Over the last twenty years I’ve been diagnosed with most everything under the sun at some point. For most of that time the only thing doctors could agree on was that I’m bipolar. I mean, it’s kind of obvious when the first antidepressant I tried right off the bat made me manic for a month. The rest? Well, it’s hard to say. I obviously have extreme anxiety, which has reared its head under several different labels I’ve been affixed with over the years, but now it’s looking like its CPTSD. CPTSD, for those that aren’t familiar, is a form of PTSD that stems not from one singular traumatic event but from repeated incidents of trauma. It’s common in adults who were abused as children, but you don’t have to have been abused as a child to develop it. You can see it in people who were abused as adults too. Hence the “C” as it stands for complex, which repeated instances of abuse can form complex trauma. It’s not in the DSM-5 but that doesn’t mean it’s not a real illness.
What does this have to do with writing, you ask? Well, I’m currently depressed. Extremely depressed. The “I’m still surprised I’m actually getting up and eating and somehow living my life” type of depressed. In the twenty years I’ve been diagnosed and been taking medication this is the part that gets hard to deal with. Rearranging my days to accommodate the lack of available resources has been a bear. Writing this novel isn’t my only project either, or my only obligation. Day to day life gets exhausting when you’re depressed, and it’s something that, in and of itself doesn’t really get any easier. The only thing that’s really helped has been learning to be nicer to myself, for one. But acknowledging when I need the break because I have nothing left to give has been a big part of getting through slumps like this. It does me no good to flog myself into uselessness; it just becomes a vicious cycle that is hard to break after all. Part of being an adult with mental illness is knowing when to push through it, but also when to relax.
Right now, I’m writing, just maybe not every day. My goal is usually seven pages a week. Breaking into a weekly goal versus daily lets me catch up if I need, or if I do ten pages on Monday and nothing else the rest of the week, I’ve still more than met my goal. That helps relieve a lot of stress surrounding writing. My weekly page count is that low because I figure it’s the bare minimum I can do when I’m severely depressed. Oftentimes, especially when I’m feeling more like myself, I easily exceed that goal. But 7 pages a week is the minimum I can do when I’m depressed, so it’s my baseline. The days I do twenty pages are amazing, but not every day is a day I can churn that much content out. Setting a realistic goal helps for myself also helps encourage me to do more. Instead of, “Oh I can’t do three pages today, m such a failure,” it becomes, “I did one page, I wonder if I can do more?”
Obviously, these are only my experiences. Everyone is different in both how mental illness presents and how they handle it. I only speak for myself here. If you want to learn more, NAMI has a lot of resources to both learn about mental illness and how to get help if you think you could use it. https://nami.org/Home has a lot of resources that can point you in the right direction. If you need someone to talk to right away, you can find resources with The Trevor Project at https://thetrevorproject.org or you can call the suicide hotline at 800-273-8255 as well.