Frig, I am getting my ass kicked. I am officially depressed, apparently not uncommon after a major life event. Is it a physical aftereffect of the stroke or the psychological aftermath of stroke + retiring from roller derby, nobody seems to think it matters which and everybody says a little of both.
Weirdly July started off pretty good, the beginning of July is when I cleaned the bathroom and hung out with TS and Sparty and finished taking my ProSource quizzes (see below), and pretty much for the rest of July I've been in the dumps. I am able to: 1) work, 2) train clients, and pretty much the rest of the time I'm in bed or on the couch.
And in the continuing saga of my life titled Good News, Bad News: Who Knows, I fell off the sidewalk leaving my therapist on Thursday, oh my god who does that, and rolled my ankle right smart—but hey, right outside the primary care practice that I'd been eyeing as a substitute for the primary care doctor who was recommended to me out of the hospital. So I hobbled in and saw a doctor and it's a Rush practice, so she was able to pull up all of my Rush records—my mammogram, my hemology tests, my ultrasound—and she asked if I was fully recovered from the stroke and I said I was totally physically recovered but I thought I might be depressed. So she started asking me depression stuff and of course I started to cry, thereby answering that.
So that's pretty much where I am now, plus a sprained ankle. It's seriously like the bar keeps getting lowered, like the one thing I used to still be able to do was walk!
I've had some inspiration too, though. This came up in my feedly: Jane McGonigal on Getting More Done with Less Stress and The Health Benefits of Gaming, which I got superexcited about and immediately signed up for her SuperBetter website. But, I think it needs some work. Like you have to check off these quests and in allaPoppyspeak you get a little brain cookie whenever you check off a little task... only it only checks off your quests if you access them in a specific way, so I did like ten quests and my counter was stuck at 1/3 and I'm like, WELL YES, THIS IS EXACTLY HOW LIFE FEELS NOW. I still love Jane McGonigal! It's not you, it's me! It's just that nobody has invented the readymade system that could satisfy me, I even stopped using Wunderlist. Please remind me of this before I plunk down anything cold and hard for a FitBit! It will always be the blank paper notebook and the blank electronic spreadsheet for me. I'm super down with "gameifying" (I think McGonigal herself does not like that term) my life, and in fact that's really what's behind my timetracker and charts, which is why I was so excited by SuperBetter in the first place, kindred spirits, but ultimately what makes it redundant for me. ANYWAY tl;dr, I am going to cobble together my own game out of Post-Its, Google Sheets, and Facebook.
July's picks:
HOME
1. Clean kitchen for the love of god, if I feel up to it.
First of all, I did clean the bathroom! Which needed it again after I cleaned it in, uh, April. And I feel like I'm getting close to being able to clean the kitchen...
PLAY
2. Take ProSource quizzes to finish.
Done!
Really the only problem here is how much doing this was functioning to keep my mood up, this was the exact right kind of task crossed with the exact right kind of reward. I haven't found anything that works quite like that to replace it.
PASTIME
Write
I think a big thing that's going on with me is that I'm eager to just get back to my life... but I think undermind doesn't want me to just go back to what I was doing before. Undermind doesn't want to rehash the same old food charts and recipes all over again, undermind thinks—or possibly knows— that I should be doing something new and different. Undermind wants me to grow as a person. And undermind can't talk to me about it, undermind can't talk. Undermind can only pull the plug on my motivation and not let me get out of bed until I give up heading in the wrong direction.
Watch
File this under be careful what you wish for, Netflix picked up NCIS and that ate my life. Then I poked around and it turns out that Hulu has CSI, so I signed up for my free one-month trial. Netflix >>>>> Hulu, I'll tell you that. Hulu has ads! If you pay, you shouldn't have ads. Not that I've paid yet. I'm going to cancel as soon as I'm done with CSI, which I don't even like as much as I think I would have without the ads. Which maybe is for the better.
The only other thing we watched this month was Tracers, which is some parkour movie starring Jacob from Team Jacob, lolz. And tonight I think we're going to watch something with The Rock, I forget what— oh right right, Hercules. Ha ha, I love The Rock.
See
Like I said, it started out as an okay month for seeing people: TS and I got jibaritos and hung out in the park, and Sparty and I got biscuits and pie at Bang Bang Pie Shop. Also Biggie had her shower and Annie organized a boat trip for Fury, that was really great.
As for seeing movies, the sweetie man and I (and Odie and Kevin) saw Minions!
August Picks
HOME
1. Clean kitchen? Please?
PLAY
How about we focus all our energy on the kitchen?
PASTIME
Yeah, how about that.
