Depression

Rules for survival come in all shapes and sizes. Some rules only apply to certain situations.

Don’t bring up a problem without having a potential solution and never embarrass your boss in front of people higher up in the structure are two rules that primarily apply in the work place.

Some rules for survival are primarily defensive.

Don’t go a a second location with someone you just met. Had a bunch of drinks? Double down on the first rule.

My mom, like a lot of moms, is a pragmatist. My mom is also a bit bloody-minded and a bit of a badass.

When she was 75 she repelled a push-in home invasion by slamming her full steel front entry door on the guy’s hand and then shutting it after he leapt back in pain.

Find two weapons in this room is a game we used to play at my house. Not to make it sound like my mother did this to a toddler, but I’m old enough to not be able to remember when we started this as a thought exercise.

And for the record, there are a lot more weapons in any given room then you might think.

We’ve been watching more TV that we might otherwise watch during these unprecedented times. This how we ended up watching the first three seasons of Wynonna Earp (Netflix; Syfy originally). Imagine Buffy the Vampire Slayer only with less heterosexual male gaze, a ton more sass, and gorgeous western Canadian landscapes.

CurrentMe has been wondering what PastMe was thinking ignoring this show for the first three seasons.

The short version: Wyatt Earp pissed off a demon and as a result the first-born heir in each generation since has been cursed with having to put down Wyatt’s kills, who rise from Hell as revenants upon the death of the previous generation’s heir.

Wynonna is the black sheep of her generation. The second born, never meant to be the heir, wild-child dealing with a lot of unresolved trauma stemming from the fact that she accidentally shot and killed her alcoholic, abusive father while revenants were kidnapping her older sister Willa, the rightful heir in her generation.

Upon her uncle’s death, Wynonna returns to Purgatory and to her sister Waverly, who maybe isn’t actually an Earp.

It doesn’t spoil anything to say that at the beginning of the second season Wynonna finds herself in trouble. It’s during this episode she remembers her mama’s rules for survival.

One: Don’t panic

As a first rule, don’t panic makes a lot of sense. Panic serves no purpose other than to draw energy. It also causes you to miss things.

Two: Assess the situation calmly

Evaluating your situation without emotion allows you to take a realistic look at your options.

Three: Take inventory

What do you have that you can use? What is around you that can help? What is your physical condition? Is the environment – your location, the weather, the time of day – working for your or against you?

All three of these rules make complete sense, especially if you’re trying to physically survive. Where they lack is in what I’m going to call…

Four: Figure out your goal

You can’t do the thing without knowing what the thing is you’re trying to do.

Focus on your goal and your goal alone. Others may be ignoring rules 1 and 2 and may try to take you down with them.

If you know what your goal is, these rules are flexible enough to apply to almost any life situation.

Presenting to your boss’ boss’ boss unexpectedly?

• Don’t panic. That big boss is just a person, like you.
• Assess the situation without emotion. That big boss is probably just bored or has heard good things about you. Maybe assume the best.
• What tools do you have that will help you? Probably there’s a slide deck involved. Maybe you’re 20 minutes deep into a 45 minute presentation. You’ve practiced this, you can summarize.
• What’s your goal? If it isn’t “Don’t embarrass your leadership” you might want to think again.

These rules also apply to the new reality of social interactions.

Yeah, some people aren’t going to wear masks, and some don’t fucking get that the reality of “keep back 6ft/2M” is that maybe you have to wait to get the thing off the shelf where I’m getting a thing off a shelf.

If you keep the goal – don’t get COVID – in mind, there are still ways you can deal with their behavior that don’t involve going all raging self-important asshole in a store.

My life is, objectively, pretty good. The curse of my imagination and the skill of that inner critic regularly torture me with “what if…” and it’s getting really boring.

For me, the struggle is how to move from surviving to thriving, and how these rules relate to that challenge.

• Height: 5′ 9″/1.75 meters
• Weight: 174 lbs/78.9 kilos
• Trips around the sun: 18,728 days, 6 hours, 33 minutes and 0 seconds
• Times I’ve been in physical therapy: 2
• Degrees: 2
• Professional certificates: 1
• Full-time jobs held: 12 or 13 depending on how you count
• Books written: 6
• Books read: too many to count
• Movies seen: ibid
• Times I’ve doubted myself: ibid
• Times I’ve gotten back up: ibid

Yes, today is one of those days. Those creepy, crawly nasty days when self-doubt kicks in and my incredibly talented inner critic sharpens its claws.

