experiencing depressed thinking creeping in

I switched to teaching 3-year-olds. It is going pretty well. I am enjoying working with slightly older kids, working on name recognition and doing parts of crafts that I didn't let my toddlers do (like squeezing out the glue to stick wings on the space rocket). Admittedly, I still had a hand on the bottle most of the time... It is so important to let the kids do art themselves and not to "fix" it for them, but the perfectionist in me is hard pressed sometimes to let things turn out differently than I had planned. But it has been good.

But my life stress level has definitely bumped up a notch. And the depression thinking is kicking into gear. It is like a fever, or throwing up, or coughing. It means I'm sick with a mental illness.

No problem; I know how to deal with that.

As long as I don't freak out. Here is my one paragraph lament; I never wanted to feel this way again! What if it gets worse? I hate depression!

Okay, now that is done. But I think I will call my counselor and try to see her this month instead of waiting until the end of July. See, I wanted to be able to prove to myself that I didn't need to see her every month. When I see her, I'm often doing well - it is between visits now that my depression shows up. So I pull back into my brain the random condemnation some people have thrown into the air, about those people who wont just live their life on their own but have to keep bugging a counselor. Weak people. Or monetarily wasteful people. Or both.

What happened to my belief that seeing my counselor as a preventative measure was okay? I take medication day in day out to keep the depression off, why can't I see my counselor once a month or every few weeks for the same reason?

Because I still want to be able to "man up" and handle my brain on my own. Ah, well. Better humble and happy than proud and depressed, right?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My merry-go-round

I've been keeping a mood log since sometime last May, or maybe June. I've done it on the OpenOffice software similar to Excel. This means I can do cool stuff like make charts and graphs to see how my mood has swooped around over the last year. This last week, I found that you can also put in a trend line over your chart. This was neat, but disturbing. I used it over charts made from week averages for the last 10 or 11 months. I learned that: My depression at its best (each day, then averaged per week) is getting better. My depression at its worst (each day, then averaged per week) is getting worse. My anxiety is getting worse. My sleep time is increasing. My exercise time is decreasing. Or, in short, my worst is getting worse. So then I wonder if I'm using the same standards to judge my mood as I was using in May last year. After all, the mood ratings are subjective, done each day, or occasionally every few days. But what if anxiety that I called a 5 in May would ...
Read more

OCD meddling in my education (again)

Image
What do you know, the insert picture function thingy is working today! Hence my photo not taking over more of the blog than it should. Today, if OCD were little g gods, I would have offended the gods. Actually, I did it last night. Thank you so much, professor, for giving OCD the opportunity to knock me to my knees. I'll have you know, however, that I am making some small show of resistance. Which I will explain. This is what I did. I did the communication screen with a little kid as per the instructions. Then, looking over it at home, I thought I missed something, so proceeded to correct something to say how the child actually pronounced it, not how I forgot and left it. And then the monster pounced. Because, being an hour or so removed from the situation, I no longer knew for absolute certain how the child said that word anymore. But I had just struck through the assumed mispronounced sound. So do I go all the way a...
Read more

Sunday

Well, played guitar in church today. I only dreamt about it two nights since Wednesday when I agreed to play. And neither dream was a total disaster... Anxiety, how much you do for me. Glad that's over until I start working up to playing next Sunday, too. Two Sundays in a row. Probably good for dealing with the anxiety monster. The pastor preached on Psalm 4 today, the second half of the (very short) chapter. It included dealing with upsetting emotions. He was good about saying that having the emotions themselves wasn't the problem, but then we have to deal with it. By stopping. A good old "be still" type verse is stuck in there, along with that vague "meditate" word (but not in my version; mine used other words for about the same meaning). The pastor's paraphrase of the meditating part was to address yourself, telling yourself to "be still" etc. Anyhow, by the end of the sermon and the chapter, he was hoping that people around us would see t...
Read more