Bootcamp Ends when I Fucking Feel Better

Persistent sad or “empty” mood

Loss of interest or pleasure in ordinary activities, including sex

Decreased energy, fatigue, being “slowed down”

Sleep disturbances (insomnia, early-morning waking, or oversleeping)

Eating disturbances (loss of appetite and weight, or weight gain)

Difficulty concentrating, remembering, making decisions

Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, helplessness

Thoughts of death or suicide, suicide attempts

Irritability

Excessive crying

Chronic aches and pains that don’t respond to treatment

A lot of people are going to be experiencing depression for the first time ever right now because they don’t have the social support to help them move past a brief depressive episode and aren’t able to do a lot of the routine things that they need to in order to maintain their mental health (socializing is IMPORTANT, self care rituals like getting your nails done are IMPORTANT, variety of experiences are IMPORTANT - that doesn’t mean “reopen every nail salon with no changes” that means “recognize that people are missing things that are genuinely important to them and help them fill that need”)

I don’t know if OP is also dealing with sleep changes (kind of sounds like it) or suicidality (”I wish I didn’t exist so I’m going to sit here and wish I didn’t exist to deal with this” is suicidal ideation even if it isn’t being actively suicidal and it kind of sounds like OP is dealing with that too) but if this post seems VERY relatable and you’ve never been diagnosed with or treated for depression before Please, Please, Please compare your feelings to the list of symptoms there and consider that maybe your existential crisis is Actual For Real Depression (and if it is that’s okay, a lot of people are having that right now and there are ways that people can help!)

If you think you MIGHT be experiencing depression but don’t know how to or aren’t ready to seek treatment here are some things you can do to help stabilize your mood:

Set a sleep schedule and attempt to stick to it, it’s okay if you mess up but try not to shift your schedule wildly from day to day

Set timers to remind yourself to eat food, prepare food in large batches so that you can wrap up leftovers in individual portions and freeze them for easy meals when you don’t have the energy to cook

Try to exercise at least a little bit each day. Ten minutes of stretching in bed counts! A walk counts! Following along to a yoga video for five minutes counts! Even if you don’t have the energy to get up and do anything or if you’re in too much pain to get up and do anything try to stretch your hands or do arm raises.

Brush your teeth. Even if you can’t shower or do your hair or makeup brush your teeth every day. If you can do your hair or shower or do your nails that’s a bonus and you should do it

Change your clothes every day. If you can change from pajamas into going out clothes that’s great! If all that you can do is change your underwear and get back into pajamas that’s great too. Just make sure to at least change your underwear.

Check your space daily. Look for plates and cups and clothes that got tossed on the ground and try to put them where they belong before you go to bed each day. You don’t have to load the dishwasher every day, you don’t have to do laundry every day, but you don’t want plates growing mold in your room and you don’t want to trip over dirty clothes. You’re not aiming for “perfect” you’re aiming for “keeping the mess small enough that I don’t get overwhelmed when I have the energy to wash a few plates.”

Drink liquids that aren’t alcohol. Coffee, pepsi, juice, water, milk, chocolate milk - as long as it isn’t actually alcohol it will hydrate you and you will have more energy and fewer headaches and body pains if you are hydrated. While caffeine is a diuretic there isn’t enough caffeine in coffee to offset the amount of water in coffee and the sugar in juices or sodas may be over what you want in a day but if that’s what you need in order to take your fluid intake up it is more important to get fluids than it is to avoid sugar or caffeine.

Reach out your friends - even people who you haven’t talked to in a while, even if you aren’t making plans to hang out. Just check in and ask how they are and what shows they’re watching or how they’re filling the time. Talk. Socialize.

Make something. It doesn’t have to be something good, it doesn’t have to be something perfect, but make something. You can put photos of it on social media if you want, you can throw it away when you’re done if you want, but make something. This is so that when your brain goes “you’re useless, what have you ever done” you can point at the thing you made and go “that. I made that.” I recommend learning to mend for this because then you can mend your clothes; I also like crocheting because even if the crocheted potholder you made is ugly it’ll still hold pots and you can give it to someone and it’ll protect their hands from getting burned.

My mom and I were starting to get along pretty well in the few years before she died.

The relationship that my dad and I have is, let’s say “fraught.”

I think that in a lot of ways my parents did the best they could by me given what they knew at the time.

I think that given new information somethings probably would have been different and probably would have been better.

My dad has some shitty, SHITTY attitudes about health and disability and mental health and the way the world should work and that contributed to how a lot of things were mishandled and I don’t forgive him for those and I try to challenge him on those when I can.