I’m trying a new technique this time. I call it the P.O. Technique.

When the inner critic pipes up about how I have set myself up perfectly to be distracted from the work I need to do on the last book, how I’m going to fail anyway because I don’t fit the profile publishers will look for any more, and how, ultimately, I’ve wasted my life I’m going to tell it to piss off.

In case your BritEng is a little rusty, piss off is a fairly rude way to tell someone to go away. And that’s what I want my inner critic to do: go away.

If I’m going to enjoy the rest of my life, I need to be a better friend to me, and I sure as hell wouldn’t say even half the shit to a friend I let my inner critic say to myself.

It’s not perfect, and it’s something I’m going to need to practice. But practice I will because I need to be a better friend to me.

One of the great gifts of “these trying times” is the realization that depression isn’t my primary problem.

Anxiety is my primary problem.

The scientific method tells us that now probably isn’t the best time to consider that a hard conclusion given the amount of generalized anxiety in 2020 what with the pandemic and the possibility of a second Trump term. There are some leading indicators that it’s a strong candidate though.

I haven’t been a good sleeper for decades. Where other people see sleep as mechanical restoration or as a respite from the world, sleep for me is a challenge. It’s something I can never do right where right is defined as “coming out feeling rested, refreshed, and ready to take on a new day’s challenges.” Menopause has only made this worse.

It started a couple of years ago with the hot flashes, which were fine as long as they were only happening during the day. When they started happening regularly at 03:00 they got more than a little inconvenient. At least they were predictable, I told myself.

Somewhen during that initial year I reformed my attitude on sleep. The idea that we should be sleeping 8 hours right through is misguided at best and farcical at worst.

Waking up at night is normal, according to WebMD. And while this is one of the few WebMD articles that doesn’t immediately lead to “You have cancer,” waking up can be an indicator of something serious.

What matters, most experts says, is how quickly you get back to sleep. Which is a comfort when you wake up multiple times during the night.

The thing is, removing the pressure to “get good sleep” combined with other good sleep hygiene habits – consistent bed time, avoiding sugar, caffeine, and digital screens at night – has actually improved my sleep. Sure, I still wake up multiple times but if I’m back to sleep in under 15 minutes, I’m usually going to wake up rested.

Then the pandemic happened.

My usual level of anxiety – around a 4 on most days – rocketed up to about an average of 7 on a scale of 0 to 10. And that’s when the dreams started.

I don’t remember all of them. But they’re intense and weird.

In one memorable one this summer I was part of an outlaw gang hiding in the mountains. While the gang played board games I had to figure out in a wintertime mountain environment how they could go surfing. Shades of Point Break perhaps?

Then there was the house with bleeding walls. That was a fun one. Strangely, it was the house from How to Get Away with Murder.

And my brain is susceptible to influence. Fuck The Mandalorian and ice cave spiders. Fuck it right in the ear with a chainsaw.

These nightmares have gotten so frequent that even though I have the physical reaction – the terror, the sweating, the awakening, the aftermath – when I have what I’ve started to think of as the basic COVID-19 nightmare I can pretty much shrug it off because I know what it means because the dream is always the same.

Last night my two favorite grocery store chains had decided to open a location that was just one big megastore. Instead of having to go to one store for these items – special treats all because the closest outlet of this chain is not easy to park at and the next closest while easy to park at isn’t all that close – and this other store for the regular groceries, I could now go one single place to get all the yummy things I want to have in the house.

The problem was it was grand opening day and everyone was there. And I do mean everyone. It felt like an aerial photo of JFK Stadium in Philadelphia during the Live Aid concert in 1985.

And no one was wearing a mask.

Sometimes in these dreams I’m not wearing a mask, which adds an extra layer of anxiety and yet another way for my brain to beat me up. Last night I was.

Anxiety expressed is so commonplace it’s become a trope of film, TV, and novels.

No matter what form the actions take, what happens, or what you do, the dream is always the same.