on feeling worthy of love.

I've learnt how to do this and then forgotten again a thousand times before. That just means that remembering is easier than ever.

I can do this.

Day 203: Clip Show Special #2

Yesterday I compiled a list of my favourite comedy posts that have come out of this daily blogging challenge I've been undertaking. Here is a compilation of everything else:

Serious Stuff

Mental health, especially my own struggles with depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and recurring negative thoughts, has been a huge subject in my writing. About one in twenty days I seem to be trying something silly or fun or creative, and the other nineteen I'm worrying sincerely that I'm a worthless failure and everything in life is irreparably broken. There's strength to be taken from writing about all this though, in helping me get through it, and hopefully helping others who may feel similar things. Here are some of my faves:

Day 12 - an early post about blogging as Zen painting.

Day 13 - being hit by waves of self-loathing, thinking back on an adolescence growing up suffering from acne. Painful, but helpful.

Day 25 - another early one, about dealing with my gammy eyes and what it actually feels like to be depressed. I used to be incredibly self-conscious when writing about my own depression. Guess I got over that.

Day 30 - to celebrate reaching my original goal of a month of sober blogging I wrote the most intimately I have yet done about having acne. It felt gross to write, and still feels gross now, but, hey, you gotta write that real stuff, or what's the point?

Commitment - a nice post about writing-as-relationship, about accepting the hard times.

Passion - a day finding beauty, or at least the briefest reflected glimmer of beauty, in the mundane, the quotidian.

Still - yet another attack of depression, but forcing myself to write through it, to get something down. To have come here on the hardest, worst, most futile days, and still to have hammered words out, is perhaps the achievement of which I’m most proud.

Friends with bicycles - a post about being socially anxious in a coffee shop, as is my wont.

Things I like - a nice dose of positivity. The bit about vision is cool, it’s something I think about a lot. Vision is weird.

Unwrapped - about going to the zero-waste food shop round the corner from my house. I still go. You should go. Just go!

Echoes - from when I did some manual labour with my friend and learnt all about being a man. Half silly, half sincere, as usual.

Storm - another post about feeling depression, I remember the effort it took to not rise to the negative thoughts, to accept them, watch them, write them out honestly, and let them go. At the time it felt like turning a corner, and though of course I’ve retreated back round the corner many times since then, I’ve also been able to retrace my steps forwards a few times as well. It’s slow going, but it’s progress.

Unique - at my sister’s in London, trying to fathom the scale and complexity of the world. I can’t. It’s unfathomable!

Triviality - a post in which you can hear me standing up to the negative voices that are continuously rattling around my head. The more I do this, the more power I have. If you have negative thoughts, try to do this. Shine the light of awareness upon them, bring them out, analyse them, and pick apart their faulty logic. They will dissolve under the flame of attention. Then they’ll come right back. But you’ll know what to do.

Windscreen - an analogy comparing depression to having faulty windscreen wipers on your car, explaining why it’s so hard to get yourself out of low moods.

Arty Stuff

I’m the most self-conscious about my writing when it is overtly attempting to be literature or poetry. Masking your clumsy attempts at fiction under the guise of an overblown Mad Max parody, or a vignette about ghost ships, is one thing; standing in front of everyone saying “I made this thing that wants to be serious art” is another. Sincerity is scary. But I’ve made a few faltering attempts over these past six months...

Flavours - I spent a few weeks trying some fiction writing prompts. This one, involving writing a scene around a bunch of flavours, came out like a young-adult story. It was fun.

Penny for your thoughts - another writing prompt, about an executive and a homeless man.

Photographs - loose, ramshackle word streams inspired by the photographs of Steve McCurry. Why aren’t I doing this every day, as a way to unclog the clay from my mind and get the words flowing?

Mirror - a day exploring Bradford with my family.

Interstices - similar to other posts about looking for the sublime in the ordinary, but more focused on the feel and flow of the words than on an argument for the intellect.

