It's New Year's, Eve, Time to Get Anxious!

Anxiety, moi?

On the day after Boxing day I started to write and posted something the day after, but what I actually wrote was much longer, because my feelings post Boxing day, post fat+sugar+alcohol+sugar+fat etc. were more than one blog could contain. I wrote this:

"It's a delicate balance. If I'm in the slew of a deep depression there's not much I can bring myself to do other than stay in bed and perhaps watch something on TV. If I'm a little better I might be able to read something - fiction definitely, not too taxing. Or I could eat something unhealthy (or healthy) or I could drink something healthy (or unhealthy) and then I could... "And don't I want this darned depression to vamoose? Yes I do," I tell myself, and the internal monologue continues. Unfortunately I've got more consciences in my head than a plague of Jiminy Crickets and the discussion goes on for quite some time. I won't bore you with all the repetitions, but on and on they go. 

In the meantime my anxiety might come back right after Christmas with the special worries about the fact that the day we're supposed to eat the most is 6 days away from the night we're supposed to look better than we ever have; apart from our wedding days. Well, anyway, the depression and rumination about what I've just eaten mixes with the worry and anxiety about which outfit on earth I'm going to be able to wear, and this fills up a good amount of time. I never have so much of the two so beautifully blended in their toxic potion than at this time of year.

Last year even though I was on no medication and wasn't receiving any help from a doctor or counsellor, I managed to make it out for a run on Boxing day because I knew that needed to try to curtail the depression caused by chemicals and topped up by me at times with more in alcoholic form, with as vigorous a form of exercise as I could manage. I went running every day from Boxing day to New Year's day (inclusive, almost certainly fuelled by prosecco). This year I can't do that and it's already 27th and I've barely moved from sofa to bed; pre-Christmas Day, I did all my shopping either online or through the local high street shops; I wrapped on the table with lots of cushions to support my back and took a rest afterwards, so all in all, my physical activity has been spectacularly low. 

All in all, I guess I'm saying that I don't have the usual physical aspects of running to help me out, and I've not done too well in making myself get up off the sofa and out into the world. (And the rain hasn't helped either, so no thanks to you, weather gods.) "

Now it's just under twenty four hours in which I will be buttoning myself up in something. I don't know what. Perhaps straight-jacket and comfy sweater will have a stand off. I'm not sure where we'll get to but we shall see. I'm going to a dinner so it would be great if I could eat something without exploding, à la Monsieur Creosote, avant les entrées.

I have had a horrid day of anxiety which I have not self-medicated with any unhealthy food or drink (although I am am going to have a Chinese for dinner. I'll try to eat in moderate proportions. That's 'try'...)

I've felt sick, I've felt miserable, I've stayed in bed and gone for a walk and slept and just waited for it to go away. It might be going now, and I hope they don't put too many additives in the food - I really hope that it doesn't come back. And tonight I get to take the most medication I'm allowed in my weekly cycle to try to stop my legs fidgeting and my arms trembling or whatever the main medication throws at me. "But it will pass", I tell myself. "This will pass. I have to just wait. So wait." And I will. And I do.

I wish you all a happy new year's eve. I've had some where I've made resolutions and some where I've kept those resolutions. And others not. I am going to go into this one a bit more neutrally. I can't resolve to run a marathon this year as I don't know what my neuro-spinal surgeon will say about the metal work and screws in my back, and now I know that these wretched wires in my arm will have to go, but only to be replaced with a rather large and nasty-looking screw instead to have a chance of fixing my arm. Again. 

Hopefully it will work this time. So more hospital for physical conditions. I don't know about what's going on in my head, but I'm back at work, albeit getting there part time and from home, and will be working hard to make sure I try to stay healthy. I suppose that is something like resolve; I just need to remember to not beat myself up on the days where I need to stay in bed because my arm kills or my back prevents me getting up, or my head won't let me leave the house. Resolve, but not regret. I would like, no more, to regret being me.

Darkness Visible, and the Black Dog: the Advent of Winter

Deer and darkness.

