Tag: depression

imperatorkhaleesi:

alexandrareadsthings:

altonzm:

tbh in general there’s a lot of writing about depression which talks about recovery as a form of reclamation, like there’s this ur-personality that exists inside you that thru the power of kale/this $14.99 audiobook you’ll rediscover

I think for those of us who’ve suffered traumatic events or abuse in childhood, that can be pretty alienating bc there is no golden ‘before’ period to reclaim, but even more than that I dont think it’s apt for anyone with depression

if there is such a thing as genuine recovery, then that process by necessity renders you an entirely different person from who you were before, w a knowledge of sadness you didn’t have previously. nobody reclaims what they were before depression, if indeed there was a before

I think focusing on reclamation is a mistake and makes people feel like failures for not being some mythical version of themselves. the focus should be on building something new & syncretic, not fruitlessly attempting to wipe yourself clean of experiences that are fundamentally indelible

there is no golden ‘before’ 

I’m gonna cry because no one ever gets that, thank you for giving me more apt words to describe what that means rather than just telling someone “I don’t remember before anymore” because they insist there’s a golden period to reclaim and will accept that I don’t remember it easier than they’ll accept that there was never was one 

This is so good. Thank you for this.

gazztron:

petitpotato:

Something that I’ve learnt from my many years of struggling with depression is that it’s never really gone. Even at times when I feel good and healthy, I’m still always at risk of relapse. So far, I’ve experienced relapses every couple of years and one of the many reasons that happened is that I didn’t take my depression seriously enough. No one likes being mentally ill, so once depression doesn’t feel too present, I tend to ignore it. I quickly put myself under a lot of pressure, because everyone else does too, and since my depression isn’t acting up in that particular moment, I don’t feel like I have an excuse to take things easy. I feel like a liar and very disrespectful of other people’s hard work, so I push myself all the time to keep up with everyone. I don’t want to cause trouble because of something no one can see.
While every single time seems still manageable to me, those situations keep stacking, until I can’t deal with the amount of stress anymore. Then I fall apart.
This is a reminder to me and everyone else who’s in a similar situation: by accepting your depression and keeping it in mind, you’ll be able to live a healthier life in the long run. It’s difficult to miss out on certain things or to say “no” to friends because of something that isn’t an immediate problem. But every time you decide to take care of your needs, you will keep depression away a bit longer.

…holy shit 

koiotchka:

spoonie-isms:

chronicillnesshelp:

taylorgoldsmithshair:

this site can be so anti recovery it’s exhausting to watch. physical recovery as well as mental.

i see so many blogs that are just people endlessly whining about their health issues – i’ve got no problem with that, we all need somewhere safe to vent. what bothers me is that, with a couple of exceptions, these sorts of blogs seem to be damned near the entirety of Chronic Illness Tumblr. 

no-one’s celebrating disabled athletes at the Paralympics. no-one’s challenging ableist legislation. no-one’s discussing real, workable strategies to help us navigate life.

like i’m not saying that yoga and kale is going to cure your lymphoma. it’s been nearly 10 months of really hard work and i’m not even in remission. 

anecdotally speaking, i had all the signs and symptoms of POTS, and CFS/ME for a long time before and after my health was at its worst. if my doctor had just slapped a label on it i probably would have accepted that this is how life is now and I’d be in exactly the same position nearly a year later. instead, although i’m far from healthy, i’m in a really good place, and it makes me so frustrated and sad that other people are missing out on that.

“i see so many blogs that are just people endlessly whining about their health issues”

wow did you ever think that maybe chronically ill people “whine” about our health issues online because there is so much pressure irl to never let your illness affect you and to never talk about your symptoms and to always be the good inspirational sick person, so that you don’t make the healthy people around you uncomfortable? oftentimes tumblr is the only place where you can talk about your issues with people who actually understand and can empathize with you.

also like… wow.. chronically ill people in the tumblr chronic illness community who run chronic illness blogs are talking about their health issues.. who could’ve seen THAT one coming..

chronically ill people venting and talking about how their illnesses have affected their lives is not being anti-recovery. getting discouraged is not being anti recovery. 

I am pretty active in the chronic illness community, and I will tell you that a significant amount of us are working our asses off, doing everything we can to achieve recovery that may not ever happen. Recovery is extremely difficult (and oftentimes impossible) to achieve. 

like.. I’m glad that you’ve been able to have some symptom improvement, but believe it or not, other people out there have different diseases, prognoses, symptom levels, etc. People with chronic illnesses/physical disabilities have very high rates of poverty, not everyone is going to be able to afford the same level of care that you can. 

just because you would have just “accepted that this is how life is now” and done nothing about it doesn’t mean that everyone else has would do the same thing. as I’ve stated, we are a hugely diverse community, you can’t just generalize us all, it’s inaccurate and quite frankly, disgusting. 

also- I have seen plenty of people sharing coping skills and strategies to compensate for our illnesses. it’s pretty much the cornerstone of our community on here. and just about every chronic illness blog I follow has been celebrating the paralympics, i really have no idea what you’re talking about.

while there are many chronically ill people out there challenging ableist legislation, lots of us are unable to, due to our debilitating illnesses that are actively preventing us from living our lives. 

