I’ve been in a bit of a weird place lately when it comes to mental health. For those inclined to worry about me-don’t worry, I’m fine. For those that don’t know, my husband and I have recently been certified to do foster care but do not have any children yet. In preparation for this I have not been working for most of the past year. But this puts me in a weird sort of holding pattern right now. I don’t want to start anything big because we could get children literally any day, but I also don’t have any sort of direction right now in my life. I’m just waiting.

This time of waiting has been hard on my mental health. From a depression standpoint the lack of direction is very hard. Why would I get out of bed in the morning when I don’t have anything I need to do? Why work on whatever project I have going when I’m really just trying to keep myself busy?

I have what’s called Persistent Depressive Disorder (formerly called Dysthymia) which basically means that my depression is always with me but it’s often not super severe. I don’t have the big episodes that people with Major Depressive Disorder often have, I’m just a bit low all the time. I described it to a friend recently as my normal everyday level of depression is maybe 25% below where a healthy person is. Lately, with everything happening in my life I’m floating around 35-40%. Not a huge drop off but enough to be noticeable. To make it harder to live my life well.

From an anxiety perspective this time in my life is basically just a nightmare. I could get 1-3 children literally any day. I could have as little as an hour warning and then the kids will be here. Kids who have seen some stuff too. Right now I have all of the anxieties of things that could go wrong or be incredibly challenging about future children, but I don’t actually have the kid to love. I think that loving the actual child or children is going to balance those anxieties out nicely but at the moment I only have half of this equation.

So what happens is my anxiety in every part of my life gets a bit worse. There’s this vague looming anxiety in the background that I understand I just can’t do anything about right now, and then because of that all the other things that normally cause minor anxiety are getting blown up. My anxiety tells me the world is a scary place and my depression tells me I should just curl up and hide from it all and I have to find ways to keep living my life in something resembling a healthy lifestyle despite all that going on in my head.

So what do I do? Well for starters I knew this would happen so I started counseling again about a month ago. That’s a good safety net for me but at the moment my counselor is on a three week vacation. I’m glad she’s living her best life but that leaves me kind of alone for a bit. I have managed so far to avoid any actual panic attacks so that’s something of a win. I’m writing when I can convince myself to. The depression tells me that writing is pointless and no one wants to hear about my life. My anxiety tells me that people will respond poorly if I write about how I’m really doing right now. Neither of those things is true.

Both depression and anxiety make eating harder than it normally is. Anxiety makes me vaguely nauseated and depression just doesn’t see the point. When my mental health gets rough I give myself points for participation alone when it comes to eating. Did I eat today? Good, you get 80%. No matter that what I ate was mostly corn chips.

I’ve been trying to do crafts more. I do some adult coloring books and I’ve recently taken up inappropriate cross stitch. That gets me to another coping mechanism I’ve been using a lot lately: comedy. I put comedy on in the background when I’m home. I read comedy memoir books (right now I’m reading Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson-it’s very very good). I’ve also been compulsively joining book clubs. I’m up to 3 now, which is probably too many. I figure that book clubs are the sorts of things that can keep me fairly busy but also won’t get real mad at me if I suddenly need to bail because I got surprise children.

So what’s the point of this post? I mostly just wrote it to be honest with everyone about where I’m at. So many people struggle with mental health and none of us is alone. We all have times where it gets harder. Even when we have gotten good at coping with our mental health struggles we still can have rough patches. It’s totally normal and totally okay. If you’re struggling just remember that all you need to do is survive the day. I believe in you! Also reach out to someone if you need to. In the ‘links’ section of this blog I have a link to Make It Okay, a website focused on making it okay to talk about mental health struggles. They have tons of good resources available.