My dear readers, you may have noticed that I have not posted in a while. I must apologise for that as I have fallen quite ill over the past week. This is the first real illness that I have encountered since I began to actively fight to control my depression and ADD. I was not prepared for the turbulent ride that lay in store for me. Before I got sick both my depression and ADD were well controlled. I was happy, productive, focused, and social. When I began to become ill that all fell by the wayside and I slowly lost control and my depression returned (that is not to say that it had ever left, but I feel that it was well enough controlled to not be an issue anymore). I began to socially withdraw and the interest that I had once enjoyed in my regular activities began to wane. Malaise, apathy, and exhaustion began to control me.
Now, I suppose that some of you are thinking "Well, that's what happens when you get sick." The truth of the matter is that before I sought help for my ADD and depression that was my baseline, the only thing that being sick would do would be to increase my exhaustion. It was terrifying and eye opening for me to see the control that I had fought so hard to gain slipping away from me right before my eyes! My blog, my CBT worksheets, my journal, my cleanliness all started to fade away and it felt as though there was nothing I could do to stop it. The apathy had returned, and all of my motivation had vanished.
I didn't want to feel like this! I had worked so hard to climb out of the endless downward spiral of failure that I felt my life had become. I was depression, I was ADD, those two things had come to define me and control me, they had come to BE me. The thought of returning to that scared me. I took Sunday off from everything, I just rested and focused on healing. Thankfully my health began to return and by Monday I started to regain control.
In the past I have set myself up on checklists only to have something happen to make me stop using them and then I would never return. In fact, during my first appointment with my psychiatrist in November when the topic of checklists came up I dismissed them out of hand as a strategy that just didn't work for me. After the appointment I began to think about it. My problem with checklists was not so much my adherence to them, I followed them very well. My problem was getting back to them, once I stopped I just couldn't return. I then decided to start up a bunch of checklists, and I hoped that by the time that something happened which took me away from them I would have progressed far enough to get back to them. That was actually me benchmark that I had set for knowing that I had my ADD well controlled.
This illness is then my test. What to some may seem like a minor chest cold is to me a huge indicator of how far I have progressed, and how much further I have to go. This is the moment I have dreaded, I have fallen off of almost every checklist that I have, now what will I do? As my strength has been returning to me I dedicated myself to reclaiming at least one task that I had stopped every day. Today one of my tasks that I am resuming is this blog.
I have no photo to post today and I will not be posting photos to make up for the days that I have missed. I want this gap to stand as either a monument to my progress, or a testament to how much further I still have to go. Tomorrow I will resume my quest to post a photo every day. They will continue to be punctuated with random thoughts that I may have and that I feel are worth sharing. Thank you for listening, thank you for reading, any advice is always appreciated.
-Jacob