MONTHLY UPDATE – AUGUST

August hasn’t been a good month. Things went bad at the beginning, shortly after my last post about the Cycle of Change program. My last post was about a blogging challenge – then things were already bad, but I pushed myself to do it, because I wanted to participate. Unfortunately there were too few participants and the organizer cancelled it. At least I didn’t quit. 

What do I mean by “things were bad”? This means that I had a really bad depressive episode. For weeks I only went to work and the rest of the time I read ebooks or watched movies/tv-shows.  I ate mostly junk food. I didn’t cook or clean, I didn’t walk my dog. J (my partner) did all that stuff. I could drive only to work. I didn’t even go to the countryside by myself although it is only 4km away. A few times I went with J and my kid. I had to go to the speech therapist with my kid, but I couldn’t drive there either, J took us there. It was bad, because I had free time, but he had to do it during working hours. I didn’t interact with people very much. Some people wrote to me and I forgot to answer them or answered very briefly. I didn’t ask about their life, I only answered their questions. I hope that it didn’t ruin my relationships. Luckily most of them know about my mental health problems and they understand. I even forgot to take my morning meds at the right time, I remembered around lunch-time that I have to take pills. 

I compared my activity between July and August. I have an app on my phone – Google Fit. It counts steps and heart points. In July I had 192 483 steps and 462 heart points. In August 67 871 steps and 93 heartpoints. I also checked how many times I had gone to the grocery store. In July it was 24 times and in August only 7 times. 4 of those were at the beginning of August when my depression hadn’t started yet.

Which books I read and tv-shows I watched? I read crime novels. 6 books were a series written by Hans Rosenfeldt and Michael Hjorth – Sebastian Bergman thriller ( LINK). It was quite interesting, because I like crime stories. 3 books were from Anders de la Motte  Seasons Quartett. The first one,  “The End of Summer” I had already read a few years ago. I read: “Rites of Spring”, “Deeds of Fall”, “Dead of Winter” (LINK). I liked those books more than Sebastian Bergman stories and my favourite was “Dead of Winter”

Tv-shows: I mostly watched the last seasons of shows I have  watched before: “Seal Team”, “Grey’s Anatomy”, “Station 19”, “When Calls The Heart”, “Heartland”. My favourite of those is “Seal Team” (LINK). New ones I discovered from Netflix were “For Life”, “Clickbait” and “Bodyguard”. My favourite was “For Life” (LINK). I have watched a lot of other tv-shows during my depressive episodes, maybe I will make a separate post one day about my favourites. 

I feel that my depressive episode is over now. I am not interested in tv-shows anymore and started cleaning, my mood is better. I went to the countryside alone and worked there a little. I started interacting with my friends more. I hope these better days will continue in September.