Update : I am feeling a lot better than I did yesterday. So I screwed up in a way I have done many times before. Nothing I can do about it now. All I can do is do what I can to fix the problem and get on with my life.

Tried to courier the document today, but the UPS store was closed for Remembrance Day. Whatever. I got dressed, got out, got moving, got around. It kept today from being like Saturday, nothing in particular to do except blogging.

Oh, plus I have a Creative Writing assignment due tomorrow. Gotta remember that.

I figure it won’t take them long to process it when they get it. There aren’t any complications like equipment or personnel requests, my diagnoses are simple, I don’t have a learning disability. And I assume that at this time of year, they are not exactly dealing with a massive backlog.

Actually, it may be a blessing in disguise that I couldn’t courier it today. I vaguely recall Doctor Costin saying that I needed to get the thing stamped by the disability people at Kwantlen before handing it in. It would be a shame (to put it mildly) to fuck up on something simple and stupid again.

If so, then I will have to make an appointment, because apparently Kwantlen’s commitment to people with disabilities doesn’t extend to having a full time disability coordinator or whatever. Appointments are made over the phone, which is ever so modern, and so I can’t make an appointment till tomorrow.

Curses. Foiled again.

Not being able to do something important because of a stat holiday happens to be disturbingly often. Weird.

Oh yeah. Better cover Remembrance, lest I forget.

Like I always say around this time of year, back home in my home town, in the park in what was the center of town when I was growing up (the center has drifted north due to development), there is a memorial of the usual statue of soldiers on a base covered with the names of the lost on it kind.

And on that last is two of my grand-uncles. Men I never got to meet because they died in World War II. Men who never got to come home to their large Acadian families. Men who were never important, powerful, or famous. Men who died on some hill somewhere and whose death was just another statistic in a war far bigger and more important than they were. Men whose lived on in the hearts and minds of their loved ones for weeks, maybe even months, until that fateful knock on their door killed them for good.

It is those men I mourn and respect today. I don’t go to any services here because they would make me far too homesick. Being at another person’s Remembrance would make me feel all the more keenly the fact that I am not at mine.

So all I can do is remember in my own way, and do my best to put how I feel into words, and carry on.

I’m beginning to feel like that is all that life is about…. carrying on. No matter what. Doing the next thing. And the next. See a mountain of tasks as if each task is a rung on a ladder that leads to where you want to go. Don’t waste time looking up the ladder and telling yourself you could never climb all those rungs. You’re right, you can’t. Taking all those rungs at once is impossible. But you can climb one rung over and over again. And if you keep doing that, eventually, you get there.

It’s the difference between thinking of a task as a whole (right brain) or as a sequence (left brain). I think maybe us creative types, especially those of us with depression, get trapped by our tendency to want to view things as united wholes. Any task, even something as simple as combing your hair, can seem like an enormous crushing burden if you imagine it stretching out infinitely into the future.

But the thing is, you will never have to do a lifetime’s worth of hair combing at once. You will only have to do a day’s worth. The true nature of the task is segmented and something easily accomplished. Viewing it as a monumental task is a trick of the mind, a self-sabotaging trick of the highest degree, and the true thing being denied and suppressed is the knowledge that you can actually do these things.

Not “you could do it if you were normal” or “you could do them in theory” or “you should be able to do them, you loser!”. You actually could do them. You could get up right now and go do them.

All you have to do is change viewing angles so that all you see is the one task in front of you. You’re not deluding yourself. Viewing it as a whole is delusional because it makes you see a small task as a huge burden that you have to shoulder all at once. That is just plain crazy.

Do the next thing. Live life one day at a time. Only worry about what you have to get done today. Hell, only worry about what you have to get done next. There is a huge difference between moving a boulder and moving a boulder’s weight in pebbles. And it’s perfectly legit to bust that boulder up.

And if you find yourself resisting that idea, if that idea in fact scares you and makes you incredibly uncomfortable, ask yourself why. What is it in you that makes you afraid of something that would make your life better? What terrible thing awaits you if you open the door to genuine hope?

What is your depression protecting? And is it worth it? What have you sacrificed in order to never have to deal with this thing?

And wouldn’t you rather be happy?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Oh, and you all remember what it means when I switch to the second person, right? Good. )