Pancakes for One

I woke up on Labor day with no sense of wanting to do anything. I had next to no motivation, no desire to get out there and experience a ‘holiday’. People smiling, the muggy weather, none of it made me feel particularly like going out. So I found myself doing something I haven’t done in a while, making a breakfast for one. Usually my breakfast is pretty plain, some yogurt, maybe warming a left over or two. I rarely have motivation for much else.

I used to enjoy cooking for my ex-wife and her father. It made me feel like I had a place in their home. These days home seems like a weird thing for me to say. I don’t really feel like I’m home here either in my condo. There was a time I would cook to relieve stress, to eat with a purpose, now though it’s just for the sake of not eating badly. I hope that in the future I can find that fire again and want to cook for the joy of cooking but until then, it’s just pancakes for one.

 

Self Help Books and Perspective

As my therapy sessions are now more spread out I’ve continued to try to find books and other resources to help me maintain perspective and find ways to cope with my depression, divorce and all the small nuances in between.

One of the small aspects that I’ve found somewhat vexing lies in the approaches of both types of texts at times. Here’s the thing that I feel a lot of text misses. There’s depression and clinical depression.  Everyone’s felt depressed, usually that’s situational with very specific events that trigger it.  Divorce obviously being a big one. Clinical depression however isn’t simply triggered by any one thing at times. I find a lot of divorce books sort of gloss this over and the tone and approaches they maintain sometimes just feed into the negative loop of depression. On the other hand most texts about battling clinical depression don’t overlap with coping with major trigger events like divorce.  So you’re sort of left with one book in your right hand, and another in your left.

Most texts about coping with depression share common tools with those that talk about recovering from divorce. Therapy, communication, meditation, exercise are all common tools. Most books on divorce don’t discuss neurochemistry or other dietary changes to help cope they just gloss over avoiding “bad foods”.

I’m not trying to say that self-help books are useless. There’s valuable wisdom and insight now and then but you have to take it with a grain of salt. Books can’t pin point anything specific to you, it’s broad strokes. I try to remind myself of for everything I read. Much like those books, I feel my blog may verbalize my own pain and my own trials and I hope that if anyone chances upon it that they understand that there are people out there struggling too. Hopefully some of the tools I’ve listed help others.

Milestones and Making it Through

I had started September fairly flat emotionally but as the first few days passed I found my depression getting pretty heavy. It took a day or so for me to realize what was weighing on me. The tail end of the month would have marked our five year wedding anniversary.

This year it just represents a day on a calendar. It’s sobering as milestones come and go.  First birthday without the spouse, first Christmas, first Valentines. It puts things in perspective. For most folks holidays are a time to be around friends but as I am these days I feel too prickly and too sensitive to be around large groups of friends. Those circles I do still keep in touch with I’d rather just have a nice short conversation with on the day of. Eventually I’ll find ways to get myself to engage w/my friends more but for now there’s a lot of reworking of my own mental state first.

 

The Oatmeal — Being Perfectly Unhappy

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/unhappy

This crossed my news feed recently and while not directed at depression specifically I think it helps illustrate some of the difficulty of anhedonia quite well.

The uplift is there at times but for the most part it’s just sort of that dull flat emotional state. It’s hard to illustrate that to most folks, most folks just figure “you’re happy or you’re sad”. The layers of gray to me are much more varied.

Of Weekends and Idle Hands

For most folks the weekend is that moment of happiness when the work stresses end and the freedom begins. For me it’s been the opposite. Weekends are what I actually dread slightly. No focal point, no direction. Those slow times are the worst for me as I am alone with my thoughts. Motivation to get out and socialize isn’t there for me.

For now at least I’ve focused on projects and things to keep me busy, keep my mind active but the rest of what I do is pretty empty. Truly wish I had better advise to give in this regard but in truth what helps each person is different. I’m hoping through September I’ll be able to form some project ideas that are less cerebral and more engaging but I know it’s going to be hard. Sept 25th would have been our five year wedding anniversary. Instead it’s just a day on a calendar that I’d rather not think about.

As the milestones go away I hope that the dull pain does too.

Divorce and Mental Health

I started to frequent reddit.com more as I looked for things to keep my mind occupied. It’s a fairly interesting way to stave off boredom but it has pitfalls too. One of them being the subreddits intended for discussions about divorce (/r/divorce) and depression (/r/depression). Both forums are not happy places to visit, let’s be honest.  Given the way reddit is by nature it can be a very wild and woolly place. One of the recent threads though hit home for me.

A wife mentioned her struggles in living with a spouse with mental health issues.  Now the specific issues weren’t brought up but anger management aspects and depression certainly would have been my first guesses.  She received a lot of positive urging to leave her situation. The irony for me is I can see things from the flip side of it.

It’s a weird double edged sword. You’re married, you start to suffer from depression/anxiety etc. Your relationship suffers, strains and in a lot of cases is destroyed. For the person who suffers from those issues though it’s just sort of one more thing on the haystack. The irony is family can be both a means to coping with depression and the best support base you can have or it can be trigger to episodes as well.  Caregiver fatigue might be one of the biggest (though more often for women) examples that comes to mind. I can understand making the choice to leave if the anger leads to violence and abuse, I can understand how much of a strain it is for the other spouse to have to be there and trying to support that person. None of that makes the choice to divorce any easier though and it’s usually painful for both parties.

