I have had one heck of a productive day, and it’s all thanks to my therapist.

I went into therapy yesterday with this^[1] on my mind :

Good god, I’m hard on myself.

Anyhow, I am lucky that I had my wonderful therapist Doctor Costin there to be the grownup in the situation and calm me down from my guilt-ridden self-loathing freaking out state by being cool, calm, and sensible.

Never realized how much I need that in my life until recently. But lately that’s what he has been doing for me. I get all panicked by something and my emotions get the better of me and there he is to, gently and firmly, put me in check.

Joe does this for me too. Thank goodness I have sensible people around me!

What really strikes me about Doc Costin being the adult for me in that way is that I do the exact same thing for others, especially for people younger than me. They come to me freaking out over something that I can see for the solvable thing it is, and I console them and give them helpful advice.

I don’t do it nearly as well as Doctor Costin. But I can learn.

Also, I am pleased that I have progressed far enough on the path to recovery that I can both trust my therapist to do this for me and actually be calmed down by it when he does.

A younger, more depressed/anxious me would have argued with him, or sighed that he didn’t “understand”, or something equally self-defeating. But now I know that both he and I are on the same team and we both want my depression to die, die, die! We are united against it, he and I.

I know who I am. And I know what it is. And I know that it is not me and I am not it. My depression is merely something happened to me, like a broken leg, and when it is gone, I will still be here, living strong and getting along.

And I will finally be rid of my dark passenger.

Back to therapy. After Doctor Costin helpfully dislodged the bone of hysteria from the trachea of my mind, I was easily able to get over those feelings of guilt/stupidity and realize that all that had really changed was that now I would be taking a full course load (almost said case load) instead of a few courses, and that I was actually totally fine with that.

Better than fine, honestly. I want to work. I am desperate for purpose in my life. My blogging and my videos keep me busy and I love doing them (most of the time… we all have bad days), but I want more.

I want to have things I can pour all my energies into doing, and seeing as at least at first that’s unlikely to come from any single course (yay, having to take a bunch of “Intro To” level courses…. again) I will instead get it by taking a full slate courses to keep me good and busy.

Now I told Doctor Costin that I would be taking at least four classes, and he was a bit leery of the idea. His reasons were more than reasonable. I haven’t been in uni for 20 years and I have spent most of those intervening years mentally ill, so he can be forgiven for thinking I should maybe take it easy at first.

And he only has my word on that whole “school was never hard for me” thing.

But I know me, and I know that at this point in my life that I would rather be too busy that not nearly busy enough. I have been insufficiently busy for a long long time.

Being too busy would make for a refreshing and stimulating change.

And who knows? Maybe having so much to sink my mental teeth into will clear my mind and improve my mood. It has worked before when I was writing a NaNoWriMo novel. Stands to reason that it would work that way again.

By the way, if you find yourself needing to stand to reason, see a doctor, because clearly your brain has slipped down into your butt and that’s the kind of thing a fella should take seriously.

Stand up and think about it and I am sure you’ll agree.

Where was I…. oh right, Doctor Costin’s doubts. Perfectly reasonable but on this, I will pay him no heed, because I am an academic powerhouse and, if anything, the last twenty years have made me even smarter than before.

That’s what happens when you do nothing but exercise your mind all day. It gets buff. Plus, I should be coming out of sleep apnea soonishly, and who knows what I am capable of when my brain actually gets enough oxygen when I sleep?

On that, still have not tried my new CPAP machine. Forgot to get distilled water for it, d’oh. I will get it when I do my shopping tomorrow night.

Last time, I used regular water instead. But this time, I am going to do absolutely everything right because I really want this thing to work.

And I have been wearing my blood oximeter when I sleep, which will give the people at the sleep store an idea of just how little O2 I am getting every night while I trod the hills and valleys of Slumberland.

Anyhow, energized by Costin’s help, today I spend all afternoon signing up for course (wait till he hears I signed up for FIVE), completing my online student loan application, and emailing UPEI in hopes of getting them to send my transcripts from my time there to Kwantlen.

It’s a shot in the dark, but what the hell, would be nice to be able to avoid a course or two.

And the thing is, while I was super busy with the administrivia (along with chatting online with my fuzzy friends in order to keep myself emotionally grounded), I was pretty happy.

Or if not exactly happy, I was at least a lot less unhappy than usual.

Seems like keeping busy really is the key to ending my suffering.

I just have to learn to throw a lasso around the neck of my wild enthusiasms so they can drag me where they want to go.

Might want to invest in some rollerskates.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.