Well yesterday largely sucked. I mean, I wasn’t contemplating self-harm or anything, but it was still pretty craptacular. So what can I do to keep that from happening again?

Well, clearly making ambitious plans that seem fun and rewarding doesn’t work. Not by itself, anyhow. I had such big plans on Friday, but by the time I was awake enough to try them, I was too depressed. The very idea of throwing myself into an ambitious new project just for the heck of it seemed repulsive and insane, like going for a jog on two broken legs.

So clearly, I have top intervene a lot sooner. Starting with making sure I have clean clothes to wear. A very big part of learning to deal with your depression is learning to proactively nullify your usual excuses. Excuses are the base currency of depression. Depression itself is one giant excuse not to deal with the real world and whatever it is that you imagine is in it that is so bad that you would rather retreat into depression that face it.

Usually, this is unresolved trauma. To go forward is to face the things you stomped on the breaks to avoid. Since then, you have only trusted the slowest of motion. Anything else makes you feel like you are going out of control, and you are… out of the control of your depression and its determination to do whatever it takes in order to avoid dealing with stuff.

Is that leaves you feeble and miserable, that’s just fine. Makes you easier to manage.

So yeah, step one, make sure I have clean clothes to put on. Then put them on. I realized while I was in the shower that I have been clinging to an old outdated belief that hanging around nekkid on Saturday “saved” me a day of laundry. And that made sense in the old place, where I couldn’t do my own laundry and when Julian did it for me, it cost me money.

But it’s a year and two months since we moved, and we have our own washer-drier right here in the apartment, and so I can do laundry whenever the hell I want.

Which is great, because now that I am going to school, I do two loads a week! That would have been very trying on both Julian and my wallet, no to mention all that extra bus time.

Looking back, if we hadn’t moved, I probably wouldn’t be going to school now. So, lame gym or not, I am glad we moved here. It is so easy to get places!

Anyhow, back to laundry. (FINALLY, you all say. ) So yeah, put on the clothes and wear them all day, whether I am up or down, even if I decide to take a nap. I have been trying to train myself that naked + bed = going to sleep for the night, and having a day where I don’t follow that rule is quite injurious to that process.

The key to training is always consistency. Especially when you are training yourself.

Opening a few windows probably couldn’t hurt either. Part of what kept putting me to sleep yesterday was that, sitting here at the computer, I am close to the baseboard heater in this room and that makes things all toasty warm here, and we all know by now that toasty warmness makes me really sleepy.

Then again, in the summer, it was the fact that being close to a window when I am at this desk that was making me sleepy because it was cooler than the rest of the room.

I guess the unifying principle is relief. Whether it’s relief from cold or heat, relief makes me melt into a puddle. And with toasty warmness, there is the added bonus that getting in bed and burrowing under the covers continues the toasty warmness, and hence, being toasty warm at the computer reminds me of how nice it is to be feeling the same, but lying down.

And so I ended up spending half the day in bed yesterday. This would not be a big deal if it made me happy. It would be totally fine if I took Saturdays to be my “lie in bed and catch up on sleep” day every week. That way I would look forward to it as opposed to viewing it with a thick cold glutinous dread.

But I am not there yet. Being sleepy all day still makes me feel depressed and helpless and lost. It makes me feel like I can’t stop myself from slipping into depression on my own, I need something like getting to school and back to keep me functional. Without it, I am the same sad person I was before I went back to school.

Only way more aware of the sadness than before. Yay.

But I know that’s the wrong way to be looking at things. I know that’s a negativist way of looking at it. It’s like there’s this grim satisfaction in seeing the world and your situation in the worst possible way. Like that’s how you get your kicks, with self-sadism. Or that’s how to express emotions without involving even the possibility of other people.

Because that’s where the real hope lies : connecting with your fellow human beings. Science says it, religion says it, the deep empathy lurking in the human heart says it. It’s something I can scarcely even imagine without a host of panic alarms going off in my head. Can I even stand connecting with someone and seeing myself in their eyes? Or would the identity feedback be too much, and I would have to flee to someplace where nobody understands me?

Perhaps in time, as I heal, that sort of thing won’t panic me any more. Maybe a stronger and healthier me will be able to let down his guard and let people in and finally end that isolation that I have locked myself into for all these years.

