On New Year’s Eve 2022 I randomly chose three statements from my day-by-day calendar that I had saved because they meant something to me on the original dates when I read them.
I’m doing the same this New Year’s Eve. I’ve randomly chosen three dates from my “You are a Badass” daily calendar that I had put aside on the date I originally read them. I am also posting 2 other quotes that really hit me in the feels this year. It has been a pretty rough year. In September I started by journey to ketamine therapy for treatment resistant depression. I finally had my first treatment session with the ketamine on 12/02/23 and it didn’t go well. I was much more depressed and had strong passive SI (suicidal ideation for those of you not in the mental health biz) after that session, but my care team helped normalize that for me and my second session was truly a breakthrough for me. I met with my personal individual therapist, my ketamine clinician, and my ketamine therapy Guide during the week after my second session and felt 75% less depressed and anxious. I checked in with myself and with all of those listed above to assure myself that I wasn’t experiencing hypomania or mania, which I wasn’t. I was probably feeling what those with a healthy, balanced emotional life and home/work life feel. Regardless, it was the first relief I’ve had from crushing depression and electrically charged anxiety in well over a year.
Today, 12/31/23 I completed my 5th of an initial schedule of 6 sessions. “Session” being defined as taking the medication and the preparation and integration that happens on session days.
So, back to the task at hand: here are the dates and messages from 3 randomly selected desk calendar pages from 2023!
Saturday/Sunday January 14/15: Your brain is your bitch.
My
shrink, who I’ve been seeing since 2004 and with whom I regularly talk about
how “the mind” is not necessarily in my corner (or anyone else’s for that
matter), when it comes to processing experiences and the accompanying emotions
post-experience. The longer we live, the more inaccurate and irrational thoughts
and emotional responses we gain/develop over time. It’s classic CBT (Cognitive
Behavioral Therapy). It takes a lot of work and repetitive practice of learning
how to “respond versus react” to whatever experience we encounter during any
regular, ho-hum day, much less the “biggies” which is a definition we create
for ourselves. A “biggie” for me may be a phone call from my mother when she’s
sobbing and whatever she’s saying is something I can’t translate so I let her
ramble on for a few minutes before I tell her I can’t understand what she’s
saying and end up hanging up the phone.
Thursday June 22: The thrills from the little wins will keep you rolling toward victory.
Despite
how much I “know” that big changes result from small, day-to-day changes in
habits, the way I think, and how I manage my expectations, it still fucking
sucks that the changes I want to see in my life don’t happen when I want them
to. I’m a classic addict: I want what I want when I want it. I don’t want to do
the day-to-day shit, I want the miracle of change to happen simply because I
say so and because I want it. This was a good reminder for me to get back to my
“recovery roots”: one day at a time (sometimes it’s 5 minutes or 1 minute at a
time). Nevertheless, it’s a good reminder for me to slow down, accept it is
what it is, and keep taking those small, regular steps that eventually will be life
changing.
Tuesday July 25: You are responsible for what you say and do. You are not responsible for whether or not people freak out about it.
Oh,
dear Lord if I could truly embrace this concept life would be so much less work!
There are versions of this I’ve heard in my life such as “It’s none of my
business what other people think of me” which in my rational mind I know is true
but fuck this is really hard for me to embrace. Until I found “my people” in
junior high which happened well into 8th grade, I was shoved into my
locker once, had the books I was carrying slammed out of my hands by a girl who
would eventually become a nurse who took care of my dad when he had his prostate
surgery. I had my rebellious periods during junior high and high school, which
included dying a part of my hair orange and then blonde, then dying the whole
thing platinum blonde the night before high school graduation. Seriously this
is how I “fought the establishment” in the upper-middle class that was
Appleton, WI in 1989. As I accumulated more life experiences throughout college
and into early adulthood, even I giggle that this was my big stand against “the
man” and the personal oppression I felt when I was 17 years old.
The other two quotes I’m just going to post, and you can interpret them as you like. As always, I will close with a quote from the New Year’s Even anthem, Old Lang Syne.
We two have paddled in
the stream
from morning sun till dine
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.
