That whole thing they talk about in therapy, the emotional battery thing, I deeply appreciate what that is lately. I have been up and down so much. What's difficult about it is that it's easy to conflate with physical fatigue and depression, because any of those things can have seemingly the same outcome. And by outcome, I mean flat on your back on the couch not really up for doing anything.
I probably spend too much time thinking about this sort of thing, but to my credit, I got hit with a lot in a very short time a year and a half ago. Emerging from the pandemic, I had an official autism diagnosis, ADHD and depression. Sure, I always suspected the first thing, but to land all of that in quick succession is a lot to take in. Not only am I reframing the context of my entire life, a journey that I don't think ever really ends, but I'm also trying to make sense of it in the moment.
The good news is that I find myself to be generally content, and that's a feeling I haven't had consistently in a very long time. But I also find that anxiety is creeping up on me a lot more than I would like. Mostly I'm worried about the interruption of the contentment. So it seems weird when I have days like this, where I'm just feeling completely spent and not motivated. But I'm realizing that spentness is not necessarily caused by depression, and that sometimes it's just that I've had "a lot" in front of me. Parenting, work and even my passion projects, often require a lot of intense focus and attention. That well is not bottomless. I somewhat blame my nonsense Midwestern work ethic, that thing where you're only valuable if you're on all of the time.
I'm not sure what I have to do to let myself just be when I feel like this. It's a transient state, it'll be gone tomorrow.
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