I’m not going to lie, my mental health has been beating my ass down, a little more so than usual. Dealing with depression is a 24/7 job in my eyes. It never ends, you just deal with it some days better than others and unfortunately, this was a week in which I didn’t deal with it the best. As when I am depressed I simply recede into myself and stop looking after my best interests. Fortunately, I get to fall back on my therapy sessions. Again, I recommend therapy for everyone as I think it is beneficial. Therapy gave me many lessons, lessons which helped shape my perspective, and left me better equipped to deal with my mood on days in which it feels like I am at the end of my rope. So, if you yourself have gone through a bit of a mental blip recently, I hope this post provides two things. First, you are not alone in what you are going through. Depression and mental health struggles often make us feel isolated and alone, and very rarely is this the case for any one of us. However, the mind is dreadfully good at convincing itself to believe in a false reality contrary to actual real tangible evidence. The second is that I hope this post does help in getting you through what you are dealing with in some shape or form. If you can’t get both from this post, then I hope you either get something out of reading this or know someone who can get something from this post.
There are two frames of mind I relied on this week, the first coming from a lesson I drew on from my therapist. One lesson I learned in therapy was to plan for the day, and not the mood. What my therapist meant by this was that if I had plans to do something, then I should still do it even if my mood told me otherwise. They then added that when doing it, I should commit for at least 5 minutes. After 5 mins, then I could do 10 mins, and then so on. The point is usually when we make the effort to start something, even poorly, we tend to finish. Even if we don’t finish, it is better to end poorly than to never have started at all. My mood the last couple of days told me to do nothing at all and I was going to let more days pass by as dictated by mood.
Fortunately, I made plans when I was in a good mood to go for a night out with some friends. It was for a disco night out and I love a good boogie. I also hate bailing on plans last minute so I managed to drag myself away from my room, get dressed and meet my friend. Spoiler alert: it was a great night. I had fun and I was around other people having fun. There was singing and dancing and great vibes all around. A much better evening than if I had just to sit in my room and wallow in my misery. I went with my plans and not with my mood and my day was a lot better for it. Sure it may have just been a distraction, but what I needed was a distraction in that moment. One that got me out of bed and out of my house.
The second frame of mind I relied on this week and the most important one, was that joy is something we must hunt down and find in this life. Something to understand and think about even when not dealing with depression. I used to think that joy and happiness are those things that find you where you are. At least that’s how I thought it was for happy people. They were happy because happiness came and found them. In contrast to depression where it feels like joy is actively ripped away from you and that was the difference between happy people and I. It wasn’t until after therapy that my perspective changed and I reflected, coming to the realisation that happy people are not happy because happiness finds them, but rather, they are the ones that go and hunt down their joy. They find joy in the smallest things because that is how they have trained their mind or simply how they operate. The type of people who view their commute to work as a chore, sure, just like everyone else, but they find joy in passing that cat on the way to work or getting to see a sunrise for example. They do not wait for the weekend as if that is when their joy switch is suddenly flipped, but rather they do their best to find joy in the moment that they are in. Might be quite obvious to some, but was not obvious to me for some time.
The thing with depression is that it does steal joy from you, that’s why it is depression. These last few days I could feel my depression coming back in full force. I could feel my desire to do nothing but rot away in bed and just endlessly scroll on my phone. I stopped going gym, I stopped going swimming, I stopped reading, I just stopped living for a few days and instead, I was just not dead. I took some time to just wallow in it and just be easy on myself rather than beating myself up about all the things I could have been doing. Instead, I fell back to those two things I mentioned before; the first is to plan for the day not the mood, and the second is happy people hunt down their joy rather than waiting for it to come and find them.
I planned that today I was going to get back into the things that brought me joy as a way to stave off the depression because that’s the thing with depression, it doesn’t want me happy. The deeper I fell into it, the more effort it would take to pull myself out of it. It takes joy away from the things that do actively make me joyful. Depression is more insidious than that, it robs you of the energy you would have had to partake in joy and dulls the emotion altogether. I stopped cooking for myself even though I do love to cook. I stopped going gym and swimming, two things I actively love doing and fundamental to my routine. Even down to the less physically taxing activities like reading or gaming, I didn’t want to do them. I didn’t have the energy to. I wasn’t in a state of mind that wanted to do them. So I said to myself today would be different, and I would get through my to-do list as best as possible regardless of the very strong desire to spend the day doing nothing but being on my phone. (Side note: You can actually track my mental health based on how much screen time has occurred that week because when my mood declines, my screen time noticeably increases). I started simple with just studying for 20 minutes, and then reading for 20 minutes, and it had a snowball effect to the point where I felt good enough to go gym. Once I hit gym I left feeling a bit more like me. That’s not to say the depression and sour mood suddenly disappeared, but I finally went and grabbed some joy for myself. My joy was not going to find me in bed today. My joy was in my book, in my studies, in my gym, and in writing this post right now.
Now my dear reader…
…I hope that my reflection on my week’s mental health resonates with you in some way. Whether it is because you can relate directly as you also struggle with your mental health, or because you know what it is like to let life pass you by whilst you wait for joy to come and find you. Life is short and we shouldn’t wait for the big moments to provide us joy. There is some joy that we can find in our every day regardless of how monotonous or dull that day may seem. At any moment, we can simply decide to get up and find a moment of joy. Some days are harder than others and that is where the hunting part comes in. Sometimes joy is waiting for us in the smallest of cracks in our lives, but that’s fine, we can hunt it down.
The Life Of Lazlo 
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