I've fallen out of sync with my usual blogging flow of posting something on Friday night, thinking that people can read it at leisure on a Saturday before they get up if - like me - they grope for their iphone/tablet first thing and wake up slowly with the news and a view of the world from bed before lauching (or lurching) from bed into real life: dressing gown, front room, kitchen, Rice Krispies...contemplation of other activities...quite possibly leading to a return to bed.

The reason for this - my being at odds with my self-determined schedule - is, I think, the time of year. I have never been very happy in the darker months. The incipient dullness and bleakness which approaches in October becomes darker and danker still in November, and today on the 1st December it has reached a state of osmosis with the world outside.

The black dog. It can be stronger than me in the darker months.

Even when it is dry the air is close to dampness. Old houses feel particularly heavy with the moisture each brick contains. In New York the iciness is cold and dry, and one's skin sucks in moisture or makeup in an attempt to build any kind of barrier against that unrelenting chill; in the UK the dampness is what persists, and icy blasts not so much a worry as the continual feeling that any minute now a cold, or, worse, flu, will strike us down to a diet of Lemsip, vitamin C, echinacea and Night Nurse, with a little soup and toast tossed in for sustenance.

And in addition to the above, if, like me, you are living with depression (to a greater or lesser degree, mine being relatively well and my mood good at present) things are often harder.

I have a black dog. He lives with me and we know one another well.

When I was 28 I fell down on a freezing and damp January night and put out my hands to catch myself on the cold concrete ground. Many years later my left wrist, which bore the brunt of the impact, aches in the cold and I start to sympathise for aged aunts from my early childhood, who would blow over their tea, clutched with reddened, wrinkled, swollen-knuckled hands and tell my mother eagerly about their rheumatism, their bunions, corns and arthritis while I sat on my assigned chair, tried not to move at all and consumed my one allocated biscuit. I am continually amused at those elderly conversations where these unsavoury topics were considered just the thing for polite company, even though the elderly aunts were the first ones to point out faults in others for conversational exclusion zones and faux pas.

I am split in two at this time of year. Part of me loves the dank coldness, particularly in the park. I am listening to the wonderful Martin Jarvis reading David Copperfield - unabridged. Martin Jarvis's sonorous voice with its amazing ability to voice each character with a different personality brings to life so much of this tale, and the fact that it is inhabited in a world of candlelight, unspoiled countryside scenes and the same sorts of bricks and buildings that would hold in that moisture seem the perfect companion for my walks, particularly when I am squishing through a muddy field in the late afternoon mist, sharing my space only with the odd scampering squirrel or the deer, their pelts darkened with the rain and lateness of the year.

Deer. They even manage to play rugby! I do well to get outside.

This year I cannot run because of my back and arm, which are much recovered but still aching (and aching more in the damp and the cold). Therefore I try to get out into the daylight to assist in the rehabilitation process but also to turn my face in the daylight and try to absorb every vitamin benefit it proffers. I have a daylight lamp for emergency use, when my spirits threaten to drop down in line with the fading light, but for now I am trying to get my only exercise and my only daylight together, walking during those few hours.

Injuries: A Pain In The Neck, No. Arm

The other part of me wants to stay in with the door firmly closed to visitors. Although I love the park and the mist and the melancholic landscapes, I look out from my bed onto the outside world and see grey. I see the sky as white as clay and it repels me. I wrestle between bed or walk. And this is not just a fight between positive exercise or needed rest, it is also a tug of war in my mind between feeling justified in eating all the good things that come at this time of year, or not. Mince pies, with their pastry cases so innocent looking, but capable of giving a sharp and thorough tummy ache by their inability to be digested; chocolates of all kinds, and, most delectable of all, the Christmas snacks and accompaniments, my interest in which is directly proportional to the percentage of pig in their recipes.

This is in fact, cauliflower cheese. With bacon and black pudding. #doingthingsproperly.

Today, bed is winning at present. It is so grey, so damp-looking outside, and I have another interview to do - on loneliness - this afternoon. It is appropriate, that subject. This is the time of year when I can most relate to that subject after sad, solitary weekends in New York walking in the frozen park and comparing myself in all of my obsessive loneliness to every group or couple. But at home with my husband not far away I am not lonely at all, so the pain in my arm can be coped with, the greyness all round tolerated very well. And the biscuits consumed in moderate proportion. For now.

Read I Had A Black Dog or read more about it here.