Good Days Are Hard (To Write About)

At the end of my last post I mentioned that I started a new job a week ago. That is the main reason that there was a week-long silence between posts, but not for the reasons you might think.

You see, starting work with my new employer led to an immediate and drastic improvement in my mood and general sense of wellness.

I am more energetic, and my baseline stress level has dropped considerably. I no longer dread leaving for work in the morning, nor do I retreat to the isolation of my bedroom the moment I take my shoes off at the end of my shift. My roommates commented on the very first day that I was happier and more relaxed when I got home than I have been in months.

Writing about the good days is difficult.

They often don't feel remarkable, so I have trouble describing them. Partly, this is because of my tendency to minimize bad days in retrospect. Mostly, however, I think it is that (unless I have urgent tasks that were delayed by my depression) good days are just days that I can feel and act normally. I think of tasks that need doing and I do them. There is no psyching myself up, no mental workout to determine which of several chores is most essential or most complex, in case I cannot get all of them done. When I do notice how much easier a good day is, instead of celebrating it, Jerk Brain has a tendency to divert my thoughts to self-recrimination for not being able to "pull myself up by my bootstraps" and just power through my bad days.

Even worse, a string of good days (or even easier days) often makes me doubt whether I even have depression.

When you have a string of good days while treating cancer, you still have constant physical reminders of the disease, in the form of surgical scars or hair loss from chemotherapy. When you have diabetes, you regularly measure your exact blood sugar levels and have direct control over how much insulin you administer to keep them stable.

But when you have a mental illness, you don't have that kind of physical reminder. You don't have that direct, measurable evidence of how your illness or your medication is affecting your body. I think that is why there are so many stories of people deciding to stop taking their medication, often to tragic effect. I know it is one of the reasons I was able to remain in denial for as long as I did.

I refuse to fall into that trap this time.