Please excuse me -- this is going to be a bit round-about, although I do
expect to get to a point eventually. Not necessarily the point.
There are two different things going on. The first is that I recently
joined a site called 7cups.com, where
one can connect via (text)chat with an actual therapist, for an entirely
reasonable monthly fee. N. suggested it partly because there are no
therapists on the island who take Medicare, but mostly because she knows
that I communicate better in text than I do in speech. (I also forget
stuff if I don't write it down.)
I'm just getting started with this, trying to work on my anxiety and
chronic depression. So naturally I needed to start with something of an
infodump.
The second thing is that I've been finding myself trying to give various
health-care providers (and their minions; I'm not sure how much of a
clinic's or hospital's staff "provider" covers) a "quick" overview of
Colleen's recent medical history. That's an infodump in its own right,
and I was having trouble remembering what happened when.
Being a tool-using bear, I figured that the simplest way to do it, or at
least to make a first cut, was by combining a couple of tagging
conventions that I was already starting to use in my yyyy/mm.done files. You'll notice that they already
sort properly by date. The problem is that when you grep for, say,
"hospital", you get line numbers instead of day numbers.
I had already started putting (mmdd) at the front of entries
that I figured I was going to want to know dates for, like hospital
admission and discharge dates. I had also started using a new flag
character, '/', for events involving Colleen. (I've been
using '%' for myself for a long time.)
Now, it was a simple matter to
grep ' / (' */*.done | wc -l
141
That number there is the line count. Right. Of course those aren't all
hospital admissions and discharges, and the record goes back to 2008. But
still, that includes at least ten hospital stays since we moved to
Seattle. And it doesn't include moving four times, being laid
off twice, my job burnout, totaling my car, and everything going on
in the rest of family. So.
That led to the following infodump on 7c, as slightly paraphrased in this
week's to.do file:
Not sure how much detail I need to go into about what's been going on in
my life, but 2012 and 2015-2018 were particularly stressful. We moved
four times between 2012 and now, and C was hospitalized at least 10 times.
I changed jobs three times, and retired. My cat died in 2015.
And then I added:
Looking back objectively, I think I have to admit that I'm in surprisingly
good shape, considering.
And
I guess that means that I have to change the question under discussion
from "how can I reduce my depression and anxiety?" to "how can I cope with
stress?" So... improving my coping skills and self-care skills. And
reducing procrastination, which is not just a (broken) coping mechanism
but also one of the few sources of stress that's actually under my
control.
N's reaction when I told her this was "I thought you'd already done that."
It turns out that depression and anxiety are perfectly normal and
expected reactions to that level of stress. I may need to work on
self-awareness, too.
Bears can be a little slow sometimes.
