Some realisations and plans 2006 January 5 0:39
Posted by diamond in : Random, Work , 2 commentsSo. As you may have gathered from my last post, i expected today to be pretty crap. I was surprised.
I got to sleep about 5, got about 6 hours sleep. Woke up feeling awful. Went for breakfast with john, maria, niall, maeve and gar (*shakes fist at the latter 3 late-comers* ,-). Retreated home to bed to try and get a nap before my counselling session at half 3. Went to bed for about an hour, slept very badly, which is unusual for me. Normally if i’m knackered i can sleep for about 25-35 minutes, and wake up feeling much improved. When i woke up though, a series of thoughts ran through my head. It went like this:
First i was thinking about the last few weeks, about the holiday period, and how i’d been very down and out of it for the majority of the time. Then i started thinking about the journal my therapist had asked me to keep, which consists of 3 lines per day describing my mental, physical and emotional state. Something i’d noticed over the last while is that while my mental and emotional states have been really negative, my physical has been pretty ok other than tired.
One of the things my gp said at the last visit was the the inability to get to sleep was strongly linked to my depression. It hit me that the last 2 awful nights have not been caused by the medical condition, but by the depression. You have no idea how much this realisation cheered me up. Depression can be treated, can be beaten, through counselling or medication if necessary. At the moment, i think it’s my biggest problem, and this gives me hope, which i didn’t have any of last night.
On my way to therapy, i was almost skipping. I’m not in any way saying everything is solved and now ok, but having hope that things can be majorly improved makes a massive difference to me. In counselling, my therapist said that my life had become very closed in and shut off from the outside world, and that if i could make an effort to expand that space to include more interaction that it would help. I don’t know why, but this really encouraged me. She said later she was surprised by how much i visibly perked up when she suggested that i try going back to work for the next couple of days, for maybe 10:30 till 1. I can’t explain why i responded so positively to that suggestion as it’s been something that i’ve been fearing for some time. She also suggested that getting a routine would also help.
So. Tomorrow i’m getting up at 9, and i’m going into work from 10:30 till 2 (the latter so chosen because it means i’ll have lunch with people in college). And i have hope. I’m possibly repeating that last point a lot, but i don’t care. G’nite folks, i’m off to work tomorrow.