Showered for the first time in 2.5 years yesterday.
The new setup works great. I am incredibly impressed with the grab bars. They really feel sturdy and stable and that’s, like, their main job.
I’m still not going to be swinging around on them like a kid on a jungle gym, but i trust them not to come off in my hand, anyhow.
The new shower head works fine too. I now have the same hose-type shower head that I used when I was a little kid just learning to bathe himself, and that’s nice.
And being able to aim the flow directly at whatever part of me I want is very nice. Feels very good in some spots, including the ones you’d think.
Oh, and the shower chair also feels nice and sturdy despite being plastic.
All in all, a very rugged setup.
As for the shower itself, eh, I got clean. But my bandages got wet. As in there was a little lake in the bottom of reach bag when I was done. Turns out rubber bands don’t hold the plastic bags on tight enough to keep the water from getting in, so next time I’m gonna use tape like Albert used.
I’m gonna miss that guy.
But nevertheless, it felt amazing to be able to shower under my own power once more. It makes me feel so much more human. Like I always say, disability takes away your dignity, and the new shower setup gives me a big chunk of dignity back.
Plus there’s just something about being able to wash myself that makes me feel more human. It’s something most people completely take for granted but I have had to do without it for a long ass time and it’s good to be back.
Oh, and adding to the wackiness of my little watery misadventure, it turned out that both of the bottles of Head and Shoulders in my bathroom were empty, LOL, so I did not get to wash my hair.
Plus, because of my long shower free period, it turned out that there was but a single towel in my bathroom as well.
Ah well, next shower will be more complete.
The real psychological takeaway from the experience for me is to be proud that I didn’t take the whole thing seriously, so the little bumps on the road didn’t bother me much.
I am learning to just accept that I am not someone skilled at thinking things out beforehand and so my best course of action is to just jump into things feet first, make a bunch of mistakes, and learn from them.
This is not the prudent or “smart” way to do things. But it’s a way to do things, and doing things is infinitely better than the stodgy and stoic stasis I’ve lived in for so long.
Towards this end I will continue to cultivate a cheerful, sunny outlook on life. That seems to be the exact kind of shock absorbers this big ol bus of a mind of mine needs if it’s to actually propel me forward for a change.
I’ve been spinning my wheels for so long, baby, that my tires wore out a long time ago and now I’m running on my rims.
It’s the fear of making a mistake that kills ya. There’s millions of things way worse than being less than perfect, and being (and doing) nothing at all is one of them.
So I need to be less cautious and more adventurous. Accept that living life means making mistakes and getting hurt and that the fun makes it all worth it.
Above all, I want to become a lot more mentally tough and resilient.
I’m working on it.
More after the break.
Trouble on the rise
I’ve started to find it very hard to get out of bed, and this worries me.
I don’t feel depressed. Just tired and lazy. I find myself just lying in bed, dozing, for way longer than usual and it’s not just sleepiness – I actively don’t wanna get out of bed.
Even though the only thing waiting for me when I arise is video games.
Maybe that’s the problem, I dunno. Maybe getting up to play video games just ain’t doing it for me any more and I need to shift into a higher gear.
But I fear it’s probably something not as simple as that.
The thing is, being unable (or unwilling) to get out of bed has never been a part of my particular depression. It’s a classic symptom, of course, but one I’ve managed to dodge.
But it’s becoming undeniable in my case right now. I am sleepy and/or tired all the time and all I want to do is burrow under the covers and snooze.
It definitely feels escapist. Like just dealing with my extremely low impact life is too much for me now and so I am retreating to the penultimate fallback position of hiding from the world in sleep.
If that’s the case, I’m in trouble. I’m going to have to tell Doctor Costin about this during Therapy Thursday this week and he might well decide that this whole “lowered Paxil dose” thing ain’t workin’ and I’m going to have to go back up.
Which would be, ironically, quite depressing.
But I don’t feel sad. Or depressed, or anxious, or anything else except sleepy. So maybe this has nothing to do with depression.
And that would be even worse because anything non-psychological that would make me sleepy all the time, like a virus or a brain issue, would be much, much worse.
It could be that I’m still just catching up on sleep debt. But I doubt it. This feels like more than that. I feel positively oppressed.
Hopefully I will get over it and it will be yet another weird health thing that disappears as mysteriously as it appeared.
Because life is at a pretty low ebb if I don’t even have the energy to play games.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.