depreshy on main
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.
Mid-week I realized: I’ve been more than just fatigued, depleted by the doomscroll, sapped by work, raising a teenager, and caregiving for an octogenarian mother in between everything else. I’ve been—depressive.
I don’t think of it as depression because it’s so intermittent, and when I think of the times in my life when I was going through depressions, they were sustained blocks of time, and absolutely related to life events. What’s going on now feels like pockets during the week where I get lost inside a darkness, fumbling around, or giving in to the fatigue. I think of it as depreshy.
There are a ton of things to feel down about right now if you’re living on Earth. If you’re living in the U.S., yes, things are feeling extra bleak.
My own depressive days may be related to this (fucking state of) perimenopause and hormone adjusting. I feel like I’ve aged double-time in the last five years. And here comes another birthday, just around the corner.
I’d wondered if, in March, when it felt like my mood took its deepest dive, it had to do with the anxiety around my kid leaving for a ten day international trip. She has never been away from home this long, and had never before traveled as far. When she returned, my mood improved but only momentarily.
I’d also wondered if I was experiencing some kind of delayed response to my partner’s experience of cancer and the six months of treatment that she went through in the second half of last year. I kept my hopes and spirits up then, artificially and otherwise, trying to keep fear and anxiety and my penchant for catastrophizing at bay. Maybe now I’m feeling it all in a rush like bad acid flashbacks. Even though she’s in remission, the depreshy is there, settling in on Tuesdays and sometimes popping by other days of the week.
But also: brain fog. What the fuck. I’m sorry to everyone who has ever experienced this, especially ongoing. The calendar also showed me that I’d been having this brain fog, which feels related to fatigue, for at least the last two weeks. It’s a relief in some ways to name it, and in other ways, it just plain sucks.
On the day I’m writing this, it took everything in me to get myself to the park to hike. I’ve moved back to podcasts, since there are so many I want to listen to (and here’re the ones I heard today), and me and the dog did our little circuit, our eight to twelve floors climbed, our comfortable pattern. I always hate when exercise feels curative (it usually does).
Today my brain and body liked what happened. I came home, ate an enormous burrito, and fell asleep. I woke up, did some work I’d been avoiding, and started writing, to you.
And also to me: This is my public self-reminder that it’s all temporary, babe. This mood, this life.
By the time this hits inboxes, I will have extroverted my heart out and might be crying in exhaustion. There’s a busy weekend ahead of promoting my books, meeting new people, reading, talking. Also, eating cake. I’ll tell you about it next week. Thanks for reading. xx
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Just FYI -- peri/menopause brought me a big fat dose of suicidal ideation. Luckily, I knew from growing up in a family of serious depressives, that this was something from somewhere else, not internal. Still took 5 years to get real HRT, which has been the solution for me to not just that problem but also the brain fog and hair trigger temper. Not trying to give you advice, but I like to remind people when I can, that the hormonal changes can do a massive number on your mental health, and the doctors will probably dismiss it, so keep asking until you find what works for you.