But. Shit.

There was A LOT of stuff contributing to my depression that my parents wouldn’t have known to look for.

Like, the ADHD stuff is debatable because constantly feeling like a failure who wasn’t living up to expectations and being unable to maintain friendships because the other kids thought I was too fucking weird was definitely something that contributed to my depression as a kid but it was the 90s and I was high-performing enough in a structured school environment and people were still looking for one very specific ADHD presentation that I didn’t get a diagnosis until my 30s. That sucked! That caused problems! But I can’t blame my parents for missing that diagnosis.

I can blame them for an over-emphasis on intellect as a foundation for self-worth, though, because that combined with the fact that I kept failing things and kept fucking things up and I didn’t know why and it must have been that I was just stupid and a disappointment DID make my depression worse.

(Oh, also if you want to build an adult who needs constant reassurance that they’re doing things correctly and they’re doing a good job and not bothering everybody and who cannot handle criticism gracefully, this is how you do it)

And. Look. People say insensitive things they wish they hadn’t said all the time, but jesus PLEASE practice not saying shitty, thoughtless things to your kids.

My mom went to parent-teacher conferences with me in 2003, listened to my teachers, and when we got in the car told me that I was the worst part of her day.

That was SEVENTEEN years ago and I can’t stop hearing it.

But the thing is I know she didn’t even really mean it. She was tired and pissed and had just sat through an hour of every single one of my teachers saying “Alli is intelligent and passes all the in-class tests but is failing my class because she won’t turn in homework” and I get being frustrated by that.

God. It also did not help that I was a weird queer feral teenage goblin who dressed in funky garbage outfits and got in fistfights and my little sister was a social butterfly who got good grades and wasn’t interested in dating boys but liked wearing cute outfits and going on family Christmas outings. My sister didn’t get in fights with the school board, my sister didn’t participate in protests, my sister didn’t accidentally set the yearbook room on fire.

I don’t know. I was flailing for a long time and in retrospect it was kind of obvious but I was also a really, really weird kid and it’s possible that all of the symptoms of my Symptoms Syndrome got buried under me being really, really weird (then again being really, really weird is a symptom of Symptoms Syndrome, maybe they should have known?).

I legitimately think they tried their best in a lot of ways and the ways in which they failed to care for me as a child are the same kinds of things that also caused problems for them as adults in their work relationships and family relationships and friendships so it’s just kind of personality stuff so I don’t really need to forgive them for that, I can just be critical of these traits they have that make them into assholes?

I love both of my parents.

I was starting to get to really like my mom when she died.

I don’t like my dad very much and we don’t get along very well.

But I think that everything that happened with my depression and ADHD and other shit as a kid was genuinely mistakes instead of malice.

What hyper focusing actually is

I was aware that I was becoming a little bit too much of a sarcastic little hater before I started this experiment. Now I am almost startled to catch myself saying shit like, “Wow, look at the flowers on that tree, I am so grateful I decided to walk this way,” unironically, completely unprompted, and outside of the specific time in the day when I do the gratitude practice. I’ve rewired my brain to look for things to be grateful for, and so I look around me more and find more of them, which makes me feel happier, which makes me find even more good things.

At the same time, though, I would like to have some way to be present in the moment without having a fucking panic attack.

It's just things that make me happy, or that I enjoy, even if it's really minor. "Oh hey, there's a hummingbird diving through the water from the sprinkler. That's great, that's going on the list." "Oh I haven't heard this song in years, I'm glad I heard it at the grocery store, that's nice." Sometimes it's big stuff, or really exciting stuff, but mostly it's little. I'm not trying to pressure myself into feeling big happy feelings, just remembering to take notes that blankets fresh from the dryer feel good and there's a dude in my neighborhood who has two dogs who tow him on a skateboard like a chariot and that is in fact pretty cool and I enjoy it when I see him.

One of the really frustrating things about a lot of mental illness (and depression specifically) is that you stop noticing the things that make you feel good. Sitting down to think about the times that you felt good and making notes about them both forces you to remember that some things DO still feel good, even if it seems like everything sucks, and gives you a book of stuff you like to flip through so when you're feeling really shitty you can go "oh yeah, I like that song, I should look up the music video."

If you want an extremely low-pressure way to start this, get one sheet of paper and write "Cool Stuff" at the top and write down one or two things recently that were pretty cool. You can do it daily, you can do it weekly, you can set goals or do it whenever you feel like it. Sometimes I forget about my cool stuff lists and then I find them again and it's actually quite pleasant to sit down and write all the cool stuff that happened and catch up.

