Illness and Weakness
Felt like posting this somewhere. I know few bother to read LJ anymore, but eh. Warning: Brain dump.
Last night I gave myself food poisoning. This was certainly not intentional, as I'm still experimenting with my pressure cooker. I'm pretty sure what happened was that the chicken (boneless skinless chicken thighs) that I put in was actually still a bit frozen in the center, thus didn't cook all the way. Due to the colors of chicken thighs, it isn't like I can simply cut into the beef to know. I've now ordered a instant probe for measuring the temperature of meat to make sure this doesn't happen again.
That's not what I'm talking about.
My depression, like many others, are based on feelings of helplessness and weakness; the more often I am ill and/or the more often I get injured, the more frequent I have bad days. My feelings of depression are amplified greatly when I am also by myself, feeling alone in the world (even when I have friends and such, it doesn't matter to StupidBrain). So the idea that I (nominally a decent cook) managed to infect myself with something out of carelessness... infected myself with something that constantly interrupted my attempts at sleep with extremely large amounts of nausea and very painful gas... well, not good for my mental well being, that's for damn sure.
After this, naturally I couldn't really go to work like that. I ended up taking a sick day today.
A couple of problems with this:
1) I'm out of sick leave. Technically, after today, I have -0.5 sick days. While a lot of the sick leave I take is due to medical appointments (hard to zip to a doc and back when you don't drive), a huge portion are due to me just plain being sick. See the depression source "weakness".
2) This puts me a day behind my projects at work, when we're already a bit rushed. Now I feel like I'm bringing my team of people down with me (for something that is entirely, 100% my fault). See the depression source "helplessness".
3) This means I'm by myself for the day at home, feeling like crap (physically due to recovering from food poisoning; mentally due to the above), with only my cats to talk to. While my cats do genuinely try to help, they can only do so much when I'm lonely. See amplification of depression.
So yeah, today has been a fairly bad day for me mentally. It took me hours to even just get out of my room, and hours more to actually get off of the couch so I could actually work on hydrating myself. Everything felt sort of ... worthless? My thoughts were more of a "why should I bother doing anything anyway" mentality.
The methods that I "deal with" depression are basically consisting of CBT - Cognitive Behavior Therapy, or a problem-solving approach to things. Think "why do you feel this way and what steps can you take to either avoid those intrusive thoughts or just escape out of the situation?" I don't take medication because I deal with some really stupid side effects of, well, every medication known to humanity. I mean, seriously, some of the things meds due to me (brain meds or otherwise) are just plain stupid. So, as a result, I have to be cognizant of what my brain is doing at all times, realize what is going on, adjust what I'm doing to compensate, all while feeling like nothing at all matters and I'm just a worthless piece of trash in an ocean of privilege.
This works about as well as one thinks.
What I am good at, however, is doing a post-mortem on events. I'm excellent at looking back at a bad time and figuring out what I did right, what I did wrong, and what I can do to optimize things; basically, what I'm doing right now. One of the things I'm doing is being a bit more open about what I'm going through. I have a tendency to just shut up about things like this, which doesn't help my friends help me. I also tend to string unrelated events together; my last major depressive episode was due to injuring my shoulders while attaching my new shower head. Imagine hurting yourself by lifting up an object less than a kilogram above your head, then imagine hurting yourself again by screwing up some cooking. My brain correlates these things, even when there is no rhyme or reason to them. I didn't intentionally give myself food poisoning, and I didn't intentionally hurt myself putting up my shower head - these really are unrelated, but StupidBrain thinks that they're just additional signs that my body is freaking worthless (thus I'm worthless).
I don't really know where I'm going with this; I just wanted to write it down. I'm not suicidal or anything, I'm just depressed and having problems with the idea of having fun even. I'm taking steps to try and better myself as a result of recognizing this, but this episode may get worse before it gets better.
Especially if my cats keep stepping on my poor sore stomach. Ow.
Last night I gave myself food poisoning. This was certainly not intentional, as I'm still experimenting with my pressure cooker. I'm pretty sure what happened was that the chicken (boneless skinless chicken thighs) that I put in was actually still a bit frozen in the center, thus didn't cook all the way. Due to the colors of chicken thighs, it isn't like I can simply cut into the beef to know. I've now ordered a instant probe for measuring the temperature of meat to make sure this doesn't happen again.
That's not what I'm talking about.
My depression, like many others, are based on feelings of helplessness and weakness; the more often I am ill and/or the more often I get injured, the more frequent I have bad days. My feelings of depression are amplified greatly when I am also by myself, feeling alone in the world (even when I have friends and such, it doesn't matter to StupidBrain). So the idea that I (nominally a decent cook) managed to infect myself with something out of carelessness... infected myself with something that constantly interrupted my attempts at sleep with extremely large amounts of nausea and very painful gas... well, not good for my mental well being, that's for damn sure.
After this, naturally I couldn't really go to work like that. I ended up taking a sick day today.
A couple of problems with this:
1) I'm out of sick leave. Technically, after today, I have -0.5 sick days. While a lot of the sick leave I take is due to medical appointments (hard to zip to a doc and back when you don't drive), a huge portion are due to me just plain being sick. See the depression source "weakness".
2) This puts me a day behind my projects at work, when we're already a bit rushed. Now I feel like I'm bringing my team of people down with me (for something that is entirely, 100% my fault). See the depression source "helplessness".
3) This means I'm by myself for the day at home, feeling like crap (physically due to recovering from food poisoning; mentally due to the above), with only my cats to talk to. While my cats do genuinely try to help, they can only do so much when I'm lonely. See amplification of depression.
So yeah, today has been a fairly bad day for me mentally. It took me hours to even just get out of my room, and hours more to actually get off of the couch so I could actually work on hydrating myself. Everything felt sort of ... worthless? My thoughts were more of a "why should I bother doing anything anyway" mentality.
The methods that I "deal with" depression are basically consisting of CBT - Cognitive Behavior Therapy, or a problem-solving approach to things. Think "why do you feel this way and what steps can you take to either avoid those intrusive thoughts or just escape out of the situation?" I don't take medication because I deal with some really stupid side effects of, well, every medication known to humanity. I mean, seriously, some of the things meds due to me (brain meds or otherwise) are just plain stupid. So, as a result, I have to be cognizant of what my brain is doing at all times, realize what is going on, adjust what I'm doing to compensate, all while feeling like nothing at all matters and I'm just a worthless piece of trash in an ocean of privilege.
This works about as well as one thinks.
What I am good at, however, is doing a post-mortem on events. I'm excellent at looking back at a bad time and figuring out what I did right, what I did wrong, and what I can do to optimize things; basically, what I'm doing right now. One of the things I'm doing is being a bit more open about what I'm going through. I have a tendency to just shut up about things like this, which doesn't help my friends help me. I also tend to string unrelated events together; my last major depressive episode was due to injuring my shoulders while attaching my new shower head. Imagine hurting yourself by lifting up an object less than a kilogram above your head, then imagine hurting yourself again by screwing up some cooking. My brain correlates these things, even when there is no rhyme or reason to them. I didn't intentionally give myself food poisoning, and I didn't intentionally hurt myself putting up my shower head - these really are unrelated, but StupidBrain thinks that they're just additional signs that my body is freaking worthless (thus I'm worthless).
I don't really know where I'm going with this; I just wanted to write it down. I'm not suicidal or anything, I'm just depressed and having problems with the idea of having fun even. I'm taking steps to try and better myself as a result of recognizing this, but this episode may get worse before it gets better.
Especially if my cats keep stepping on my poor sore stomach. Ow.