elainegrey

As i drove to work yesterday morning i realized i had shifted to being not depressed. This bout has been incredibly illustrative of the power of self-compassion for me.

Disclaimers: this is not what would have worked fifteen years ago when i was in a dark place in grad school, or twenty five years ago as a teen. It's not some magic solution that will keep me from being depressed, and it's not necessarily appropriate for others.

I was lucky in some ways: i had planned for some recovery time from the trip, and there were not any stressful demands at work. That made it easier to deal with.

So, upon recognizing i was depressed this time, i didn't fight it because i recognized that there was a familiar pattern of returning from overstimulating travel and crashing and then getting better. So i was able to tell myself it was a temporary state and make (some) decisions accordingly. I allowed myself to do what i felt like doing: baking and playing with yarn and a deep compulsive dive into genealogy. Those all are things that replenish me (even though it didn't feel like it), and i didn't judge my doing of them. (And, actually, i think there is some pattern about the deep compulsive dive work being oddly replenishing.) I recognized that there were tasks that i was responsible for that i didn't feel like doing: in some way i *could not* do them. These were generally things that involved planning, decision making, and interaction with others, particularly things that involved negotiating and assimilating information and responding. I was very fortunate that the most time sensitive tasks i had were meeting oriented, and i could ask others to pick those up for me.

The temptation to judge and label myself a failure was incredible. By passing on the time sensitive tasks i could cut through the cycle of guilt and judgement to some extent. The amount of shame i felt Sunday was huge (i witnessed the other members of oversight picking up the task with such apparent ease....), so instead of staying for Meeting for Business i went home. I did not attend a Monday evening event that i hadn't had in mind.

"Easy" things to do were things that i planned slowly and were highly predictable (a return to OSH, grocery store trips, mailing a box, ordering some gifts for my grandparents), where i allowed myself to be expedient (buy all new gift wrapping instead of assessing what we had from previous years and identify what was needed), where Christine could make final decisions and do more of the interacting and bear most of the responsibility (dishwasher shopping). By focussing on what i *could* do and allowing myself to see that success i also staved off the paralysis and the sense of failure.

I allowed myself to say, "I can't right now," which was a big new shift for me. I tried to keep the frame in mind that it was like having a cold or flu: i didn't know when i would recover but i knew i would recover. I knew the "can't" was contextual.

I am now in a fragile place. Just like someone with a weakened immune system because of a struggle with illness, i could easily trigger another depression spell by expecting myself to be able to take on everything in the world. (And the amazing thing is how my mental state has shifted and everything seems so possible now!)

I stayed up too late last night reading a novel, and was awake early this morning with my mind remembering things i need for a 10:30 am work meeting that aren't done. Writing this and some of the email i sent this morning is part of pacing and being reasonable: charging off to work-mind without the self care of morning writing is a mental/emotional stress.

It's time to move on to that work. I'll just need to remind myself to pace.