Big Depression Equals New Medication

I feel I owe y'all an explanation of my absence over the duration of July. I know I mentioned prior to July that I was experiencing a depressive phase that was more pronounced than usual. Well, it continued through most of July. It got to the point, in fact, where I spent most or all of some days in bed. Literally. I didn't feel like getting up to do more than use the bathroom and eat. Going to bed got difficult as well, and I was sitting up all night sometimes three nights out of the week every week. See, the depression made me afraid to go to bed, because I didn't want to end up spending the day in bed again. It was just a vicious cycle. But that's what depression does. It locks the person who has it into a vicious circle of tactics to avoid or deal with it, and rarely are they healthy methods.

When I had my video appointment with my psych doc a few weeks ago, I explained to him what was going on. He wanted to be cautious. Instead of replacing one of the psych meds I'm already on, he suggested introducing a new one, to which I agreed. The reasoning behind this is that my mood stabilizers were working fine before the big depressive drop, and he doesn't want to meddle too much with established meds. It's actually easier to add a different medication on top of what I'm taking than take me off of one of my current meds and run through a list of others until we find one that works. And, besides, he could assign a medication specifically to deal with the depression, and go from there. I don't know what other plans he may have for my medications, but I'm glad to say this first one worked.

My psych doc put me on Wellbutrin, whose generic name is bupropion, which is actually the name that appears on the bottle. We were hoping for some improvement in my depression, but this medication just totally wiped it out. Before the heat wave hit, I spent a week being productive. It was fantastic, and if not for the heat wave, I'd have spent the past two or three weeks on an all new schedule. Sleeping at night. Awake during the day. I loved it for the week I had it.

Oh, the heat wave is important, because it messed up my sleeping at night. When the daytime temps hit about 95°F and above—and for about a week and a half, most of our days were over 100°F—I have difficulty staying asleep. I get hot at night and wake up. The window unit air conditioner in the bedroom just could not keep up, and we had nothing in the living room to help it. At times, I woke up to wipe sweat off myself with my sheet. 

That's part of the reason why I spent last night up. I slept all day yesterday—or may as well have been all day, to catch up on missed sleep leftover from the heat wave. From about midnight the night before until 13:00 yesterday, then I laid down for a 2.5 hour nap at 15:00. Even taking my night meds last night didn't help. 

We're getting a new window unit that's supposed to be delivered today or tomorrow, for the living room. With that in place, things should get back on track. I'm looking forward to that! 

Moving Along Slowly

In the past few weeks, I've made some progress. There's about three or four drafts of the To Do list I planned on making, mostly adding things to it. I've also realized that with things going as they have been with Covid, my job hunt may never get started again. A lot of companies are moving their employees to home-based working, and that's not really feasible right now for me, even if I could qualify for the well-paying jobs I'm seeing. Not only that, I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel with other methods of making money. Ideas I've had before, but never had the courage to consider doing seriously. So, if things work out, writing won't be my only income stream—and it really shouldn't be anyway. 

About that To Do list. I think I have it finalized at last. My attempts at starting on obeying it have failed previously, in part I think because of the depression that is still very much with me, but also in part because I didn't really give myself time to mentally prepare for starting to align myself to it. This week, though, I finalized the list and started on a "schedule" for it starting Sunday of next week. One of the things I'm doing is listing minimum times to do the things on it, usually an hour-range, but sometimes something like a wordcount (for writing) or minimum chapters (for reading). I'm not going to be working on a couple-odd things on it for the first while or so, because I need to get better equipment for the work, and I won't be able to do that until I get all the fabric I need for the quilting projects I'm planning. Writing is definitely on it, though, even if the goal count won't be very high, mainly because if I throw myself into high wordcounts right away I'll burn out and end up not writing at all for a few weeks.

I'm happy to say I'm getting some ideas on how to handle DH03 now. Suffice it to say that some major plot points may change. Beyond that, I'm not going to go any deeper into detail. Overall, I'm enjoying writing and am excited to get back into doing it regularly, so I'm hoping the next several days of psyching myself up for getting into my new "schedule" will work. 

Yes, I'm up awfully early. I slept until around 16:30 yesterday. Was just so tired. I'm probably going to take a nap today, then go to bed at a decent hour. Whatever I do, I'll be setting an alarm for Thursday and getting up when it goes off. I can't get myself on a decent schedule unless I organize my sleeping hours into a much better nightly habit than it has been up to this point. Whatever else happens today, I intend to do some housecleaning and perhaps some quilting—as well as reading through what I have of Géta's scenes so I can figure out how his next scene should go. 

And that is all!

Depression Sucks

Nuff said.

Where Things Stand

My writing is on hiatus again. I've gotten obsessed with quilting, which I've been wanting to do since before January but didn't have most of the equipment for. Right now, I'm mostly going with the flow, though I'm trying to be less focused than usual. This is, I feel, the first step to bringing writing into my non-writing obsessions and vice-versa, so I'm deliberately putting things aside and focusing on things around me and spending time with Tess. I want to have a better-balanced life, and it won't happen without me applying some discipline to it.

I'm still in the highly mixed state I was in when I wrote my bipolar post. Also, I've moved to a mostly nocturnal schedule, where I don't usually get to bed until after dawn. It's what's working for me right now, and I'm not sure if it's totally just what feels right for me or if the bipolar may be involved. All I know is that I'm enjoying being up all night. 

All I can really say is that I'm glad I got done with the Patreon setup before my mind switched gears. I'm sure finally getting a cutting mat, rotary cutter, and quilting ruler set is what jerked my mind into full-on Quilting Obsession. Depending upon how long this goes on, I may be able to establish better balance to my life. 