There’s a lot of days I sort of wonder if people suffering from depression are outlying cases that aren’t optimally meant to be in relationships. At times I feel like maybe I’m supposed to do other things and I’m not meant to be someone’s other half, or father. It’s a painful thing to contemplate but it reminds me that if I am to have those things in my life I need to continue to work against depression and find ways to cope.

Distractions and the Negative Loop

As much as I love technology it has been both a blessing and a curse for me. Previously I rarely used my iPad unless I was on the road or traveling.  These days I use it almost every day as sort of “background tech”.

Following my divorce I found myself having the hardest time getting my mind to unhook from negativity and loneliness. In a cruel twist of irony though my anxiety made social interaction difficult at times in crowds and in public.  So I was left with a quandary. How do you feel less alone when alone? For me it became always having background noise or dialogue be it shows or movies in the background. Not directly in line of sight, just off to the side on my iPad.

This slippery slope however is something I’ve had to try to balance. It doesn’t interrupt my job it sort of becomes the din behind me. Replacing the normal banter heard in any office setting or workplace without the rise in anxiety. Slowly I’ve tried to ween myself off it, but it’s a gradual thing. Silence you see is something I fear.  Those gaps, that idle time when it’s just me and my thoughts is a dangerous place. There’s the phrase of idle hands are the devils workshop. When you suffer from depression and anxiety that statement becomes more true to me and really silence is your personal hell. Those moments where there’s no clear objective that I can keep engaged to often result in negative thoughts and dwelling on the past. It’s a horrible back-slide in my recovery. So every day I try to keep my mind running, never giving it time to think about the past, my marriage, the divorce. Eventually though there’s nothing but silence and in those moments, little by little I try to meditate and come to terms w/the pain and the guilt. I work at it every day to break out of the loop and it slowly gets easier, but it never quite goes away. Maybe some day when my head is full of other things or more positive elements I can push the negative aside.  For now though, it is a daily task.

Friends, Fading and Farewells

Divorce is about hard choices. The choice of what to say, what to fight for or against. One of the most awkward and painful is how it affects your circle of friends and family.

I made the choice to let go of a sizable number of friends, not because I disliked them but because I realized proximity to many of them would be a painful trigger for me given my divorce. A core of friends that I can still speak to is there and I lean on them heavily, probably more so than I should at times. I know some folks will view this as childish but to me those whom I call close friends are for the most part, still my friends. Acquaintances however, casual friends I accepted to let go of the lions share.

Divorce and especially depression is about survival. Sometimes that means letting go or getting your distance from folks that are too much of a trigger point to you.  Don’t cut off everyone, keep those folks who you feel enough comfort with close at hand. It’s been difficult for me to let some friendships fade away, while saying blunt goodbyes to others. If you’re going through the same type of choices just remember there are subtle differences between having to let go of friends for your safety and giving in to depressive feelings of disconnect. It isn’t easy to maintain your objectivity but you have to make the effort.

When Weekends and Weekdays Become the Same

I won’t sugar coat the fact that for me work and home are sort of the same thing. I mostly work from home and as such am often connected into my clients’ networks several at a time. That lack of separation does create some problems.

Through the course of my therapy one of the things I had the hardest time reconciling was that after a while I felt like I couldn’t distinguish between the weekdays and weekends. My ex-wife’s schedule usually dictated what we did on the weekends and now post-divorce I find myself just focusing on chores. There’s not much in the way of ‘activity’ for me. Nothing that I look forward to or want to plan really.  Now and then I’ve tried to hit up the gun range, gone for walks or photo projects but it is not something that comes naturally to me. Instead, much like work, the only thing I have are goal/task oriented. Cleaning up, sorting, throwing things out.

For most folks I think the weekend is full of promise and opportunity.  In my case the weekend is just a time for me to figure out the things I have to do, rarely what I want to do. Can’t exactly plan for ‘wants’ when you feel like you want nothing. If you’re in the same sort of anhedonia induced ‘lull’ in feeling about the weekends, you may feel like you’re just running through the motions. I continue to do it because over time I hope that I can bring back my sense of joy and actual longing to do something. It isn’t an easy practice but it’s something that you have to put effort in.

Beginnings and End

My marriage formally ended in April of 2016. It was somewhat painful timing as that relationship ended three of our mutual friends were lining up their weddings.

As one thing ends, others begin but for me, I made the harsh decision that I could not be a part of my friends weddings. I couldn’t in good conscience go to someone’s wedding and have so little ability to share and contribute to their happiness that I would put a dark cloud over their best day. I remember what it was like on my wedding day all too well. It’s confusing and frustrating to feel like someone else’s happiness is a trigger to your depression.

There’s folks that will put me on blast as selfish for thinking this way but I often think of the flip side. We all see the tropes and hear the horror stories.  Folks who go to a wedding when they don’t really want to be there, folks who get drunk to drown away their sadness during a wedding. I didn’t want to be that person, that cliché of the bitter divorcee who spouts snide comments at a wedding.  My friends deserve better than that.

Social expectation and masks are something I’ve struggled with since my teens. I’m not sociable, I’m better in small tight groups. A wedding is perhaps the largest social gathering folks hope to have and a time to be sharing in the start of a new life together. I’m not about to put on a mask anymore because social norms say I’m supposed to. “Do it for them” I’ve heard, and while well meaning it misses the point.  To me putting on a false front for someone on a day when genuine happiness should be the only thing there is a disservice in my eyes.  So while I wish them all the best, I’ll remain where I am, working, trying to change until the day I can go to a friends wedding and smile again, with a real smile.