Welcome to my Mind
Bouncing back from a Hiatus
The past few months have been rough.
First, I got the flu and it knocked me on my ass.
I had to call out of work for about a week, but I was feeling it for much longer (I would’ve called out more, but that was it for my PTO lol). Part of me was worried it might be COVID, but I luckily tested negative. However, it was still a rough time and my whole routine was disrupted. Not just for my writing, but for everything. I’m the type of person to thrive on my routines. They may be chaotic and ever-changing, but they are always there. But my head was in such a fog that all of that got thrown out the window.
Second, my mental health took a hit.
Just when I was finally recovering from the flu and re-establishing my routines, the depression snuck in. It has an annoyingly successful way of creeping into my life despite my best efforts to circumvent it.
Just like depression can look and feel different for each person, my own depressive episodes can look different based on many different factors that I’m not going to go into here. This time, it felt like an ominous entity was constantly behind me - looking over my shoulder, breathing down my neck before attaching itself to my body. In a way, the anticipation was worse. I knew the attachment was coming - I discussed it in therapy and had some coping mechanisms ready to use - but, alas, I could not prevent it in its entirety.
Once the entity did attach, it felt like superglue shot out from an osmium block and stuck to the back side of my entire body. I could try to move, to get away from the block, but my own relative strength was not enough to budge it. I was stuck, reaching out, trying to put some distance between it and myself, but the superglue was relentless. It never separated from my back, it just stretched and stretched and stretched - no matter how far I tried to run. So my energy level (my spoons, my life force, whatever terms you prefer) was pretty much depleted each morning just trying to get out of bed. Basic survival necessities were damn near impossible to achieve, let alone anything else that I would have actually liked to include in my day to day existence.
Alas, my current project took a hit. The tentative routine I had crafted went out the window. My poor laptop sat abandoned in my living room, having to watch me gaze longingly at it, sometimes with tears in my eyes, and not be able to open it up.
It’s taken some time, but things are looking up. They have been for a couple weeks or so, but I wanted to give myself time to re-acclimate to my environment. Now that I am going to get back into writing and into pushing myself, I am trying to focus on showing myself compassion. I can be my own worst enemy by being too hard on myself, talking down to myself, and I need to do better. That’s the first step for me to get back in the game and regain my confidence. I’ll be putting in more time to write from now on and I’m going to work on developing a schedule to blog here more. But if you don’t hear from me, I’ll be off getting lost in my story.
I’m happier now. I’m better now. And I’m ready to kick ass.
If you’ve also experiencing or have experienced this, I’ve included some tips to help bounce back from a lengthy hiatus below :)