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

bedroom is very messy I really should tidy up

bedroom is chaotic I NEED to tidy but my brain says no. Why. Whyyy.

I guess I’ll just have to watch where I step in here for the rest of my life. The mess is everywhere. I’m one with the mess.

A sudden Need to Clean™ makes you get the room looking like some fancy homes magazine cover, and you think “I’ll never ever let it get that bad again, and then...

-out of sight = out of mind, as in, if you can’t see it, you will forget it exists. Set up your space such that, when everything is put away, you can still see it all (remove closet doors, shallow shelves so nothing is behind anything else, etc.)

-one-step access. None of this “to get to this thing, I have to get a stool, remove the box in front of it, grab the thing i want, put the box back, put the stool back-” nah. One step access. Not even “this thing belongs behind this thing”. Open drawer. Is thing right there? good. Have to move other thing to get to it? bad. Multi-steps means you’ll rarely use it, and when you do, it will NEVER GET PUT AWAY AGAIN. Multi-step access is for deep storage and the items that get the least frequent use.

-an item’s home is within arm’s reach of where you are most likely to use it/want to put it down.

-items can have multiple homes and that’s ok. I have three pencil/pen cans around my room, and like two or three places where I’m “allowed” to place things like my wallet and keys (and I am NOT allowed to place them anywhere else, because then I’ll lose them forever).

-examine the mess on your floor and determine the categories, then ask why those things are on the floor. 

---Why pile of clean clothes? because I didn’t want to fold them up. Solution: fuck folding clothes, clothes only get sorted into categories and then dumped into drawers or crates. That’s fine and ok. 

---Why pile of kinda-dirty-but-can-still-wear clothes? because I don’t want to put them away (i wore them once) but i don’t want to put them in the laundry basket (they’re not really dirty yet). Solution: have a home for “kinda dirty” clothes. I drape mine over the edge of my hamper. 

---- a bunch of trash on your floor? Because the trash can is all the way over there. Solution: put a bunch of trash cans all around your room.

---- pile of papers on desk? because i need to put them in my files where they’ll eventually go. Solution: one of those cute magazine boxes on desk, specifically for “to file” papers. 

-permanent piles on surfaces go in cute little boxes exactly where they already were. e.g. pile on nightstand consisting of wallet, keys, meds, phone, etc??? cute little box right on the nightstand for all that stuff you’ll grab every day. Pile on desk of shit that you need to take back out to the kitchen but haven’t yet? grab a little tray specifically to accumulate things you’ll take back out to the kitchen at some point. box on nightstand for “stuff that could/usually does go in purse, but isn’t there today for whatever reason”. Lil box for “random tiny shit that I should put away at some point” like hair ties, safety pins, push pins, etc.

-it’s ok for things to “live” in the place where you’ll need them next, even if it’s not “away”, so long as those things aren’t in your way. My pjs live on my bed, because I’m going to wear them again tonight. If I’m feeling fancy I’ll fold them and put them at the foot of the bed. Most days I’ll just yeet them on there and that’s where they Belong. My meds belong in a lil box on my nightstand, because that’s where I’ll set out my pills for the next day.

- “dump station” = right inside the door, where you’ll divest yourself of everything automatically anyways. Hook for your purse, hook for workbag, a few hooks for coats etc (even though coats “live” in the closet, it’s ok for them to live here too), box/tray for wallet etc, place for shoes. Because I’m gonna dump them the moment I walk in the door anyway, and if their “place” isn’t right there, they’re just gonna end up part of the mess

-beware the corner piles. Observe them, question them, solve them. Shit accumulates in “dead spots” on the floor where you don’t walk often. Watch those piles. What are those piles? Where are their homes? And why aren’t they there? Are their homes too inaccessible? Did I accidentally start a new hobby and none of the supplies for that have a home yet? Is it something “in progress” that I still intend to work on/do something with? 

You can search "remote control organizer" and something should pop up.

Mine sits on my nightstand and holds:

My weekly am/pm pill sorter

At night it holds my glasses

It keeps my phone in place while it's charging at night

A packet of tissues

Nail clippers and a file

Earplugs and an eye mask in case of migraine

Emergency inhaler

Hand sanitizer

Small sketchbook and a couple pencils

Small notebook for making lists

The two sides that are closest to me are the most consistent, and are basically "daily meds, glasses, phone, nail file" and the back half of it accumulates weird stuff that doesn't have a permanent home but also holds less-used but still important to keep close stuff (inhaler, earplugs, etc.)