Late May Monte Report

Things have been going pretty well for the past few weeks. My birthday came and went, and I enjoyed it, celebrating by going to lunch or dinner with various friends throughout the week. I spent yesterday with family, and have at least one more birthday dinner coming up. I splurged and got an 80 minute massage, too! Strangely, it was fun getting so much attention, which is not my wont when my birthday comes around.

One thing on the horizon that is going to become a bigger deal as time progresses is that the Head Teller at work is planning on leaving in the Fall, and I've got to figure out if I feel ready to apply for the position. My self-confidence in that regard is in the toilet, and the following quote from Dr. Allen's Coping With Depression helps to explain why. It's so hard for me to do anything unless I can do it really well, and I'm not (yet) confident that I am capable of being a really great Head Teller. This perfectionistic attitude is the sort of "self-generated stress" that I mentioned in my last post. Because my perfectionism leads me into depression, I will need to rein it in if I am to ever successfully advance at work.

From Coping With Depression:

"Perfectionism is a prime example of self-generated stress that can provide continual mental fuel to stress pileup. Being perfectionistic, you are preoccupied with evaluation, criticism, and making mistakes. You continually put yourself on trial, subject to disapproval from within and without. Perfectionism spans an array of distressing emotions, including anxiety, frustration, shame, resentment, and depression. Perfectionism not only escalates negative emotion but also undermines positive emotion: being perfectionistic you deprive yourself of pleasure and satisfaction by focusing all your attention on how you've fallen short rather than enjoying whatever success you've achieved. No matter how well you do, no matter how successful you may be, you can continue to raise the bar, fall short of your high aspirations, and feel like a failure. . . . [P]erfectionism can become oppressive when high standards are coupled with self-doubt, a pervasive sense of inadequacy, and unstable self-esteem. When you pursue perfection for the sake of overcoming feelings of insecurity or inferiority, you're likely to wind up in the vicious circle of a losing battle that fuels anxiety and depression.

Early May Monte Report

My Mood-O-Meter shows a noticeable decline in my mood over the past few weeks. I'm still sleeping an awful lot -- 11 to 12 hours most nights, and more on the weekends. A couple weeks ago my doctor made another adjustment to one of my medications in order to see if that might help me sleep less, but it didn't work and my mood took a hit, so I've switched back to what I was taking before -- but my mood hasn't yet rebounded any. When I say "my mood took a hit," I guess what I mean is that I became more vulnerable to my triggers -- mainly work-related triggers -- and I started taking more Xanax and Seroquel in order to help me get through my workday.(Before my doctor changed my med I was hardly taking any extra Xanax or Seroquel at work.)

Even without my work-related problems, I'm still feeling depressed about my life. I feel as though I'm just going through the motions -- just trying to get from here to there, from laundry day to laundry day, from meal to meal, from one workday to the next, from Monday to Friday, from blog entry to blog entry, from sunrise to sunset . . . And I'm not really enjoying life in between each marking point. Hardly anything brings me pleasure these days. Between working, eating and sleeping, there's little time left over to enjoy in any case. I'm re-reading the Harry Potter series, and that gets me through my lunch breaks at work, and I'm watching "House MD" and "Lost" on DVD after work before bed -- and that's the extent of my weekday "fun." Weekends pose a greater challenge, since I generally don't know what to do with myself. Nothing interests me. I haven't been birdwatching since New Year's Day. I force myself to at least go hiking once each weekend, but even that brings me little pleasure. And so far I've failed to reach my goal of going on short hikes after work.

So I guess you could say I'm stuck in a rut.

Some appropriate quotes from Coping With Depression focus on Dr. Allen's view that "a substantial amount of stress that contributes to depression is at least partly self-generated":

"The perspective of agency draws our attention to the active role we play in shaping the environment that, in turn, exerts such a powerful influence on us. . . . Understanding whatever active role you played in falling into the hole of depression can help you climb out of it and stay out of it in the future. . . . Looking back and taking stock of your life, you [can] see your depression as an unwitting creation; an agent was involved, namely, you."

Clearly it would behoove me to ponder how my own actions contribute to my depression.