“Hi”
- Hi.
“What have you been up to?”
…
-I start my day at 6am with a morning run. It’s a great way to make sure your day can’t get any fucking worse that it started… (Spoiler alert, it inevitably does.)
While I run (my one moment of clarity in the day) my iTunes playlist sounds like a fucking DJ Khalid remix with all the pauses [in the music] with the notifications from the absurd amount of emails I received before 8am. My legs are burning and my blood is already boiling.
Then I clock into work where I miraculously fit 10 hours of work into my 8 hour work day. Can we normalize reading (and comprehending) a whole email before replying?
I will address the elephant in the room, I have lost a lot of weight (30+lbs)… For the record, having weight gain be a side effect of an antidepressant seems counterproductive. To deal with the weight of the world, my debilitating anxiety, all-consuming depression and my pure distaste in the human experience, without medication, my outlet is working out. So after work (at my attempt to not go to jail with my built up aggression) I workout again. A real low in my life is watching (and participating) in Maggie Brinkley’s Amazon Prime Workout Series. Her cheese-y encouragement and her poorly decorated Ikea “live laugh love” home decor puts me in a dark-dark place, but the work out kills; so I must be a masochist, because I continue to do it.
The constant stress of the day makes me nauseas; when I begin to feel lightheaded I am reminded I haven’t eaten yet, so I choke down a salad.
Then, in effort to relax, I take a bath. Relaxation takes a backseat when I instead feel the need to scrub my body of the filth I feel for selling my soul [and freedom] for a social media platform. This turns into a dark rabbit hole of “where I thought my life would be at this point” and so I read to try and escape. If you are feeling down (or even if you are feeling fucking chipper) I would not suggest reading “A Little Life.” Seems on trend to end my day ugly crying in the bathtub reading [said book].
Now is about the time I would normally drink myself silly, but I haven’t been participating, *buzzkill alcohol is a depressant. -Already on a slippery slope, I decided to see what being sober feels like… my conclusion: ‘not great’. How ironic that alcohol is one of the few things to make everything feel better, and yet the next day, for example, if I get an eyelash in my eye… -hide the sharp objects from me! I see the world more clearly, but amidst this pandemic, in this political climate, do I really want to see things more clear? I am beginning to prefer a foggy hungover Valencia filter.
It’s now about 9pm and I am ready for bed, it’s funny how daily I can psyche myself out by thinking, “I am tired. I am going to go to bed early and wake up and have a better day tomorrow”… (literally the definition of insanity… doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results) -But yet again my onset anxiety kicks in and I don’t sleep. Thinking of how to navigate my life sans health insurance, inspecting peculiar moles, googling varicose veins, diagnosing my chronic back pain, picking apart my aging face, “am I having trouble breathing because I have Covid or am I having an anxiety attack”? … … … And so I find myself at 3am watching my 600lb Life and telling myself it’s not so bad. -And then by 5am binging 90 Day Fiancé my fleeting positivity starts to think, well at least they have someone, I have no one (relationship) and my insomnia turns into a (non-alcoholic) pity party!
…Before you know it, it’s time to get out of bed to start groundhogs day all over again! I literally HATE working out and the highlight of my day is going for a morning run. What does that say for “how I am doing?” -I am fucking fine!
Brett Dreissig