{"id":301,"date":"2016-11-14T12:22:51","date_gmt":"2016-11-14T22:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/?p=301"},"modified":"2016-11-14T12:22:51","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T22:22:51","slug":"close-friends-and-coffee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/14\/close-friends-and-coffee\/","title":{"rendered":"Close Friends and Coffee"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My circle of friends shrank exponentially following my divorce and depression diagnosis. A good portion of it was a direct decision by me to cut ties where I felt the conflict of friendships was too high. I&#8217;m sure some felt this was just me giving up, but sometimes you have to come to a decision to take yourself out of a situation where your mental health comes at the cost of trying to act like nothing has changed.<\/p>\n<p>Having said that, I still maintain a small group of friends that I still interact with, some local, some from far away (ish). I&#8217;ve never really been a social butterfly, I&#8217;ve always felt that it wasn&#8217;t the proximity of\u00a0your friends or how many of them you had, it&#8217;s the closeness of them that counted the most. I would gladly rather have ten tried and true friends than a hundred trivial ones.<\/p>\n<p>One of my friends, I&#8217;ll call her M, was kind enough of to send me a care package.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_302\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-302\" style=\"width: 840px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"302\" data-permalink=\"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/14\/close-friends-and-coffee\/img_8012\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/IMG_8012.jpg?fit=1600%2C1067\" data-orig-size=\"1600,1067\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;7.1&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;Canon EOS 5D Mark IV&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;1479121199&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;2014&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;17&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;6400&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0.0333333333333&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"img_8012\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"&lt;p&gt;New brew to try&lt;\/p&gt;\n\" data-medium-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/IMG_8012.jpg?fit=300%2C200\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/IMG_8012.jpg?fit=840%2C560\" class=\"wp-image-302 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/IMG_8012.jpg?resize=840%2C560\" alt=\"New brew to try\" width=\"840\" height=\"560\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/IMG_8012.jpg?resize=1024%2C683 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/IMG_8012.jpg?resize=300%2C200 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/IMG_8012.jpg?resize=768%2C512 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/IMG_8012.jpg?resize=1200%2C800 1200w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/IMG_8012.jpg?w=1600 1600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-302\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">New brew to try<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The manual labor of doing a pour-over (or hand-pour) coffee has been a coping tool for me. It&#8217;s that kick start of physical activity to get my blood moving and to get my mind focusing on something other than nightmares or depressive thoughts. I grind my coffee by hand so it&#8217;s a whole experience. Gone are the days of a push button Keurig for me. Call it coffee snobbery if you want, for me it&#8217;s a way of getting active, even if only in a small measure. What&#8217;s nice though is that I found ways to gradually expand from my coffee habit to things like making desserts (Coffee Panna Cotta &#8212;\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/06\/dwallops-of-happy-panna-cotta\/\">Dwallops of Happy Panna Cotta<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re faced with the same challenges as I&#8217;ve been. \u00a0Try to find something even if it&#8217;s small. Every little bit helps if it gets you up and moving. It&#8217;s painful and easy to get trapped by depression and the physical &#8216;drag&#8217; that entails. Small things can help in the long term, even if they don&#8217;t seem like it at first.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My circle of friends shrank exponentially following my divorce and depression diagnosis. A good portion of it was a direct decision by me to cut ties where I felt the conflict of friendships was too high. I&#8217;m sure some felt this was just me giving up, but sometimes you have to come to a decision &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/14\/close-friends-and-coffee\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Close Friends and Coffee&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13,2,6],"tags":[39,19],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-slice","category-depression","category-projects","tag-coffee","tag-cooking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7PG4O-4R","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions\/303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}