One of the most valuable things that this blog has given me has been a record of the minutiae of our daily lives. Not only of the milestones and special occassions and momentous changes, but of the rhythm of every-day life as our family has grown.<\/p>\n
And because I tend to blog whatever is in my head, however I happen to be perceiving it, the blog is in a lot of ways like my own personal mood barometer. Without it, I might not have realized, for instance, that the month of May seems to be a particularly difficult time for me on an emotional level. It’s a funny time to be depressed, with the flowers blooming and the days growing longer and full of sunshine and warmth, but for whatever reason, I seem to be more likely to be anxious and even mildly depressed in May. Also in November, which makes a little more sense from a seasonal perspective.<\/p>\n
(May also happens to be when I am most fertile. Of five pregnancies, four of them were conceived in May or June. Even with the vasectomy last year, I can’t bring myself to have unprotected sex this month!!)<\/p>\n
A friend and I were discussing the anxieties of parenting, and what you do on the dark days when it seems like you’ve truly lost control. I don’t blog about those feeling much anymore, partly because it got a little embarrassing having my colleagues who read the blog come rushing into my cubicle to check on my obviously precarious mental health after reading that morning’s rant, and partially because I was just sick of listening to myself whine about the tedium of the anxiety of the moment when by the time I hit “publish” or at latest, the next morning, I was over whatever knot had twisted my knickers. <\/p>\n
The anxieties still come and go, though, in a sort of a regular cycle that I am now learning to recognize. That recognition has been a huge relief in and of itself, because now I can simply say, “This too shall pass” and believe myself. I can see in the blog that I’ve felt overwhelmed by my own life on a fairly regular basis, that the feelings of being incompetent and lost and simply exhausted by it all come and go like the tulips and the fall leaves — sometimes in a couple of hours, sometimes over the course of a couple of days.<\/p>\n
I’ve even wondered, occassionally. whether I should find a way — through therapy, maybe, or medication — to try to fight off the bad days, the dark moods, the wrenching anxiety that occasionally gets the better of me and turns me into a tantrumming two-year-old or feeling hollow and frustrated and incapable. But then the tides turn and I feel strong and smart in control again, and I forget — until the next time.<\/p>\n
All this to say, in talking to my friend about this, she said that if nothing else, it was good to know somebody else sometimes feels that way, too. It makes me wonder whether we’re all in a similar place on that continuum of contentment to anxiety, slipping back and forth depending on season and circumstance.<\/p>\n
It’s a very personal subject, and something we just don’t talk about very much, even in this most personal and intimate of forums, but if you’d like to talk about it I’m curious: do you know that feeling, of slipping beyond comfortable footing into the panic of despair? Do you just hold your breath and wait it out, knowing that this too shall pass, or do you have other ways of coping? How do you judge the difference between “I’m having a bad day” and “I need professional help” and “I really need to get the hell out of my head”? (That last one would be my personal Achilles heel.) When the stress threatens to break out of whatever containment system you’ve rigged up in your brain, what do you do to get it back under control?<\/p>\n
(And even as I type, I’m thinking about just deleting the whole post, because it’s too close to the sort of self-indulgent navel-gazing and whining that I dislike in myself. But I’ll publish it, because if nothing else I don’t have any other ideas for today.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the most valuable things that this blog has given me has been a record of the minutiae of our daily lives. Not only of the milestones and special occassions and momentous changes, but of the rhythm of every-day life as our family has grown. And because I tend to blog whatever is in … Continue reading “Good days, bad days”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-is-all-about-me","category-rants-and-rambles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2128,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127\/revisions\/2128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}