Bollard - the last day working with my friend, a post about the sadness of endings.

Solemn - a bit of writing about the flickering joys, and dangers, of being drunk. I like some of the lines in here.

Howling - a sketch of what it feels like to work a busy weekend bar shift. I was angry when I wrote it. You can tell.

Reviews/Articles/Other

And here’s a list of the stuff that doesn’t fit into the categories above. Mostly articles about films and videogames, and the odd thought piece.

Re-Bourne - a sort of draft of a review of The Bourne Identity. Man I love this film.

Story structure - notes on the hero’s journey, the monomyth, story circles, all that good stuff.

Switch impressions - as a reward for sober blogging for 90 days I bought myself a Nintendo Switch. Wrote lots about it. Here’s one such piece.

Blade Runner, the sequel, parts 1 and 2, the original, parts 1 and 2 - lots of words about Blade Running. My love for the first film knows no bounds. The second? I can take it or leave it.

Red Dead Redissonance - wrote a few posts recently about Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. Some praising the beauty of the game’s world; this one was critical of the ludonarrative dissonance at the game’s heart, and touched on what it is we want videogames to provide for us: gritty art, or a warm bath? And can we have both?

Let’s have an argument about Apu - I tried to write an article that essentially argued the opposite of what all my friends felt about the news that Apu might be written out of the Simpsons, while avoiding any ego or aggression. I wanted to try to change people’s minds, or at least provide a fresh perspective. I think it worked well actually.

OK. It’s 4am, as usual, and I cannot write any more on this. Compiling this list today and yesterday has shown me how far I’ve come. Yes, every piece has been a rushed first draft, ragged and unfinished, often starting as one thing and becoming another halfway through. Many times I’ve had a brainwave as to how I should have written the post at the point at which I’ve posted it, and it’s continuously frustrating to have to put up work I know I could make better with time, but not having any time, already being stressed that I’ve stayed up too late and eaten into my energy and resources for the next day’s post. As has happened today.

But there’s been a lot of snatches of good writing within the greater haze of words. There have been many, many words, and a not-insignificant amount of them have been good.

Drop that desire for perfection, and suddenly it’s so lovely that I’ve gone and done the work every day for 203 days now, and that that work has even momentarily helped people, made them laugh, given them pause for thought - and of course kept me from throwing myself under a bus as well.

Writing is the best. It really is.

Day 190: Scores

Tired from work, from writing late last night, from fighting to get that post done when the thoughts were fizzling and evaporating somewhere between mind and screen. Stumbling after them in the dark, grabbing their tails, forcing them back into existence. Forcing myself through the misery of writing so badly, of the words being such a malformed betrayal of the initial impulse to write. Forcing myself to finish a draft that made no sense, that was so clumsy and hesitant, that simply did not work. The night getting late, seeing the time, grabbing tufts of my hair and wanting to scream that I flat out could not do it, that I could not get a post up, that I would have to write just a single sentence saying that I'd failed and I had nothing for today.

...But then doing star jumps in my room to get the blood pumping. Making another mug of tea. Slapping myself back awake and grinding out a second draft that made slightly more sense. Tidying it up, trimming it, making it as presentable as possible. Publishing it to the blog, letting out a sigh of relief, and then going to Red Dead for half an hour to unwind my frazzled brain before bed.

Riding my horse far out into the wilderness, watching the ground change beneath me, the rustling of the grass. Listening to the wind soughing the trees. Seeing silhouettes of trees on distant cliff tops, stark and lonely with the moonlight shining through them. A gully far below me. Unseen water flowing in the dark.

Then PlayStation off, six hours sleep, and up for a Saturday open. I'm stuck working a perpetual Saturday open. It always seems to be Saturday open, I'm trapped in purgatory, or in an American TV show where the twist is that they're all really in purgatory. Hey, American TV show writers - come up with better twists!

