(no subject)

Health update: slowly coming out of depressive chasm; being entirely off the prednisone helps. Got a migraine (three days and counting) that is an atypical-for-me location and seems to involve my skull not liking my pillow. It gets worse when I'm lying down, and feels like there's a big rock under one specific spot on my skull. (There's no lumps in the pillow -- I've had multiple people check -- nor zippers or seams or anything different about that spot. It's not where any of my straps hit.) The spot on my head, in the back and a little right of center, feels "soft" to my mom, "like a swollen lymph node" to one of my aides. Not sure whether to go to dr or not ... of course it's a holiday weekend anyway, sigh.

Had a realization yesterday:

although our culture does a disturbing amount of physical health shaming (anything wrong with an overweight person is Their Fault Because Fat, and being overweight itself is A Moral Failing; getting lung cancer is Obviously Because Smoker; chronic issues are Not Enough Yoga or whatever) -- it’s never about the mechanisms, in that even if it’s Clearly Your Fault that you got cancer / diabetes / measles / the flu, you’re not generally held personally responsible for tumoring on purpose or whatnot -- but with mental health there’s so much blame and so much expectation of willpower. I’m basically having the depression equivalent of getting the flu, only instead of coddling myself while my immune system does its thing and I’m allowed to feel like crap and to not get things done because I’m sick, instead I’m beating myself up for being in a bad mental place and not dragging myself out of it.)

(though partly it’s tangled up in a learned thing from childhood where I somehow ingrained that I have to be super hard on myself because otherwise things don’t get done, and intellectually I know that a) there’s a lot of executive dysfunction shit going on that means I’m not actually as lazy as I think I am, and b) beating myself up doesn’t really work that well, but I can’t stop because what if i then fail at even the few things I’m scraping by on)

Thinking of depressive slumps as mental flu rather than Thing Which Is My Fault is ... surprisingly helpful. It's not about fighting it (which doesn't really help and just ends with me hating myself), but also not wallowing in it (which is also bad), just ... I don't know. I can't really word *why* it helps.