Pretty sure most of us would run ourselves ragged if we could recover.

The problem is, so many of us run ourselves ragged to just barely get by, also there are no cures for chronic illnesses or they’d just be called illnesses.

We can’t all be activists.  I have enough to do being a mom and a human being with a house and a lot of pets and some hobbies to pursue, on top of all the health related stuff we do.  Doctors take time.  And spoons.

I’m so glad there are others out there being activists.

I did 8 minutes of stretching and 8 minutes of exercise today.  Wanna know how much that hurt?  How hard it was?  But how important it is, so that I can maybe slow the progress of fibromyalgia and bone cancer?

My strong, wonderful, supportive husband sat with me in the car for half an hour while I cried and tried to get my pain and anxiety enough under control to walk into a grocery store.  That’s half an hour I could have used for to do /anything else in the world/ if I didn’t have these chronic mental and physical health conditions.

I had to tell a little girl, “Please don’t talk to my service dog, he is working.”  And break her heart because all she wanted to do was see the doggy.

I’m not interested in sports.  Glad the Paralympics exists.  Just not my thing.  But show me a disability-oriented flow jam and I’ll get behind that.

I try very, very hard to keep positive and be a “good, inspirational sick person”.  It helps me feel better.  I like doing it, and it keeps the delusions and the depression at bay, /for me/.  It is my path.  But it is not everyone’s path and they should not feel ashamed for it.

OP, how very lucky of you to have the privilege of affording medical care and a diagnosis. How very precious of you to think that ten months is a long time to fight something.

It’ll be twenty years come spring that I have spent with slowly but steadily worsening physical health. It’ll be thirty-three years of adhd come October, with other mental health issues piling on top as the years go by.

At this point, I’m satisfied when I’m still breathing at the end of the day, even on days when I’m bitterly disappointed I couldn’t manage anything more than that.

I’ll fucking well complain about my health and my situation when and how I want to. The only reason I don’t complain more is a lifetime of being told that nothing I have to deal with is remotely bad enough to actually complain about, because someone has it worse. You’re not anything special on that account.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I have to go put my headphones back on before the sensory processing issues have me screaming at the people mucking about with a table saw on the far side of two back yards.

Depression messes you up. On a cellular level.

rosalindrobertson:

You have heard me go on at length about how you need to baby your whole body during depression…

It turns out there is a reason why it’s more than just Feeling Sad. A landmark study from the University of Michigan has shown that the body clock of a depressed person is, well, completely ratfucked. And this might explain why you want to eat icing out of a can, why getting out of bed is such an exhausting prospect, why you’re up with the hamsters all night…

…and why it’s just more than Choosing To Be Happy.

Depression fucks with you on an absolutely cellular level.

Just look at this diagram.

So, forgive me, Happy Folks, but teasing that bit of yarn apart is going to take some time and some serious recovery tactics.

Stay strong, my fellow fruitbats.

kucala:

meowtian:

beijinhos:

hint: if a person with clinical depression and anxiety says theyre tired …. dont tell them they have no reason to be …. bc guess what….. They Know and Its Shitty

Louder!!!

I just want to add one thing-

If you have depression or anxiety? you’re not tired for no reason.

You’re tired because you have depression/anxiety.

Not only do they both come with low energy/fatigue as a legit common side effect, but they’re both fucking /exhausting/. fighting your brain all the time? exhausting. adrenaline crashes from anxiety/panic attacks? exhausting. being on edge all the time? exhausting. plus doing things costs /more/ energy when you have those mental illnesses.

You’re not tired for no reason, you’re tied because you have an illness that makes you tired.

Achievement unlocked: actually got hair fully combed for the first time in two weeks. All of it, at the temples (often very painful to comb), and the back of my head (hard to reach when flexibility is low), from root to tip (hair goes to the middle of my thighs when loose, and to my knees when wet, so very long).

And it is braided in two braids (which makes it easier to actually deal with than a single braid).

*sighs* Now hopefully I can manage to continue to have enough spoons to do that at least every two or three days (every day would be nice, but I have to do other things too, so not happening every day right now).

(Also, anyone who suggests cutting it to make it more manageable can go sit in scummy pond water up to their eyeballs. Scissors do not come near my hair ever again on that scale.)

Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions and crowds them out. Such depression takes up bodily occupancy in the eyelids and in the muscles that keep the spine erect. It hurts your heart and lungs, making the contraction of involuntary muscles harder than it needs to be. Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come. The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge.

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
(via chthonic-cassandra)