Dear friends,
I know I skipped the November monthly Update — I was simply quite busy and overwhelmed. I struggled a lot with getting my final papers done, mostly because I found it very difficult to get started on each of them. Task initiation is one of my executive function weaknesses, and it gets even harder when I’m facing waves of depression as well. Additionally, the prompts for the assignments were sometimes vague and confusing. For one paper, I had to “articulate your orientation within the East-West-Earth-World encounter.” (East, West, Earth, and World refer to the four “directions” of study in my East-West psychology program, where East is Asian contemplative traditions, West is European depth psychology, Earth is Indigenous, and World is decolonial and global.) It was supposed to be more of a reflective essay, but I ended up taking a slightly more academic approach, simply because it was easier to do. Well, not really. It was easier to conceptualize, but a lot more work to complete. Same for the Trauma and Spirituality essay — it was supposed to just be about what we learned in the course, but I asked the professor if I could research trauma and spirituality in the context of autism specifically, and she said yes, so I went all in and spent way too much time and effort.
I eventually got everything done, but nothing on time. I don’t want that to happen again, and it should be better next semester now that I have an academic coach through disability services. I kept accidentally missing coaching sessions this semester and also there were scheduling difficulties in part because of only being assigned to the coach later in the semester.
And now that the semester is over, I realize just how exhausted I am. I didn’t fully believe my psychiatrist when she said that I seemed to be more depressed recently. I had even decided to decrease one of my meds and thought that things were okay. Or rather, I thought that everything that was not okay was simply the stress of the end of the semester. Yes, I was feeling more suicidal to the point of even identifying a potential method, but it was overwhelm caused by something external. But maybe it doesn’t matter so much for me whether it is an external or an internal cause. Either way, my energy reserves were waning. So, as my psychiatrist recommended, I went back up on the medication.
I’ve been struggling at times even to command the focus to play normally addictive phone games. When I was supposed to be practicing for the piano concert I played for my church on Saturday, all I wanted to do was sleep. I didn’t even feel anxious about the concert; my motivation level was that low. The concert went okay — people seem to enjoy my playing even while I mess up half the piece and improvise sections that I really should have practiced better. I didn’t even smile after playing most of the pieces; I was just getting the task done (Wait, do I smile after I play a piece? I’m not sure, but I very much felt like I was too drained to smile after playing the pieces at the concert). I confessed to a vocalist who also performed at the concert about my depression and the loads of mistakes being due to not having the motivation to practice. He just told me to hold my hand out, palm up.
“Do you see a hole in your hand?” he asked.
“No?” I said.
“Well, then, you’re not Jesus, and the only perfect person was Jesus.”
Which befuddled me for a moment, until I put the pieces together in my head and started laughing with him. (If you didn’t get it: Jesus’s hands were nailed onto the cross.)
After the concert, I began to feel more energized. I just started working on my novel again, which I had planned to work on as part of the Pathfinders Writing Collective challenge, but academic overwhelm and depression meant that that got put aside. Which is okay. I do want to get it done, though, and it’s just so frustrating for me that that takes time and effort to do. I love writing, but I write painfully slowly because I am utterly unable to write a rough draft. I am always unconsciously editing my words as I write them — the most free-flowing I can be is when I write confessional stream-of-consciousness “I need to get this out of my head RIGHT NOW” type of things that I’ve sometimes sent to specific people (these newsletters are maybe a somewhat less vivid version of that), but that’s very different from a novel or any other type of writing I have to do, including academic. The basic idea for this novel took root when I was in high school, so internally I’ve been working on it for a long time, but I just started writing it! And finally finished the first chapter. My outline is so detailed though, necessarily so because each of six characters has their own narrative that is interwoven with the others. You can’t write that kind of novel “from the seat of your pants” (if someone could, I’d be very impressed).
But overall I’m still pretty exhausted. I thought the creative burst was going to last longer and bring me out of the murkiness, but no, after around 2000 words written, my body felt weak enough that I actually worried that I was getting sick. I don’t seem to be; I’m just energetically drained. I might take a short creative/spiritual retreat next month so that I can give myself time to work on some musical compositions that I’ve been meaning to finish and just generally have a little space to breathe. You know what, I will take that retreat, I just haven’t told my mother yet and she still kind of rules my life. I will not ask her for permission, I will just say that I’m doing the retreat and I’m paying for it so she can’t stop me.
I have had a recent victory in my negotiations with my mother, however: for the Pennsylvania Youth Chorale concert (I’m the accompanist), I wore a black dress shirt and pants and put on a nice red tie. While at home, I took a selfie and sent it to the director, asking if she liked it. She said yes (as I expected), so I told my mother that I wanted to wear the tie and that the director said she liked it and also it’s actually a “women’s” tie (kind of true: I got it from Peau de Loup, a store that sells androgynous and masculine clothing mostly to people assigned female at birth, including cis women). Somehow that convinced my mother, so I wore the tie to the concert and was very happy. I hadn’t worn a tie in a long while, a least a year but probably more.
There’s more that I could add here, but I think I need a nap (or if I can’t nap, at least just some mental rest). I’ll end this with a little Contemplative Offering as usual:
How can you give yourself the rest you need in the coming year?
How can you care for the needs of others, especially those you may not usually think about, who might be different from you and may not have the same privileges that you do? (I think particularly of people with various kinds of disabilities. Disability justice is not as commonly discussed as other forms of social justice. And, as an Ontario hospital reinstates a mask mandate and New York urgent cares are overwhelmed due to a surge in flu cases, maybe some of the community care practices that the majority of people have dropped since the the pandemic’s so-called end ought to be reincorporated into our lives.)