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.