Wow. It’s been a tough couple of days. To say the literal least. I’ve literally managed zero coding and zero writing. Looking back, it’s easy to see that the first seven days of this log have been utterly misleading and how semi-miraculous they were in how much I achieved.
Instead, Tuesday night I didn’t sleep until 05.15 and then managed some broken hours up to around midday. Last night (Wednesday) I managed a fairly solid block from 1-2am-ish until around 8 or 9am this morning. That’s not enough sleep, and certainly not enough sleep when under stress. And stress is rocketing right now.
They saying buying a house is the most stressful thing you’ll ever do. Honestly, if that was true for whoever coined the phrase (or finds it to be true), they have led a very blessed life. That said, it’s definitely right up near the top of the list. When the looming threat of the deal collapsing raises its head, that’s when things get really bad.
The biggest issue for me, though, is what stress can do to my mood. Years of being clinically depressed and, more recently, diagnosed with Bipolar 2 means that I understand how I react to things pretty well. When things go wrong it can have very real, very severe consequences to my mood, sinking me into deeply depressed states. Sometimes I pull of of them quickly, other times I don’t.1
It’s scary when you don’t know how long that sort of state will last. Time slows down, appetite disappears, everything becomes pointless and it’s hard to even shift off the sofa.2 That’s fine if it lasts for a day or two, but more than that and there’s a very real chance I’m going to be in it for the long haul, which is a very, very dangerous place to be.
So that’s how the last two days have been. A bad situation with our house sale has put our house purchase in jeopardy and it dropped my mood to intimidating lows. I couldn’t even face typing out a summary last night, so hopefully this means I’ve made a little bit of progress.
Sleep helps, so fingers crossed for a better, longer, more settled night and a brighter outlook in the morning to make more progress on the things I want to be focusing on.
Side note: I did at least manage to teach myself Mad World in two days, probably helped because it was a song that reflected my mood pretty well!
- Or can’t – that’s the more accurate term. The thing with depression as a clinical state is that it’s not a choice, it’s an involuntary state of being. ↩︎
- It’s important to recognise that clinical depression presents differently in everyone. Some people become almost literally catatonic, others can appear to function “normally” most of the time, but dissolve into tears at any given moment. Everyone has their own flavour, none of which is better or worse than others. ↩︎