Patience

As anyone who knows me would tell you I'm not the most patient person in the world! In fact you don't need to ask someone who knows me, someone who has been around me for 15 minutes could tell you that I'm not the most patient person!! I tend to manage to be kind and patient with others. But when it comes to me or my life I want things to be sorted out as soon as possible. I am not good at allowing myself time.

 

We are now into November. And I am frustrated. I am frustrated that I am not 100% (or let's say 95%) all the time. Today I am calm and I am fine and feeling like myself (which is great and I am definitely enjoying!!). But generally speaking in a week I will have 5 good days, 1 bad day and 1 recovery day after the bad day. This seems to roughly reflect the pattern I am going through.

 

Objectively speaking this means that actually I am only having 1 day a week where I am feeling depressed or seriously anxious. (I hope the mathematicians out there would agree that this is about 14.3% of the time.) Compared to how I was in July when I was depressed and anxious every day (I can reliably calculate that as 100% of the time!) I know that this is a clear improvement.

 

But I'm not done yet! I am not happy that there is that 1 day!!

 

Ultimately I want to feel better at least 95% of the time. And it isn't because I am overly ambitious (which I am but that isn't the reason). And it isn't because I feel that I need to be better to make my family and/or friends happy. I want to feel better because it is so much nicer than feeling depressed!

 

I've written about how being depressed feels, about how it makes me feel lonely, it distances me from people, and it causes me to act in ways that in hindsight I regret. Having now had a serious taste of what I am like without the depression I want to be without it all the time!

 

And this desire coupled with the impatience means that while I am only 4 months into properly sorting all of this stuff out, I still want to get it sorted as soon as possible.

 

Other people are very kind. They point out to me that getting from 100% to 14.3% in 4 months is astonishing, especially given that I'm working to deal with something that has been going on for over a decade. Working my way through everything that has happen and learning how to be myself without depression was never going to happen overnight, or in a month, and will take time.

 

But the wish to feel better does mean that when I do have a down day it hits me pretty hard. Fundamentally because I don't want to have a down day! I hate the down days. And I hate how the depression has impacted on my life. Yes, I accept the impact it has had, but that doesn't mean that I am happy about it!!

 

And so maybe the impatience doesn't help me because it means that those days do feel pretty awful at the moment. But I also know that I am very lucky to have this drive, and that if I didn't I wouldn't have got to where I am in 4 months. Or have the drive to keep going to get that 14.3% even lower.

 

Facing up to everything in June/July was definitely the hardest and scariest thing I have ever done in my life. I also now know that it was definitely the most important thing. And so I remain very firmly of the view that anyone else suffering should at least consider trying to talk to someone - even if it is just one person who you feel able to trust.

 

In my experience it has quite literally changed my life. By a whole 85.7%!