That’s right. We did it on purpose. Deal with it.
Not a lot on my mind at the moment. What with the weather getting much nicer and the sun shining brightly outside my window, my brain had gone into Summer Mode and is therefore not inclined towards thinking very hard about anything.
Finally did my grocery shopping last night. Normally I do it Sunday night, but last Sunday was Easter, so it got shifted to last night, Tuesday.
Damn holidays messing up my life. Bah.
Ended up buying the same crap as usual. So my canned food revolution will have to wait till Friday.
I just didn’t have the energy for it last night. But now I know this is the sort of thing that will take a concentrated act of will to begin, and that means I have to go into that store with my goals firmly in mind and a good head of steam built up.
I’m calling it The Challenge Of The Ten Cans. That means my goal is to leave Sav-on with ten cans of whatever. Chili, baked beans, corn, flakes of chicken, whatever I can find that seems tasty and isn’t too pricey.
I am determined to improve my shitty diet, both because I want to improve my health by eating like a grownup and because I think it might make me feel a lot better too.
For all I know, what I call depression is really just malnutrition.
It’s worth a try.
Of course, there’s also the fact that having tasty and nourishing food to eat will improve my mood in and of itself.
My diet right now is quite monotonous. I could use more variety.
Over in my other life, the one I lived in Elder Scrolls Online, I am enjoying being a Necromancer, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t somewhat disappointed.
Because it’s not that different than being a regular Mage. The spells are basically just Halloween versions of the usual Mage spells with some superficial tweaks in use in order to make them technically new and different.
And I would be fine with that if they had included the Mage’s summoning spells in the conversion. But they didn’t. I thought I would `have a skeleton or zombie or something as a summoned companion by now, but nope. Does not appear to be in the cards.
And I am disappoint.
Still, I get to hurl flaming skulls at the bad guys and summon skeletons that run toward the enemy, hurl themselves bodily toward them, then explode, so it ain’t all bad.
But i wanted an ever-growing army of the undead, god damn it!
Otherwise, things are going fine. My sleep schedule has been a little more random than usual and sometimes I feel very tired and frustrated and depressed, but for the most part my life is pleasant and serene.
It’s not enough, of course. I need so much more than video games and reading and junk food and naps.
But for now, it will have to do.
More after the break.
When Aversions Attach!
I was tempted to go with When Aversions Attack – after all, it’s just a letter away.
But attach suits the subject matter more.
It was a judgment call. One had to be made, and I made it.
Anyhow. Something that has been on my mind a fair bit lately is aversions. They are an aspect of depressions I have not seen discussed before, and they seem fairly important to me, so I figured I would talk about them tonight.
The simple definition of an aversion is an emotional tendency to avoid certain things. But not just the things themselves, but everything attached to it.
They are a lot like phobias, but they come at you from the other side, so to speak. Phobias react to harmless stimuli with unreasoning (and unreasonable) fear, aversions make you avoid things that might provoke the fear.
For example, I have a mild phobia of stinging insects. That means if I see a bee, I feel fear. That’s a phobia.
But if I avoid walking through an area full of wildflowers because I am worried that I might see a bee, that’s aversion.
Got it? Good.
What I have seen in my own case is that depression causes me to develop aversions to things very easily, and once they are formed, they rapidly sink deep into the bedrock of my psyche until before long, going against them seems impossible.
And like a phobia, it feeds upon itself. After all, if last time you thought about a subject, you got scared, then you will naturally avoid thinking about that subject again, and if the reaction is strong enough, other subjects that are merely attached by association (as opposed to logic) to said subject might get attached to the aversion as well.
For example, my fear of stinging insects is one thing. But if the last time the phobia was triggered, I was at an outdoor ice cream stand, I might avoid those as well in fear of triggering the phobia by association.
The problem arises when depression makes you form aversions easily and said aversions become rock solid compulsions in very little time.
It’s not hard to see that before long, you have so many of these aversions and phobias and compulsions that it becomes impossible to do anything, and they all merge together into depression’s familiar desire to not do anything at all.
The solution is as simple as it is difficult : you have to override the aversion and do the thing it tells you not to do.
The secret rule of all aversions is “if you do this, something terrible will happen”, and the only way to bust that aversion is to do the thing and see that, even if it results in something bad happening, it is still not nearly as bad as my aversion told me it would be. It happened, I am still here, and it was really no big deal. ”
Aversions survive because they make you too scared to think in specific terms. Once you ask yourself, “No, seriously, what is the actual worst that could happen?”, the “Something Terrible” of infinite undesirability disappears and is replaced by a concrete, finite fear that is, mathematically speaking, infinitely smaller.
Again, I am not saying this is easy. Everything in your mind will be screaming at you not to do it. Your depression/anxiety will do everything it can to keep you from doing it. Doing it will feel like you are lifting a hundred million pounds off your chest.
But if you lean into it and persist, the relief when you finally do the thing will make it all worth while, as will the sense of victory over your depression/anxiety.
So fight the friction, folks. It only hurts until you win.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.