routine

Wanting to tap out a quick post before I hit the hay.  January isn't quite off to the ball-busting, get-up-at-five-work-out-and-journal return to spartan discipline that I had fantasized about, but we're going to try this getting up earlier thing tomorrow.  Which means going to be earlier tonight.  Because I'm just not 21 anymore, and I can't function energetically on short sleep.

It is lovely to return to quieter, simpler routine though.  This past weekend I washed all my dishes and put away all my laundry, and so far I'm successfully doing my dishes and keeping my clothes picked up on a daily basis.  It feels...rhythmic.  Grounding.  I'm remembering all over again how much easier it is to manage my depression when I don't feel like I'm helplessly living in a troll hole.  I think the strategy (daily tidiness to manage depression) comes from bifold roots:  1.)  Messiness is depressing all by itself.  2.)  A huge part of depression is not being able to do anything, is powerlessness, is the lack of energy to deal with the tasks at hand.  The more your surroundings fall into decay, the worse you feel, because the task becomes monumentally harder, because there's more to do to clean it up.  And you also feel worse because you should be doing better than this, you should be keeping your shit together, and so the self-loathing and self-blame creep in too.  But if there's enough time to get some rest and reset the clock by cleaning everything up, it's a lot easier to maintain the tidy system by little daily tasks.  

I don't know how well I'll be able to maintain this when school starts back up.  And I don't have a lot of weekends to myself these days (though only for a few more months), and the system is rather weekend-dependent.  I'm hopeful though.  Determined, but without that get-it-together-you-useless-piece-of-shit self-hating that just makes everything worse.  If I can't maintain the little daily system, then I can't.  But I'm going to try, because I feel so much more relaxed and happy when my living space is clean and airy.

Tonight in an effort to combat the transubstantiation of my elbows into dragon scales I cut a knee sock into a pair of elbow sleeves to wear over slathers of petroleum jelly.  We'll see if that has any effect.  (I love petroleum jelly, so new uses for it delight me.)