Recovery

Yesterday I found myself laughing at things again. This morning I didn't have to fight with anxiety when I woke up - though partly that's because I was so annoyed with Quirk trying to wake me up by pulling my hair. I won't say I'm totally back to where I want to be, but I feel like glimpses of me are showing through more and more.

I am recovering. It is a quick recovery which tells me that this was mostly definitely a trigger induced episode, and that now that most of those triggers have been taken out of the equation my medications are able to return me to equilibrium. This is a relief, I didn't want to have to go through the hassle of medication changes.

I thought after all my posts describing what depression feels like to me I would talk about something more positive - coping skills. What are some of the skills I have learned that are helping me get through? The biggest thing I recommend is contacting your doctor and/or counsellor  of course!

Breathing Exercises

I have mentioned before how I would wake up and be paralyzed by anxiety for up to hours at a time. The biggest thing I could do to get through this was breathing exercises. Nothing fancy, just breathing deeply and focusing on the words "in" and "out". Because we can't keep multiple things in our brain really well, if I focused on those words and only those words I wasn't able to think of the anxiety at the same time and slowly it would disappear.

Expressing Myself

That's what this journal was. Now not everyone is going to want to publish their thoughts and feelings for everyone to see - for all I know there could be some future fallout of me doing so but that's a risk I decided I was willing to take - but it is really important to find some way to get the thoughts out. A lot of the times when I wrote a post was when I found the same thoughts circling in my head over and over and over and starting to eat at me. I realized that if I kept them in they would just keep eating at me. Some things I just journaled privately, but I found that by having it out there for others to know it was more helpful to me. It is important to find some way to acknowledge them and then get those thoughts out - talk to someone, write them down, make art (making art is always a good thing!), anything. Just don't keep them in to eat away at your brain.

Support

I found some online support groups and registered with them as another way to reach out and communicate with others who understand. This goes in with the last one - it's a safer way to tell people those thoughts without putting them quite this public. Sometimes people will have good advice and recommendations, other times they are able to help by  just acknowledging your feelings. I don't recommend live chat rooms however - I went into one and found it just left me feeling worse.




Those are the three that I can best put into words. I know there are more that I did, but those are the three big ones. I also called my wonderful mum a lot - sometimes four or five times a day. I am so blessed to have her and that she is so patient and supportive.

Mostly I wanted to post to let people know that I am getting better. I can find myself in all the stuff going on in my brain, and that's a really  nice feeling. I am so glad I have skills to cope that ten years ago I didn't.

 There will probably be one more post in this series regarding a bit of an impulse decision I made. Until then, thank you to all who have read and who have sent me encouraging messages.