Month: March 2019

From Seasonal to ‘Regular’ Depression

Now depression related humor is always a delicate thing, but it’s often rooted in painful truths. This particular find on Tumblr summed up a very real scenario for a lot of people.

http://slaughterkeys.tumblr.com/image/183585744311 )

With my dysthymia I’ve found that I’m basically as depressed during the winter months as I am in summer months. I suppose in some ways I’ve been the opposite. With colder weather I don’t feel as guilty about staying in and giving myself a few hours more of comforter time.

We always look for what the root causes are for depression. Be it purely external and situational things or internal matters. Sometimes it’s simple, a decrease in Vitamin D, other times it’s far more multilayered (requiring medication). I know it’s easy to get frustrated when your progress stalls in treatment. As we enter into spring, I genuinely hope that for anyone suffering from seasonal affective disorder (SAD)/seasonal depression, you’re finding things lifting. For anyone who is struggling with ‘regular’ depression I hope your treatment course is still consistent and you’re taking the seasonal transition OK. This is where my own triggers tend to come up. For me my divorce took place in April, a time when I think most people are looking forward to warmer weather and color. Happier people around me usually puts me into a state where I want to isolate further. I don’t begrudge others their happiness, instead I get a sense of not fitting in among them. It’s a distorted view, one that I continue to work on and forced myself through in gradual stages.

Whatever form of depression you are dealing with today, keep current on your treatment options. Look for more and more coping tools to try and gauge. Most importantly, I wish you well in your journey.

Getting Past your Past (Ex’s, Social Media)

Anna Akana was one of the first YouTubers that I actually began following when I first had my depression diagnosis. She was very frank and honest about her difference experiences and her advice, almost always punctuated with humor was easy for me to access.

It sounds so easy to simply say “Don’t think about your ex” but in a world of social media that’s actually harder than it is. Anna’s advice is on point here but I thought I’d expand upon it. During the start of my divorce there were certainly those feelings that I wanted to know what was going on as my ex and I were preparing to end our marriage. I realized that just having my social media profile meant having connections to her, the guy she was seeing and our old circle of friends. I had to make the blunt choice to simply get rid of all my social media and change how I used any form of it. Gone were my FB, my Google+ accounts, Twitter and the like. Eventually I found myself with just two main types of social media accounts, a Reddit to read up about subjects I still had an interest in, and Instagram. Unlike my FB days though my IG was private and mostly used to track news, products or things relating to my growing interest in target shooting.

Over time though I realized that creating a more isolated social media presence had also helped me to make the break from my ex-wife. I wasn’t tempted to login to social media and see what was going on. Her life was hers and mine was mine. Rebuilding could go on for both of us and neither of us had any reason to know what was going on in the other’s life. These days while I sometimes miss being ‘in the know’ with some of my friends (hrm maybe friends is a stretch) I find that it’s forced me to do one of the things I hate. I have to actual be social and engage in conversation. It seems silly to think of that as something novel but the reality is I don’t passively observe in people’s lives these days. I have to go out of my way to see how they are. In some cases it’s helpful, there’s a subset of my old circles that genuinely do enjoy telling me about the goings on of their lives. Then again I suspect for some people it’s frustrating that I’m not “aware of what’s going on in XYZ’s life”.

Getting over an ex, be it boyfriend/girlfriend or worse, an ex-spouse takes time. You can go about it in any number of ways but knowing how to avoid the social media trap and letting them have their life is a big first step. If you’re having a hard time with it, considering deactivating your accounts for a short time or learning to filter content to avoid triggering painful memories. You can get through it, it won’t be fun, but it can be made easier.