The View from WI: And Another Year Has Come to Pass…

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 5^th 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 8^th 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.