Stuck

[marsden_online]

My mental health may not be holding up as well as I thought it was.

Without the distraction of commuting the last couple of weeks have really highlighted how little of my day to day life actually follows my plans and intentions. Despite all past evidence of my ability to achieve such a schedule to the contrary I am still expecting my weekday routine to look basically like:

8am-9amish - 10am: get up, shower, breakfast, check messages/events
10am - Midday: on-the-clock working from home
Midday - 1pm: break for lunch, downtime, messages/events and some light household chores (washing the dishes or perhaps a bit of gardening)
1pm - 3pm: on-the-clock
3pm - 3:30pm: break for afternoon tea, downtime and messages/events
3:30pm - 4:30pm: on-the-clock
4:30pm - 4:45pm: break and messages
4:45pm - 5:45pm: on-the-clock
5:45pm - 6:30pm: downtime, messages and events, do dishes if needed for dinner prep
6:30pm through 10pmish/Midnight: help prepare dinner if needed, spend time with D. or time to myself, inside chores and gentle tasks (like sorting cupboards). During daylight savings this can also include significant gardening tasks.

10pmish - Midnight: bedtime perchance to sleep.

There is flexibility - if I go out grocery shopping during the day (generally costs about an hour) or sleep in / crash out for a couple of hours nap in the afternoon I can accept spending up to an hour less time on the clock or work in the evening to make it up. 6 hours a day on-the-clock for the week is the best-case scenario, especially since a sort of professional pride has me working off-the-clock on some projects where I have gone well over the expected time.

I managed it for four days leading up to Easter, knowing I could crash a little over Easter. I did /not/ manage it this week, but scraped up to 25 hours including the public holiday. However my productivity this week was pretty shit in a lot of ways, difficulty focusing (not uncommon to have days like that), missing simple things, couldn't fix one thing without breaking another, stuff like that.

According to my rational mind this is a perfectly achievable schedule. Lets look at what has actually been happening....

- one of either exhaustion or executive dysfunction keeps me in bed until after 10am, sometimes until midday.
- I get "to work" between 11am and midday, usually while still having breakfast. Often I check my work messages at the same time as my personal messages to see if there is anything I need to jump onto or if I can go through the rest of my uual morning visits first. Sometimes I will do a chore I had planned to do at lunchtime because I know I am not going to find the time to do it later.
- If my concentration is shot I jump back and forth between work and Facebook / The Spinoff's COVID19 rolling updates page. If my concentration isn't shot I can easily do 2-hour blocks of work early in the day. [Same as in-the-office]
- concentration or not I rarely manage to get as much done in those two hours as I should because I keep making mistakes. Again same-as-in-the-office, but there does seem to have been a noticeable increase.
- Try my best to follow the 2 + 2 + 1 + 1 pattern but with only 15-20 minute breaks between blocks. At least one block will be taken out by a pharmacy/supermarket visit or helping D. out with something (which may just be spending time with her because she is feeling down; and before you start feeling guilty dear I don't regret or resent this time :p )
- Helping with dinner prep almost inevitably happens somewhere between 7pm and 8pm. Dinner happens somewhere between 8pm and 10pm.
- If my hours for the day or week so far have been truly abysmal or I have a tight deadline I will keep working into the night - as late as midnight in one instance but 10pm isn't uncommon. [Sort-of same-as-in-the-office; I've often stayed in the office until 8-9pm, and on rare occasions after midnight to make up for late starts or when something needs to be finished/fixed by the next morning]
- otherwise D actually gets to see me for the evening; unless I am so wiped out I just need to be left alone. Even then I will usually make the effort to spend time with her instead if she is not happily engrossed in sewing (which a shoulder injury has been preventing) or media of some description.
- Get to bed about midnight.
- get to sleep between 1am and 2am
- repeat.

I was hoping my body clock would shift away from it's midnight-10m sleep cycle - well it did but two hours in the wrong direction :(

Weekends should be much the same except with a much gentler schedule and that 6 hours converted into downtime / me time / us time / major chores around the house / garden. One major chore per day, same for public holidays.

- by that token I should have managed 4 over Easter. In fact I managed the equivalent of one, spread over 4 days. Among other things I remember from the weekend I also had an emotional and physical crash (most of Saturday), and we spent part of Easter Sunday morning at the after hours clinic. (There was also a 6ish hour roleplaying session over Discord on the Monday afternoon/evening, picking up a FtF campaign which went on hiatus before Xmas. That was good :) )
- yesterday I managed washing the dishes, washing one load of laundry, putting away two loads of laundry, some vacuuming and a trip to the supermarket.
- this post is my task for today, and it is being done in stages.