And then, finally, Spring will come.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Once again, I am somewhat depressed on Saturday. But I think I know why.

For one, I’ve been hanging out naked, something I keep telling myself I will never do again, but always seems to happen around now. My excuse this time was that I had no clean laundry to put on, but I still have a pair of red sweatpants kicking around here somewhere that a perfect for Laundry Day attire. So that dog don’t hunt.

And the thing is, I know from my experience living in a nudist-ish household in the past that when I am going nudist, I end up in this sort of soft squishy depressed mindset where I just plain can’t get going.

One of the many things going to Kwantlen has done for me is give me a reason to get dressed every day. When I am dressed, I am more focused and alert and ready to face whatever comes. Naked, I am a depressed, bed-seeking, life-avoiding shut-in who wants to crawl down a hole and hide from the world.

And I don’t wanna be that guy any more. Fuck that guy. He’s a deeply unhappy person.

Part of me still wants to be there, though, and it will take a while before the desire to turn into a puddle and flow down the drain is gone from me completely. I am still in the process of convincing myself that it is okay to be out there in the world without ready access to my bed or other methods of comfort.

Indeed, going out to face the big bad world makes coming home to be cozy and relaxed a million times better. Which is why, I suppose, Saturdays are depressing to me. No daily thing to keep me focused and give me direction except for blogging, and blogging is not enough by itself.

I’d be lost without it though. If I didn’t even have blogging to keep me stitched together, I would end up in a very, very bad frame of mind. I just plain can’t imagine my life without this blog now. As long as I do my 1000 words a day, my thoughts and emotions have a regular way out. It’s not always the ones I thought I was going to be expressing, but it’s all stuff that needs to be expressed, so it’s all good.

So once more, I cherish and adore everyone who reads this blog. You help keep me sane.

I felt really great yesterday, and that’s not worth ignoring. I honestly think the key must have been hydration. I arrived at class with a 2L bottle of tap water, down that in like half an hour, then on break I refilled it, and drank THAT over the next two hours. That’s 4L of water!

So sure, I had to pee a lot yesterday and today. But if it puts me in that good of a mood, it’s worth it a thousand times over.

When I go back to class on Monday, it will be with plenty of water. Maybe I have been nursing a bad case of hypo-dehydration for a long time, and it took actually listening to my body and obeying my thirst to realize it.

Now I want to go back in time and take those “OBEY YOUR THIRST” 7up ads and just remove the 7up part of them. Obey your thirst in general, folks. Drink as much water as it demands. Drink till your body tells you to stop. And don’t go into it with any preconceptions as to how much that will be, either.

As with me, it could turn out to be one heck of a lot. Especially the first time.

I shouldn’t be surprised I ended up skirting dehydration. I went like five days without diabetes meds, and that led to a heck of a lot of urination. Enough so that it kept me from getting good sleep!

I hate it when that happens.

And ya know, if output outstrips input, you end up with a serious deficit. No wonder I needed all that water. Makes me wonder if I could still be in deficit.

This clearly warrants further experimentation. Time to drink more water!

Another thing I am working on : letting go of unnecessary expectations. For example, I know that yesterday I had big big plans for today. And I know that the odds are that blogging is all I will accomplish for today.

And that is fine. When it comes to things I am doing on my own, with no extrinsic motivation, I have to tread a very fine line between not punishing myself and not giving up on myself. I want to be able to fill my time when I feel bored and depressed, but I don’t want that to turn into something dark and ugly that my depression can use to pummel and punish me.

I want to nurture the desire for productive labor, not punish it!

I do have homework I could work on. But it involves reading this interminably long and impenetrably dense free verse poem and I am going to have to work my way up to that because it is nonfun.

However, once I do read it and select which “hour” of it (cor, what a giveaway) I like most/hate least, I get to write a poem in response to it, and I know I will enjoy that.

That’s the thing about being a writer. While every good writer has to be a good reader first, that does not mean we want to read other people’s writing. We still have our own tastes, after all, and while there will be some connection between what we like and what we write, it might not be an obvious one.

And that goes ten times over for poetry. So having to read all this dense BS that doesn’t seem to want to actually tell me anything directly is going to be a chore.

When it comes to poetry, I would much rather be writing it than reading it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.