I am in a massive writing rut. Wait, let me restate that. I am in a massive rut that has impacted my ability to write (and to do many other things). I would like to blame the slow pace of my posts here lately on our website makeover, but the truth is I just can’t seem to write. If you follow us on Instagram or photogrief you probably know I have been cleaning out my childhood home, getting ready to sell it. Needless to say, it has been bringing up . . . stuff. All sorts of stuff. Literal stuff, figurative stuff, all the stuff. And I have been coping with other losses this year – not deaths (thankfully) but losses none the less. Losses that have hit me harder than I ever imagined and kept me in the dark for longer than I wanted to accept.
It isn’t that I don’t have hope it will get better. I do. I have been through this darkness before and I know it can get better; I know it will get better. I know that I am capable of surviving because I did it yesterday and today and I will do it tomorrow. But it doesn’t change the fact that the darkness sometimes feels suffocating. I breathe in and it feels like it is the only thing filling my lungs. Even with this rational belief that it will get better, it doesn’t feel like it will get better.
Luckily (or unluckily) when you’re a mental health person you deconstruct your every thought, mood, and action. Through this rut I have done that, obsessively. I know well why some days it doesn’t feel like it will ever get better:
- Unfortunately, you can know or believe one thing but feel another. It’s a very frustrating, but very real, experience.
- As one of our favorite bloggers, Jenny Larson, says Depression Lies. It tries to shake what you know and replace it with emptiness. It feels like walking through a long, curved, dark tunnel. You believe there has to be an end, but you just can’t see it. Depression whispers in your ear that the tunnel never ends and that whisper can feel pretty darn convincing.
- Feeling like it will never get better can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and create a dangerous loop: you feel it won’t get better no matter what you do, so you don’t do anything, and it doesn’t get better, so you feel even more convinced it won’t get better, so you keep not doing anything, and on and on.
I put off writing a post for days. Okay, weeks. Okay, maybe a month. Let me walk you through a bit of what was happening in my head before sitting to write this post today:
Needless to say, these thoughts had me feeling pretty terrible about writing a post, and pretty close to looking for a Law and Order marathon and writing nothing (like I have been doing for weeks thanks to grief-brain, like I have been feeling bad about for weeks). But here I am, typing. Now, you may be thinking, yes you’re typing but you’re not actually saying anything. Fair assessment. This post may be less about saying and more about demonstrating. Sometimes you just have to do SOMETHING instead of NOTHING and hope for the best.
What ALMOST happened:
What ACTUALLY happened:
Hmmmm . . .that drawing shows me smiling. I’m not actually smiling. But I’m typing, and that’s something, right?
But how did that happen???
Don’t get me wrong, there have been more than a few times over the past few weeks that I have opted for the Law and Order marathon. What went differently today? I just forced myself to type, no matter how bad it felt [feels]. Grief and depression can create an inertia that feels impossible to overcome. Not more than two hours ago it felt unthinkable I would be typing right now. As I type it still feels unimaginable I will generate anything worth posting. But I am determined to target this stupid, evil, bottomless inertia and I am trying to slowly shake it off.
Yes, but HOW???
Whelp, that’s the million dollar question, right?? There is no easy answer, I can tell you what some third generation behavioral mental health peeps might suggest, so you know. I remind myself of these things often when grief-brain sets in; sometimes they help (like today), sometimes they don’t (like yesterday). But, in the immortal words of GI Joe, knowing is half the battle:
A proponent of behavioral activation is going to tell me to make a list of things that have been known in the past to make me feel even just a wee bit better. This can be anything – big or small. Don’t get too complicated, because you want to keep these manageable. Basic things like “taking a shower” are totally fair game, if they are things you know help you feel better. If you’re feeling really ambitious you can even rank these things on a scale of how easy or difficult they are and also the degree to which you think they might improve your mood. The goal is to then DO these things when your mood is down, in either a scheduled way or in moments when you recognize you need them. It isn’t always easy, but having ideas outlined helps. The ranking system can help, as it can be a motivator to think “I can’t do much, but I can probably muster doing something that is only a 1 or 2 on the motivation spectrum”. Eleanor has written about it before and does a better job explaining it than I am doing here. Because I’m in a writing rut, remember?? I will give you a quick one sentence summary though: you don’t need to feel better to do something, sometimes doing something is what allows you to feel better.
A proponent of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is going to tell me: Accept those unpleasant thoughts swimming in your head, and do what you’re going to do anyway. This can be a tough one to wrap your head around, because usually when we have a thought we listen to that thought – we feel and do things as a result of that thought. Instead, an ACT therapist is going to tell me I should just notice the thought, consider what it is making me feel and what it is telling me to do (or not do). If it is increasing inertia and discouraging me from doing something, I should notice it and say to myself, this is just a thought, it in no way controls my actions or behaviors. I can acknowledge the thought, “I am in no mental state to write, whatever I write will be garbage” and still say, “Those are just thoughts, I can and will open my computer anyway”. I can decide to type. I can decide to choose something instead of nothing. Even as I type these words my brain is saying, this is going nowhere, you’re going to have to scrap it. And I am saying yup, okay, probably. But that is just a thought, possibly a lie, and I won’t let it change the fact that I am going to keep typing.
What you might have noticed about these techniques is, unlike posts where we are talking about dealing with emotions from the inside out, these approaches work from the outside in with the simple idea that, no matter your thoughts and emotions, you can push yourself to change your actions. It sucks and it’s hard and your grief-brain or depression-brain might tell you it’s impossible, but sometimes it works. Sometimes it’s the only reason a WYG post ends up in your inbox.
How do you motivate yourself to do something when you can’t even begin to imagine motivating yourself to do something? Leave a tip, because we all have days we could really use them!
What’s on the WYG horizon? E-courses! We have three courses you should check out: Managing Grief on Holidays and Special Days (free and great for those getting mentally prepared for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day), a 30 Day Grief Journaling Bootcamp, and Exploring Grief Through Photography.
The post Hey there grief-brain, I’m ignoring you today. appeared first on What's Your Grief.