Tag Archives: Misery

Thought of the Week: A Day in the Life

6:07 AM

UP Band starts vibrating. Don’t get up; it’s not worth it.

~

6:30 AM

iPhone alarm goes off. Try to keep your eyes open, but don’t get up; it’s not worth it. Check for emails and WordPress notifications. They’re all boring.

~

6:42 AM

Get up, because you’re going to be late for work. You should have got up at 6:07 AM and had plenty of time for a nice breakfast, cup of coffee, but no…it wasn’t worth it. Sleep would have been worth it, but you didn’t do that, either. Just…wasted time. Great start to the day.

~

6:52 AM

Devour an english muffin. You used to prepare a bagel and eat it on the way to work, but even the preparation isn’t worth it. Bread, butter, done. That’s about all you can manage. Maybe make coffee; you desperately need it.

~

7:21 AM

Start driving to work; you’ll probably just make it in time. Try not to fall asleep driving; play loud music, put the a/c on high…still no luck. Swerve into the wrong lane several times.

~

8:03 AM

Get to work 3 minutes late and hope no one notices. Try to drink more coffee (if you made it). Slap on the happy face: no one at work can know how you feel. Dread the next four hours.

~

10:00 AM

Break time. Fifteen minutes – not nearly enough. Keep smiling and joking; you’re still surrounded by people. Finish your coffee. Decide not to brush your teeth, even though you deliberately brought toothbrush and toothpaste to work. Have a mint instead. After all, who cares if your teeth rot.

~

12:05 PM

Lunch time – finally. Did you bring lunch with you? Then heat it up in the microwave. No? Go out and spend $10 at Starbucks, even though you’re almost out of money for the month. After all, there isn’t a lot else around. Bury yourself in a game on your iPad, listen to music on your earphones, try to pretend no one’s around you. Finish your food, set an alarm for 12:55 PM, and go find a chair out of the way from everyone and try to go to sleep.

~

1:10 PM

Wake up and realize you didn’t set the alarm right and now you’re 10 minutes late back to work. Panic, but try not to show it. Remember: happy face. Oops, I lost track of the time, etc. Dread the next four hours again.

~

3:00 PM

Miss your break. Fun times.

~

4:53 PM

Start counting the seconds until you can go home. Not entirely sure why – what’s there to look forward to when you get off work? You finish with your customer, clock out, change your shirt…the happy face is starting to crumble – just hope it lasts until you get in the car. It does. Try not to fall asleep on the drive home. Fail, and doze off at the wheel, just like the morning. Somehow, you don’t crash. Again.

~

5:55 PM

Arrive home. The kitchen is a mess from the morning. The recycling has been piling for days. The dishwasher hasn’t been run. It’s stinking hot, and there’s no a/c in the kitchen. You turn it on in the living room and upstairs, at least. You’re supposed to start preparing dinner, but the bed is too tempting. You lie down – just for a moment.

~~

7:45 PM

Dinner’s finally ready, way, way late. The kitchen’s a worse mess from the dinner preparations. You don’t feel like eating at all, but make yourself.

~

8:30 PM

Finish dinner and stare at the kitchen. There’s really only a few things to do: most of the dishes can be put in the dishwasher, and there’s only one pot. It’s too much anyway, and you go back upstairs. You look at the computer: you’re supposed to write this week’s blog entry. The floor in your office is too tempting, and you go to sleep.

~

9:30 PM

Wake up briefly. Think about doing the dishes. Then think about doing the pile of dirty laundry you’re sleeping on. Then go back to sleep.

~

11:04 PM

You’ve slept now for almost two hours since getting home, and you’re more tired than ever. Maybe you find the energy to get up and clean the kitchen, if you’re lucky.

~

1:36 AM

Wake up on the floor of your office. Decide you finally need to do the dishes. Come close to panic doing them, but you get it done – barely. There are still glasses that need rinsing, but you leave them until the morning. The recycling still needs to be done. The floor still needs to be swept. The stove still needs to be wiped. You just. Can’t. Do. It.

~

6:07 AM

Repeat. Forever.

~

Featured image from http://mombizcoach.com/time-focus-money/.

Satis Logo with ©

Thought of the Week: Finding Optimism

Optimism IconFor those of you who know (and those who don’t), I am not entirely mentally stable. From depression to violent outbursts and outright nervous breakdowns, I’m honestly pretty messed up.

The good news is that, for some time now, I’ve making inroads into coping with these issues better. I’m loathe to say I’m getting better, because I don’t believe there’s any such thing; I am me, warty neurons and all. My behaviors at times are erratic and unpleasant, and I acknowledge that I can make life extremely difficult, if not downright miserable, for those I care most about. But coping – that, I feel I’m doing better with.

pictureAnd there are a few reasons why.I’ve now been regularly going to therapy since February, and as embarrassing as it is to admit, she does help me achieve some insight into myself. It’s ironic, because the techniques she uses are precisely those I use with people at work on an everyday basis, but even though I recognize it, it still helps.

