I think that I’m naturally quite a cheerful and confident person. I suspect that seems ridiculous to assert but I really do see my Depression, complete with its suicide ideation, as being separate to my self. The way I’ve always dealt with it, from my teens until present day, is by seeing it as a positive. That’s gotten more sophisticated with age, from a teenage – I can always just leave to my Bhutanese inspired thinking about death five times a day. The thing is, I’m cheerful by nature..
Thinking about tiny little joys is supposed to reset a sad and anxious brain, it’s brought home to me that Anxiety is something that I suffer from when things get bad, because the tiny little joys aren’t so much cheering me up as they are anchoring me. It’s a bit like that therapy exercise, focus on five things you can hear, see, touch which worked ok actually within a session but I usually found I couldn’t quite make work in the outside world. I think Depression is something that I’ve gotten used to dealing with and because Disassociation has previously been the solution to that the idea that I really need to deal with this is taking a long time to get into my brain.
I didn’t even have the words for this last year, I just knew that some things felt more solid than others and that some days it felt like I might float away at any moment. The whys and where fires of course are things I’m working through in therapy.