Weekly Update - 98

Surprise! We'll be checking in on Riley this week. She seems as shocked as I am!

Comic This Week: Yes!

Drawing: Page 129

Reading: Best Served Cold

Playing: TW:Warhammer 2, Project Zomboid

Ramble:

When my depression was at its worst, I used to keep a journal. The idea was to kind of take all those nebulous negative thoughts and put them down on paper where I could read them and rationalize them and identify the logical fallacies that were causing me so much grief.

It helped for awhile at the time, but the thing is, if I go back and reread that journal, it makes me sound like I am actually insane. The reason is because I didn't write in the journal when I was feeling even mildly okay. And I would stop writing in the journal as soon as I started to feel even a little better. The journal has about ten or fifteen entries in it, and they are all entries from when I was feeling my worst and had no where else to turn to aside from a private blank page where I could spill all my most terrible thoughts without fear of judgement. It takes the worst parts of me and distills them down to their most concentrated form. They are ten entries with weeks and months in between them, where the days in between are completely ignored and without mention. If you read the journal from start to finish, it sounds like I am the unhappiest person ever to live, when really, the years I spent struggling with depression were more of an ebb and flow, with some good days, a lot of bad days, but a vast majority of days, all those weeks and months that happened in between the journal entries, were all just okay.

And I feel like, this is a common thing, as all too often we ignore most of the average days of our lives. The okay days that make up such a huge percentage of a lifespan. We are a problem-solving species by nature, and so we fixate on the problems that need solving. This, I think, means our brains give a disproportionate amount of attention to the negative, to the problems we see needing to be fixed.  A lot of problems we are faced with, however, especially those scrolling down our news feeds, are unsolvable, at least by any one person, and our inability to solve the problems that are presented to the forefront of our minds causes us stress.

So the days that we spend fixating on problems tend to be the most memorable and the most stressful. And when one thinks back on the past few years, those are probably the memories that stick out to them the most, making life seem just terrible. But most of our days are spent solving immediate and relevant problems that we DO have direct control over. Days where things are okay. Days where our thoughts can shift to the smaller, simpler problems in our lives, problems like doing the laundry, or cleaning the kitchen, feeding the cats or deciding what to have for dinner and eating it. These days and the problems solved therein are quickly forgotten because once a problem is solved, it is kicked out of our heads to make room for the next one, but it is probably a credit to how successful we are that we have so much time to stress out about the bigger unsolvable problems facing our entire world. We are so successful at managing our own lives, that the only problems our minds can find to stress out about are big and immensely complicated.

And sure, solving a problem of deciding what to eat for dinner might not be as impactful on the global scale as, say, Covid, or Ukraine, but I would argue that the emotional impact those problems have on you, the individual, is equivalent. One of those problems you can solve immediately, and you receive a tiny, momentary burst of satisfaction for having done so before your brain deletes it and moves onto the next problems. The other problem you can't do anything about, generally speaking, and it could be causing you stress as your mind keeps trying to puzzle out a solution to an impossible problem. There is no reason that the scope of problems we worry about shouldn't narrow to the things we can actually fix, to things we can control. There is no reason that our simple day-to-day successes shouldn't be allowed to make us feel good. There is no reason we all can't be the heroes of our own stories.

I'll admit, it may be cynical, perhaps a bit nihilistic of me to say that we don't have any control on the global scale, but I feel pretty confident in saying that no average human is going to convince Covid to leave us alone or persuade Putin to change his ways. But my point is that I think the satisfaction, the small sense of value and self-worth and the momentary boost of happiness from making it successfully through an average day shouldn't be so easily dismissed and forgotten. That we shouldn't ignore our small successes in favor of huge unsolvable problems. I think we should shift our thinking, just slightly, to allow ourselves to enjoy the achievement of the daily tasks. Allow ourselves to feel proud of simple things and to savor every day that goes by that's just fine.

Today is not a great day for me. It's not a terrible day, it's not a bad day. It's just another day. It's just a day like most days of my life, and I intend to allow myself to enjoy that about it.

Dunno, I'd love to hear your thoughts, get your take on all this. Or just chat, whatever.