and all manner of thing shall be well

Very packed couple of months.

I'm still slogging through the worst depressive spell I've experienced in about eight years.  Getting up on weekday mornings is fucking hard.  Life has practically zero savor.  Everything feels generally sort of gray and dull and meh.  Not sad or painful, just void.

Even so, I'm doing the best I've ever done while doing this badly.  Which is pretty incredible, and pretty empowering.  (That's my theme of 2018.  Empowerment.  Because fuck powerlessness.)  While I don't fool myself that I'll conquer depression once and for all, I am highly pleased with how well I've learned to manage it.  I'm still making it to work, still kicking ass at my job.  I'm still paying my bills.  And I'm facing a whole shitload of what my therapist terms "pathologic guilt" (which is most likely the source of this depressive spell) and learning to tell it to fuck right off.

Something happened last spring, when I decided to buy in to my own life.  Something happened last summer, when I got rid of the last asshole I will ever date.  A sea change.  It spread out, crept over every single one of my relationships.  Some of those relationships were restored; others strengthened; others extinguished.

It's been hella weird.

I'm still riding out the aftermath; some of the people from whom I needed to estrange myself have made up a fundamental component of my self-conception.  (Enacting strict limits on the "daughter" and "sister" portions of my identity, when "family caretaker" has been my most basic role since my birth, is really goddamn traumatizing.  I'm still not sure how I found the strength to do it at all, much less maintain the separation; but I guess at this point I shouldn't be all that surprised at my own strength; it's a fairly defining feature of my character.)  The underlying peace, even as I've floundered in the guilt-wake of the separation, has been totally worth it.  Still, it's weird and difficult and uncomfortable, and I'm already tired.  (Of course, it seems to be these low points, when you lack resources, that drive necessary changes, because the former coping mechanisms have failed and there's nothing to do but forge new ones.)

The human brain resists change.  Even painful, self-destructive habits are comfortable because they create predictability.  It's not the first time I've taken a gamble with the unfamiliar, so at least I know that this sort of psychologically itchy discomfort, this unease with uncertainty, this faint feeling of impending badness, will ultimately pass as the new way of doing things becomes the familiar, the safe, the predictable.  I just have to give it time.

And I'm better at self-care and self-advocacy now.  I've learned a lot in the past eight years.  I've been through enough to know that I'll get through this too.  The meh factor will fade.  Life will be satisfying and good again.  It's surprisingly satisfying and good now, even in the midst of the Void of Blah.

So I'm okay in the not-okayness.

Plus too I have the darlingest kitty of all the kitties that ever kittied.  Simon is currently curled up on the ottoman next to my writing desk; never a lap cat, he still likes to keep close.

He's sixteen now.  We've been together fourteen years.  He's looking scruffier and skinnier, but he's still in excellent health, and still the sweetest little shithead in the entire world. (There's nothing more heart-warming than a generally grouchy cat that gives exactly zero fucks about anything at all except for his boundless devotion to you.)

On a side note (HAR, you'll see in a second) I am loving my new digital piano.  I went high-end for this one, because I was sick to death of shitty-sounding keyboards and craving music like oxygen or water.  It sounds breathtaking.  And it's so good to play and sing again.  That's probably about half of what's getting me through this latest slump.

So, things kinda suck a lot, but also are really great, and will eventually get even better.  I just need to self-care my way through this, which I know I'll be able to do.

I'm gonna pull through.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.