Let's Dig In: Depression Part II (the good, the bad, the I need all the potato chips in my belly now dammit)

I was trying to go to sleep when this image popped into my head of a vast open space covered in green grass and flowers with trees off in the distance. The sky is blue with white puffy clouds. It's warm. Birds and happy insects flying about (like the big fat fuzzy bumble bees, not wasps and mosquitoes). Sounds perfect. Looks perfect. Happily, I'm sitting on the ground, in the grass looking up at the sky and around at all the beautiful things... with my feet dangling over the edge of a giant deep dark hole in the ground. So why did I have to get up and write this down in my journal at 4am? What does it mean? It is a visual representation of my life with depression. On my good days I get to sit outside with my feet dangling in the depression hole. The warmth of the sun on my face, the breeze lightly blowing through my hair. I'm never very far from the hole. It's there all the time waiting for me to forget it's there and I fall in.  Some days I even get up and walk around and explore. Other days I trip and fall into the hole. Sometimes I get stuck on a ledge and the sun can still reach my face. Other times I fall all the way to the bottom of the hole. Normal people get to run around far from the depression hole. They may trip and fall and skin their knees, but they never have this constant quiet threat of a depression hole. Damn you extroverts and your bomb social skills. I imagine that bipolar people are one day at the bottom of the hole looking up and the next floating in the clouds. They never get to experience the ground. That's sad. At least I don't have that.

I've been having less bad days with some good days sprinkled in. I'm mostly just right in the middle. Not super happy and not super sad which is how I know I'm not bipolar. A song popped to me on my ipod on a run recently that comes pretty close to how I'm doing. And it's not a Twenty One Pilots song! I know, shocker! Listen if you'd like. It's One Republic - Better. The chorus says this: I think I lost my mind, But don't worry about me, Happens all the time, In the morning I'll be better, Things are slowly getting better, Sing it again.

I've been making slow, steady, small changes, one at a time. Making big drastic life changes all at once, like going cold turkey, only leads to big drastic failure, in my experience. So starting way back in September I made my first small change. I stopped binge eating. Once I got that under control I made the next small change. I went from eating three meals a day to two. Once I adjusted to that I made the next small change. I started to exercise. First just walking (I used walking to the coffee shop to get a drink, to curb the binge food cravings), then the rowing machine, and now running. Once the habit of exercise was reformed, the next small change was implemented. I stopped drinking soda.

I need to work on a few things still. I've been running somewhat consistently now. I signed up for a 5K with my boob. My friend. She calls me her boo and she's my boo too so she's my boob. She has big boobs. Never mind. She's my friend. Yes I have friends dammit. I used to use food or soda as a motivation to exercise. If I went for a run, then I could go get a soda. But I can't do that anymore. I needed to find something, some reward for achieving my goals. What are my goals, you ask? Well, I got fat remember? I got 30 pounds overweight fat. So my goal is to loose those 30 pounds. And I needed to set small incremental goals (every 10 pounds) with rewards for hitting them. So what can I use as rewards? Can't be food. I don't need or want stuff. I hate shopping. So I decided on tattoos. I have wanted to expand and add to the arm band I have. Perfect. So when I reached the first 10 pounds milestone I walked into the tattoo shop and gave my artist my ideas and said have fun designing.

As of posting (I wasn't going to post this till I actually reached it) I have hit the next 10 pounds milestone. So my reward? My first session.

There's 10 more pounds. And from experience, the last 5-10 pounds are the hardest to loose. My body is very well adjusted to the new eating habits. And my body is pretty adjusted to exercise. I will start to gain muscle faster than I loose fat so my weight will likely go up before it goes down again. So I have to run farther and faster. Start weight lifting. Eat healthier foods. It has taken about 4.5 months to loose 20 pounds. It will likely take half that, possibly more to loose the last 10. Because these last 10 will be the hardest, I've decided to break it into two. So I need to figure out what the rewards will be for the next and last 5 pounds. I have an idea, and yes they are tattoos.

The next small change is sleep. That's what I need to work on next. Going to sleep at 4am and waking at noon is probably not the healthiest thing. Even with all the small changes I have made, the daily struggle of depression is always there. There are some days I wake up and I just know, instantly that it's not going to be a good day and I won't be a proper functioning adult. But, there are other days I wake up and I know instantly, that it's going to be a good day.

When I first started writing this in... February, I was having a string of good days. Now that I am finishing this, I have been in a long string of bad days. Today was the first good day in a long few weeks. Not to burst your happy bubble, but that's just how it works. When I started this post, I was sitting in the grass, as I finish it, I'm a few steps up off the floor of the bottom of the hole. That 5K? We never ran it. We were to run it in January, and it's now close to the ides of March. That tattoo I got for reaching my 20 pounds lost goal? I didn't actually make it. I was one pound away. And I've since gained some back. It feels like I gained all of it back. I've had two sodas, two days in a row including today. I binged an entire can of Pringles and a family sized bag of peanut butter M&M's last week. I haven't been wanting to write in my journal. I set three goals for the next day in each entry. They're usually easy like: run, work 2 hours, and do laundry or go for a walk, shower, fix the kitchen drawer. Because I failed to do pretty much any and all for a while, the last one from a few nights ago simply was: get up, survive, go back to bed.

And that's exactly what I did. It's what I do. It's what every other depressed person does. We get up every day. We survive however we can (some days we may not make it out of our pj's while other days we accomplish all three goals and then some), and we go back to bed every night. And do it all again. Keep breathing. Keep getting up.



Let's Dig In Series links: Religion Part I and Part II     Depression Part I    Obsession     Anxiety Part I