I'm finding a little time to computer game (that fits into me-time okay) but that is not having the refreshing effect if usually does, and I am completely failing to find the mental energy to read for pleasure or interest or even to keep up with work-related stuff, or the emotional energy to properly spend on time with D. (More on that later.)

You know what is missing from in there? Any significant time / ability to work on any of my backlog of projects unless I can squeeze it into a chore or me-time spot, and the latter requires also having the spoons to even look at one of the items on my list. Tasks which off the very top of my head include clearing out my digital archives for a year (which used to be an annual thing over the Xmas / NY break but which I haven't managed since 2016), scanning in the old family photo albums, giving the AHChch website a very overdue overhaul, re-captioning and uploading pre-2009 photo albums, or even prepping to run a new game myself.

Even the ongoing and deadlined task of going through all the cupboards and having a good throw out, which is technically on the chore list but a lower priority that the tasks needed to make sure the house does not become a filth-pit, is not progressing. (By way of a minor positive The one thing which is progressing, with fewer going-out expenses, is paying down the mortgage and that is a very long term thing. A month is not enough to have made a difference that one unexpected major expense could not wipe out, but it is nice to see the balance dropping a little week-on-week).

Obviously I didn't have that time beforehand hence the backlog, but there was a subtle expectation that with more home-time I might find a place in the schedule to get onto some of them. By this point I am clearly not, and that is ... jarring? weighing? wearying? an additional burden I am carrying at the back of my mind.

I guess I am suffering some serious cognitive dissonance between my expectations and my reality. This has obviously been going on for at least as long as I have been struggling with the inability to get out of bed in the morning, but the last couple of weeks have brought it into sharp relief.

What to do? I am open to suggestions.

1. Acceptance?

I am already pretty practised at accepting that I have not hit my targets for the day/week and moving on, and the reality that at best I'm probably only going to get 25-30 hours on-the-clock (I haven't been making that some weeks recently, but it's usually coupled with a significant number of hours working off-the-clock so it's not through lack of ability to work for that period of time).

However our budget (including meeting the mortgage) is pretty tightly reliant on making at least 25 hours on-the-clock more weeks than not. I asked for a pay rise at new year, didn't get it. No chance now.

I'm also pretty practised at accepting that the house is not as clean and tidy as I would like it, and certain areas are only going to become grottier and grottier until I finally snap and dedicate several hours to giving them a good go-over. Although in the past I have happily paid for cleaning/gardening from time to time that's not an option within our current budget. I am keeping the dishes washed, the laundry done, the floors vacuumed when the dirt and fluff becomes too visible and the bathroom/toilet cleaned less often than it should be, and having to live with that.

Both of these things are are certainly a constant mental/emotional drag and I would like for them to be gone, but I accept that I cannot practically change them.

I also accept that because of D's health I am going to have to continue shouldering the bulk of both the earning and the chores, unfair as that may seem :(


2. Therapy / Meds

D says I need to find someone to talk to who can help, since there are limits to how much I can discuss these things with her. Primary among these is the way her brain pigeons will immediately seize on any hint that she may be responsible (through action or inaction) for my negativity and make an anxiety-nest out of it. Which means any time either of us wants to have a conversation about these things I need to have enough emotional spoons available to both manage my mood and provide her reassurance/support when (not if) this happens.

I am sure that like others in the past she feels that trying to have this discussion with me is like talking to a tree, but it very quickly became evident that if I present any sort of strong emotion her brain immediately pounces on it as evidence that she has done something wrong and at these times I really do not have the spoons to deal with that as well as my own issues. For my part if I start letting /any/ emotion bubble up and do anything but consider my words carefully and make them as non-charged as possible the well of negativity I keep bottled up is likely to breach the surface and I will say something or speak in a tone we will both end up regretting, even if the subject actually has nothing to do with either of us personally.

So it is actually better for my short term mental health / energy levels just to let things go as best I can, push the rest to the back of my mind to stew until they become indistinguishable from the rest of the background negativity and move on.

