Blogging and brushing my way through a depressive episode.

2024-09-16

I'm going through quite the depressive episode. I haven't got one like that in a very long time. And I mean, it makes sense. Lots of things are not going well in my life. Lots of things are, but lots of things sure aren't. And even besides that, there has been lots of things that have needed attention, that just never gotten it. And now it's demanding its due.

And while I don't know if I'm going through it or if it's going through me, I can tell you that one of the things that helps has been this. I have multiple blogs and it's helped a lot.

I used to keep a journal, and I had gotten pretty consistent with it until March of this year, when things started to really go off the rails in my life. And I mean... I've never been on rails. You know? Things have always been messy in my life. It's just gotten to a point where I couldn't ignore it.

Since March I've must have written in my journal, like, five times. That's not good. And yet, it has been a really, and I do mean really long time since I've written as much as I did in 2024. And that's because of blogging.

This blog and my other one are really important to me. And it's my own corner of the internet. It's my own personal space. It's the bedroom I never really gotten in lots of ways. It does me a lot of good. Lots of things are bringing me down, but at the same time lots of things are helping. This is part of the latter, and it's a big one.

I don't have space in my life for me to keep my journal which sucks because I'm losing a lot of stuff and I really need to get back on that because my journal is a backup of myself. It's an archive of my life. And I can't seem to find a proper mental space for me to go back into to write fiction, which is my favorite form of writing.

But somehow, in the midst of all the bullshit I'm going through, blogging is something I keep coming back to. I somehow have space for this.

This depressive episode is a learning moment for me. I'm learning to take care of myself in new ways. Stuff I didn't do before. Little things. I'm trying to shove everything I can't handle aside as much as I can and do the very little things I can and accepting that it's okay that I can't do other things right now.

Like, here is a tiny little thing that I'm doing now that I didn't do before. I'm brushing my hair. Every day. I didn't do that before. I have straight, long hair. But they would always get messy and tangled and it would just become physically painful to deal with.

So a friend of mine untangled the whole thing, it took more than an hour, but she did it. And after that I got myself a brush and I'm trying to brush my hair every day. It helps. A lot. Because it's a tiny little thing, but it's also a moment in which I am purposefully taking care of myself.

Right now, I'm in a phase where I'm constantly tired, I can barely get out of my own apartment because I either don't have the energy or gender dysphoria is killing me, and eating to keep myself alive is something that I need to force myself to do way too often. And I don't want to get too dark, so I'm gonna stop there. But the gist of it is, I'm not having a good time. At all.

I'm accepting now that I'm in a tunnel and that there is very little light that shines through it. That when it does it's not gonna last long so I need to make the most of it and what making the most of it is for me, it's making and planning tiny little things for me to keep going through the dark. Because I'm definitely playing on survival mode right now, but surviving isn't enough.

Brushing my hair is definitely one of these. There are little things that are part of it, and blogging is one of the biggest.

I loved the space that I carved for myself on the internet. My microblog and my main blog are really important to me. They're spaces in which I can express myself about everything I want. It allows me to be artistic. It allows me to think about other things. It allows me to process my thoughts in a different way than I would usually do.

You see, before, I used to make videos on YouTube. They were scripted, recorded, and edited, and so on. But that was a massive process. I've had too many things that I never made it past initial writing phases because I was already thinking about "oh my god, how am I going to make this look good on a video format?" Sometimes it never even got past the walls of my head.

Blogging solved that for me. If I can write it, I can just put it out there. And that's not to say that writing is easy. Sometimes it's very hard. But writing and talking are things that just comes naturally for me. It's been like that since I was 9 years old. For me, it's almost a frictionless way of expressing myself.

While I'm at it, credit to Bearblog. Because I've been looking for a place like this for a very long time and never found it before this. There was always some unspoken rules of the platform. There is no platform here. I mean, there is one, but at the end of the day, this? This right here? It's my space. It's my blog, my rules. I can do whatever I want with it. I can write, post, whatever I want on it. It doesn't have the pressure of most other platforms. It doesn't have drama. It doesn't have any of that.

Does it feel like I'm writing and talking into the void? Yes, kind of. That's also what I like. Like this here, it's kind of like therapy for me. This entire thing has been written by me speaking into my phone through dictation. Once I'll be done, which should be coming up really soon, I'm just gonna reread it quickly just to see if there isn't some glaring issues like spelling or some words that haven't been properly comprehended by the app or whatever. But that's it. I'm just gonna post it as is.

I don't have to care or to conform myself to some pre-existing social norms because God knows I already have enough of that to deal with. I can be my own weird little autistic trans girl person that I am on this space. It's about me and only me. And it's cool. And it does me a lot of good.

Little things. It's all about the little things. I can't do big things so these little tiny things matter the most. I'm brushing my hair and I'm blogging.

I can't do much more right now. I am going from a depressive spike, to a panic attack and on to the next cycle. But between these anti-depressant and Xanax-controlled events, sometimes I got these little moments of greyness, like I don't feel much and these are the moments in which I can do this and they matter a lot.

You survive life by living through it.

Surviving on its own isn't really complicated. Your body is quite easy to maintain. Your brain needs a lot more than just basic survival to continue. Right now it's all about making sure my brain wants my body to keep on surviving. Everything else that isn't about this is now low priority for me.

Thank you for reading.

Take care of yourself and please go and ask your friends, your family, how they are doing. You never know.

📨 Comment via email.

#personal