My job hunt is on indefinite suspension. I'm both sad and relieved about this. The main problem is that I need a job that pays at least $13.00 an hour, and I need to have a job where I'm seated most of the time. Being on my feet is just too hard on my right foot, and I really don't want to be in a medical boot for the rest of my life—or to have to undergo surgery to correct the problem because I've spent too much time on my feet. About the only job I qualify for that's seated is working in a call center, and all of the few I've found that pay $13.00 or more require knowledge of computer programs I don't even have access to right now, never mind training with. Most of the rest don't list wages at all, and those that do usually offer less than $10.00. If I'm going to get a job and thus lose part of my government income by making "too much" money, I need something that's got a halfway decent chance of supporting me and my family after taxes is taken out, and jobs for less than $10.00 just won't be able to do that.

So that's where things stand at the beginning of June 2020. 

How Depression Affects My Writing

I mentioned in a previous post that I'm dealing with a depressive phase of my bipolar disorder. This affects my writing to some extent. Even with these posts and recreating this Blogger account, I'm having to fight through feelings that my writing isn't any good and that the blog is pointless. This is even more pronounced with my fiction writing. I haven't touched DH01 in days, and in fact, I haven't touched it since the 7th of this month.

Depression doesn't so much block me as make it harder to connect to the ideas I have for my writing. This is true whether I'm pantsing the WIP or have an outline for it. It's frustrating to be able to see the ideas, but have an inability to "grasp" them well enough to write them out. Back in the past when I got like this, I'd try to force the words out, following advice that it's best to write every day regardless of mood, and that didn't end well for me. Sure, the words were as good as they would have been if my mood wasn't down, but I hated what I wrote and ended up abandoning the project for a few months. Not days or weeks. Months. So now I don't try to force the words out when I'm depressed. I go with the flow instead. 

At the same time, I also have a very poor opinion of my writing. I know I write well, and that I can create engaging characters and entertaining stories. Consciously. Logically. But the depression tells me all my writing, especially the fiction, is crap. This is part of the reason why I don't touch projects I force depression-phase words onto after forcing those words. 

If I'm lucky, I can look at my stuff to edit it. This time, I'm not lucky. I've been using this down period where I'm not writing to get to know ProWritingAid software again, using their web editor one paragraph at a time. It has few complaints for the most part; I've spent long enough writing to eradicate most of the issues it highlights. The "Repeats" checker section, though, always "confirms" the depression's opinion of my writing, so I don't end up doing any editing. I'm trying to figure out how to get ProWritingAid to work best for me, and this is not helping. At this point, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. 

The worst thing about pronounced depressions like this is that I don't know how long I'll be in it. It makes me not care about my writing, and if I had a deadline, that would only exacerbate the disinterest. Even if I were inclined to pursue traditional publishing, I wouldn't be able to because of these depressive phases so it's good I've latched onto the independent/self publishing track like I have. This depressive phase may last another day, a week, a month—or longer. I don't know. All I can really say is that I'm glad I don't have these phases more often. I'd never get anything done.

Triumphant Dream

I've been dealing with a pronounced depressive phase of my bipolar recently. Recent days, I typically stay in bed all day and don't get up until the evening. And even then, I don't feel like doing anything until I've been up for several hours. Until that time, I generally zone and vegetate, doing nothing except hanging out in writers' chats waiting for my mood to improve a smidgen. 

When I'm depressed like this, the dreams I have just before waking play a big role in how I'm able to face the day. I typically recall how positive or negative or neutral my last dream was before waking, and often I actually recall the dream. When I'm experiencing a pronounced depressive phase like this, any dreams that are even just neutral tend to induce me to roll over and go back to sleep. Decidedly positive dreams make me more willing to face the day, though they don't lift my depression, and occasionally even enable me to want to be productive much sooner than average. 

Now some background for the dream:

Several years ago, I had a frustration dream. In this dream, I had just gotten hired on at a school of some sort and part of my job was to take home the receipts from the meal sales in the cafeteria to tally them up. To transport these receipts, I was given a lockbox with a long key. To unlock the lockbox, I was to insert the key in the back end of the lockbox (it was a hidden lock). 

In the original dream, the first time I took the receipts home, everything went as it was supposed to. I was able to unlock the box and do my job. The second time did not go quite as well, however. No matter how I tried to unlock that lockbox, I couldn't get it open. I had family members try. Took it back to the school and explained the problem, and the principal himself tried to unlock it without success. Just before waking up, I ended up taking the lockbox to a deserted room and trying to open it one last time to no avail. Frustrated, I jammed the key in halfway, I think so it wouldn't get lost. I then woke up, and after a few days, forgot about the dream. 

Fast-forward to today. I went to bed this morning after finishing up figuring out some issues with this blog. Didn't sleep deeply, but I did get a good amount of time in bed. 

The last dream brought me back to that lockbox.

Apparently, I returned to the school and found the deserted room with the lockbox, with the key sticking halfway out of the backside of it. In the dream, I thought, "Well, I remember leaving this here in frustration. Maybe it'll work this time." I went up to the table the lockbox was on and took the key out of the lock, then reinserted it—all the way. 

And this time it turned.

The lid of the box popped up. Now, years had also passed in the dream, so these receipts were pretty useless, but I opened the box. I shouted in joy, and family members and the same principal who was there before came in to see what I was crowing about. When they saw I'd gotten the lockbox open, they cheered too. We had a little celebration about my success, and I woke up.

So, while I'm still feeling depressed, I'm in a better frame of mind. I wonder if this is a symbolic way that my mind is telling me it's unlocked something within my psyche that I need. Maybe something to do with my writing? LOL