I understand why D. and more broadly most women and probably not a few men react to any raising of the voice with a reflexive fear of what might follow, and I hate it, but I cannot both express my frustrations and do so calmly except of course via the intermediary/distancing of text. Journalling has often been therapeutic, but it also falls into the list of things I am not able to find the time to do. D for her part is an extremely verbal communicator, although we had some limited success using shared google documents as a go-between in the early days of our relationship.

For several years I saw a psychologist. I was at my lowest point when I managed to seek professional help instead of trying and failing to talk with my friends, and had no more reason to pick this one than I'd recognised his name from having been to him briefly for some issues in my school years and hoped there might be some notes from that time which might be useful (there weren't). I still don't know if it helped at all, or if it was just a very expensive way of figuring out how stupid some of the things I was telling myself sounded and telling someone about events in my life for the past n weeks, spending 50 minutes at a time taking me apart and no time putting me back together or even really providing insight or analysis of the pieces. It didn't provide me any tools for thinking or knowing differently, and I've learnt far more from the internet about the internalised social fallacies that led to me thinking/not understanding some of the things I did and their consequences.

At the moment I don't even have any friends that I feel comfortable venting about "our" issues with, or at least initiating that conversation; although D claims to have fewer friends than I do she is ahead of me in that regard :/

D is prepared to "hold my hand while [I] make the phone call" - but that doesn't make it any easier to know where to, or find the spoons to, start.

In terms of medication: I'm on citalopram, I have been on and could go back to a higher dose. I have no idea if it is helping, whenever I try to go down again things do tend to become more stressful but that could just be lifes little coincidences. I've been tried on most of the other SSRIs that my doctor said were available, and these saw almost immediate decline or system rejection. I don't want to have to deal with the potential nastiness that is SNRIs unless I am really not coping. I occasionally pop a berroca in hopes of a short-term pick up if I'm feeling particularly wiped, or an off the shelf vitamin D supplement in winter.


3. Finding more time / Sorting out my sleeping pattern

Since there simply isn't that much time available in my waking hours (see point 1) I need to be getting more and better sleep. It would be nice if I could go back to a 10pm - 8am cycle; or if I could get better sleep so I wake up with more energy and focus => better use of the time available; even better if I could get down to a regular 8-9 hours good sleep rather than my current 10-12.

Getting up and being productive / having non-sleep downtime for a few hours in the middle of the night (ie staying up and doing something when my bladder makes it's almost clockwork 2-3 hours in demand, or I waken from some dream) which is what I thought might happen with the freedom to work when I want - is not happening.

D and I are already sleeping in separate beds & rooms most of the time since we have very different sleep cycles and this means at least one of us can get an uninterrupted (by the other person anyway) period of sleep.

An ideal solution would be finding a mind-hack to get past the executive dysfunction which leads to over-sleeping. I have few issues getting out of bed if there is a sufficiently compelling external commitment; be that having the car booked in for a service, a doctors appointment, a meeting or other timed deadline at work, and it is a fact that an "early" start usually leads to a good day for me. J & I used to do meetups at the halfway point between our houses to get both of us out of bed, but I have to say some days that was a real struggle for me to make. D is usually sound asleep at the time I should be getting up, and claims my time to help her get to sleep if not (which invariably leads to me going back to sleep as well).

It has been suggested that I schedule something enjoyable for first thing in the morning eg a period of computer games but I haven't found this to work for me any more than (not) needing to be at work. Anything purely discretionary easily loses to executive dysfunction, or even just the fact that bed is cosy and nice. Similarly even an alarm away from the bed does not stop executive dysfunction steering me straight back to prone after pausing or deactivating it.

I might be able to improve my sleep with tablets. I'm reluctant to turn to this measure, the same as I am with painkillers and anti-depressants. My doctor prescribed them once before but I was doing Hall alarms and didn't want to have to deal with dragging myself out of a pill induced stupor / driving even groggier / sleeping through the alarms entirely so I basically never took any. However for lack of other options I am seriously considering it at least in the short term.

I have had bloods done to look for clues to my fatigue; I don't know exactly /what/ was tested for but I apparently have very good blood. (Becoming a donor is another of those things I haven't found time/spoons for ...)

~~~

So that's where I'm at. Me having time to achieve things for me and my sanity, let alone spend the time doing things with D which she deserves looks to be mortgage-paid-off-and-retirement time away, which at this rate means I will be about 85. It's not a sustainable situation, but I have very few ideas of how to remedy it that I have not already tried and failed over the years.