Two Gold Stars

Happy 1-year-medicated-for-my-depression-anniversary to me. I wish I did it sooner. I’ve been depressed for a long time— some stretches worse than others, but always bad in the winter— but I never thought I was “sick enough” for meds because even at my worst I was mostly able to function. Going through talk therapy a few years ago helped, but it still felt like sometimes the floor would fall out from under me. Getting on SSRIs felt like putting the bumpers on during the bowling game of my life. The principles of the game are the same but suddenly it’s so much harder to go off the rails. And that is great in itself, but it has also led to me trusting myself a lot more, because I don’t feel so much like my brain is a half step from going off an edge I can’t see, and that in turn has made it much easier for me to manage my anxiety. It’s not all sunshine and roses out here in post-pandemic healthcare-provider mid-thirties land, but I’m grateful for this year and where it’s brought me.

I finished an incredible book yesterday and I’m having a lot of feelings about it. Unfortunately talking to someone about a book they haven’t read feels awfully close to explaining your dreams to someone, in that no one actually cares, sorry. But yall. Thistlefoot by Gennarose Nethercott. I’m stuck on how she wove the old folklore tales into how she told this new story in the present-day. The way she addressed generational trauma and the privilege of forgetting. The profound otherness stirred so completely into the normalcy of our world. A queen. 5/5.