And now I'm home again, feeling flat and low. But I don't need to be low. It was so tough getting that post finished last night, yet I managed it. If I'm going to focus so intently on the times I fail - and I am, I am going to focus on that - then it's only right, only fair, that I also focus on the times I succeed.

If you keep track of all the goals your team concedes, but not the ones they score, well, then you have no idea how the match really went, do you?

Except, of course, the problem with depression is it finds ways to discount the positives. "That goal doesn't count," it says. "You were offside. You were lucky. It won't happen again." Or else it says the other team are too easy to be worth winning against. "Happy about beating those amateurs? Get real. They're awful. To have only won by the amount you did is embarrassing. It's actually more like failure..."

But that's depression. We know this. I know this. It is the nature of the beast.

I've been playing better recently. That's all that needs to be said. I've been improving. I've scored 190 goals in 190 days, and that's pretty special. Some have been halfway-line belters; some I've walked in after tussles in the box.

But they've all gone in.

Take the victories. Appreciate them for what they are. Keep turning up, let the result be what it may, and remember to enjoy the game for its own sake. It's all just a laugh on a Saturday in the rain, eh?

And make sure to rest. Rest is important. It's what I'm going to do now.

Day 184: Turning up

Another better day, although work sucked hard, but I ate the fruit I planned on eating, I cooked the veg; I edited the photos... did social media for work, put up a pic on my own Instagram, food shopped, talked to my housemate, drank tea, listened to sumptuous piano music, wrote silly messages to my friend…. and now I’m here writing my blog. I haven’t wasted time on Youtube, scrolled down Facebook (well, a little at work, and on the bus, and just for a moment when I got home...); I haven’t succumbed to negative thoughts or fallen into lethargy or despair. Another day upright, living, doing what needs to be done. Treating myself with a bit more kindness, practising self-care.

Don’t have much more tonight, but that’s OK. I should be proud of myself for the smallest victories. Because why not? What’s being happy about tiny steps going to harm? I haven’t written a novel today, forced myself to create anything of lasting worth. But I’ve turned up, and I’ve been present, and when you suffer from depression that’s huge in itself.

Gently does it, don’t excoriate myself for not being stronger than I am. What will that help? Breathe out. Concentrate on the positives, on gratitude - that I’m here, that I’m experiencing any of this at all. Don’t slip backwards, hold my ground, and tomorrow is another day.

And now, with all my jobs done, there's time for a little ride into the wilderness on Red Dead Redemption, a little moonlit ranging across wooded hills, over canyons, with wolves howling and birds taking flight, and the first morning mist thick in the valleys, and day coming cold and hard.

I mean, look at this game. How can you not want to lose yourself in this game?

Day 183: Six months

Another busy Saturday shift. Another long bus ride up the hill, eyelids dropping with head bumping gently against glass. Played an hour of Red Dead when I got in, tramped around the first town, looked at new revolvers I couldn’t afford, thought about buying an engraving for my current pistol, hung out in a saloon, squelched through mud, went to a church, took in a show, had a fist fight… then let my character lie back in a bath in the town’s hotel, the drip of water, muffled voices through the wall, moody cowboy blues playing lugubriously in the background.

I’ve had rejuvenating carrot and ginger soup for tea (back in the actual world), with plump brown rolls and lots of butter. I’ve eaten an apple and an orange for dessert, and drunk a mug of steaming blackcurrant tea. I’m going to put this up, and then get an early night, for the first time in far too long.

I’m trying, trying to go easy on myself, to resist the gravitational pull of negative thoughts. To carefully direct myself away from their orbits, to learn to rest in the empty space outside of harmful routine.

Day 183. Somewhere between yesterday and today I reached the halfway point; I have now been doing this for six months. It never feels like it but I have made real progress. I am better than I have been in a long time.

Keep going. It will get worse, and harder, and easier, and harder, and better. And gradually, gradually, life will change.