For example, she helped me consider the possibility that a lot of the strain between Mrs. Satis and I might result from a mutual jealousy of the things each of us excel at (she’s really good at making sure everything gets done; I’m really good at not doing anything). She’s reassured me with my mild hypochondria that I have every mental illness under the sun (I don’t have Aspergers, though I might share some traits; I’m not bipolar, though I often have mood swings). We’ve talked about how I often feel emotionless, and helped trace it back to when I did last feel an intensity that I personally could define as “emotion”.

I’ve also been exercising (sort of). My UP band has been phenomenal in helping with this, by tracking my steps, my meals and my sleep. I’ve begun going for a 20-30 minute walk every lunch time, and using our elliptical (finally!) on my days off. I’ve reduced the amount of calories I consume, and consequently have dropped 15 pounds in the past month or so. I’ve started making sure I try to go to bed earlier, increasing my average of 5½ hours to closer to 7 hours. It’s all helping.

My weight since April. I'm over 6' tall, so don't worry - 200 lbs isn't actually that heavy!

My weight since April. I’m over 6′ tall, so don’t worry – 200 lbs isn’t actually that heavy!

And one of my favorite things I’ve discovered is an app called Optimism. It’s an incredibly flexible mood tracking app, allowing me to chart anything from my general mood and ability to cope to how guilty I feel and the number of cups of coffee I’ve had. I’ve been using it for about two months now, and the results have been…interesting, to say the least. One of the neat things is that I can record notes with each day, which helps me go back and see when I felt a particular way and the possible reasons why. Here’s what it looks like:

Screen Shot 2013-05-26 at 10.04.15 PM

Interesting, no? Look at the few weeks of wild mood swings around the start of May. Looking back, this correlates to stress at work and a number of severe fights with Mrs. Satis. Now what would be really interesting would be to have a think about what external triggers might have caused these swings, and the possibilities are endless (and perhaps all true), from changes in weather to hormonal cycles.

It’s an ongoing process, but I feel a lot better about it than I did three or four months ago. I don’t know if it’s been external changes or the very nature of tracking my mood that’s helped, but either way I’m going to continue, because each day I feel better able to cope with myself and the world.

Thought of the Week: Not Writing

pen-and-paper

I had quite a hard time thinking about what to write this week, so I thought I’d write about not writing instead.

I have now not written for The Redemption of Erâth for two weeks, which is not something I feel happy about. I have not written a movie night post in the same period of time, though we watched Hogfather recently and very, very much enjoyed it. I very nearly did not write this post tonight.

The truth is, I’ve been in a bit of a bad place for the past few weeks. Some nights I didn’t want to go to bed, because I didn’t want to wake up the next morning. I’ve eaten far too many bowls of Cheerios, too, and even forgot to brush my teeth one night. I had two glasses of wine and a finger of rum a few days ago, and wow – my sleep pattern was all kinds of messed up.

Completely psychotic sleep.

Completely psychotic sleep.

In fact, sleep has been one of the things getting me down. I’m not going to debate cause and effect, but ever since I got my UP band and was able to track my sleep patterns, I’ve felt worse – more tired, less energy – than ever before. Some nights I’ve had as few as 5 hours of sleep, despite being in bed for almost 7 hours. The weird thing is that I usually fall asleep quickly, but wake up often through the night. Sometimes I actually think the band is just picking up my violent thrashing and bashing and thinking I’m awake, but I suppose the result is the same either way; if I’m active enough to seem awake, I might as well be awake for all the rest I’m getting.

It ends up being very hard to write when you question doing anything at all.

Like gods of the sunI’m playing through every My Dying Bride album in the car – one album each day – in an effort to match my mood (damn, their music is good bad mood music). I actually did pretty well tonight; Like Gods of the Sun kept me going until I got home, and I didn’t really fall asleep at the wheel either. I’ve been experimenting with music and sleep, as well; I usually listen to music through earphones in bed as I doze off, since for as long as I can remember it was always a way to soothe myself to sleep. It turns out, thanks to my UP band, that listening to music actually delays my sleep, especially since I eventually wake up to pause the music and take the earphones out. That sucks, because I really, really miss listening to music as I go to sleep.

It ends up being very hard to write when you get to the point of questioning the value of doing anything at all. By the time 10:00 PM rolls around all I want to do is crawl into bed, which of course gives me no writing time at all. I miss Brandyé, and thought I want to know where he’s going next, I just can’t bring myself to go back to him. I worry about this, because I know that the longer I leave the story alone, the harder it will be to get back to it.

The funny thing is that cutting back on writing to focus on sleep hasn’t made me feel better; all it’s really highlighted to me is that I really suck at getting enough sleep. I’m still waiting for the ‘official’ results from my polysomnography, but until then it’s sweet dreams with a rubber ring on my wrist.

At least I got this out – that’s a start! Thanks for bearing with me, guys; I’ll be back in full soon. Trust me?