Category: Keeping Ahead of the Shadows

Finding an Easy Fallback Exercise

Posted on by Kai Raine

For days when I don’t necessarily have all the energy to throw myself into some exercise, I need a fallback.

Ever since I began exercising regularly, my formerly erratic living habits have become more predictable. In a depressive episode, I find it harder to exercise, and I grow hungrier as though my body is trying to gain what it is lacking in energy through food. It doesn’t work, and I only grow more tired. Yet denying myself food is not the answer either: though food is far from an ideal solution, the alternative is a complete lack of energy.

I’ve found that I can help myself by exercising, even if it’s just a little bit a few days a week, in a way that is as easy as possible. It took me awhile to find such a thing, but it did exist.

I am no one’s idea of an exercise or sports addict. I’m an indoors person through and through. Though I enjoy a good hike or swim, and enjoy being outside, most of the time I would prefer to be curled up somewhere peaceful with my music and a book, a show, or something with which to write. Since in depressive episodes, writing becomes more difficult, music, books and shows are more my speed.

So I incorporate this into my exercise.  I find it hard to focus on exercising while watching a show, so I don’t do that often. But I have found that if I have a book with me, I am able to keep up some forms of cardio for up to an hour even when depressed and lacking in energy. It depends on the form of cardio, certainly, but I’ve managed this on elliptical machines and various types of cycling machines. This doesn’t mean I keep the exercise physically easy: I crank the resistance up to a point where it is a challenge, but still manageable for an extended period. Then I focus on my book, absently working my body to the beat of the music. When I first started trying this, it surprised me to realize that somehow, this enhances my concentration on the book. Depending on the book, I can read up to 400 pages in an hour (no skimming or speed reading involved).

I try to choose my books and music carefully: nothing gloomy, but also nothing too deliberately designed to give myself an adrenaline rush. I highly detest manipulation, even when the manipulator is myself. So I have to focus on my enjoyment first and foremost. This tends to mean that my workout music can be rock, pop, electronic or Celtic; and my books can be comedy, adventure or fantasy. I avoid books that I expect will be especially thought-provoking: I once tried to read 1984 while working out; this was my only unsuccessful attempt yet. After a mere 10 minutes, I had to give up trying to focus on the book and 10 minutes after that, I let myself stop trying to exercise.

I set myself goals: sometimes it’s the number of pages in the book, or the supposed “miles” I’ve “traveled” on a cycling machine, or the amount of time. Most commonly I use time. I set my absolute minimum to 20 minutes; my preferred minimum is 30 minutes; my basic goal is 45 minutes; and my self-congratulatory-but-unnecessary-to-achieve goal is an hour. Other details, such as resistance, are determined by how I feel at the time and what I feel is the most that I can handle.

The choices–in goals, in exercise type, in distractions–are all based on what is right for me personally. My legs are strong, and I grew up in a bicycle culture, making this the easiest exercise for me. (My arms are truly pathetically weak, so anything involving them requires extra effort and fortitude on my part. This is a worthy goal under normal circumstances, but not while I’m contending with the energy sieve of a depressive episode.) Though I far prefer swimming under ordinary circumstances, the lack of any possible distraction save my imagination puts a damper on using swimming in this case. The same goes for yoga (which is how I learned that trying to watch shows while exercising is perhaps not the best approach for me).

When All Else Fails…Hedgehogs!

Posted on by Kai Raine

From a PR perspective, having upload schedules is a great thing. Even from a self-management point of view, working toward a deadline ensures a constant flow of production, no matter how arbitrary the deadlines may be.

That said, this series is the hardest for me to keep to a schedule. Some days, I find myself in the middle of a depressive episode having to write about how I cope with it, at a moment when I feel like I’m failing entirely to cope. On some occasions, forcing myself to write about the subject anyway would be the answer. Today, that is not the answer.

Instead, I want to share my construct of the Happy Place.

Sometimes, in the middle of a depressive episode, I take refuge in something. The identity of this something is arbitrary. In the past, it’s been anything from my family to a TV show to random cat pictures.

One thing I have found is that it’s safest to keep my refuge something that is not alive, thereby giving it less power over me. It’s all well and good to take refuge in someone you can love and trust enough to know that they will not kick you deeper into the hole even as you’re trying desperately to hang on—and this has happened to me all too often, though the person always meant well. So cynical though it may seem, I prefer to take refuge in the inanimate. It doesn’t help me recover, but it does give me something to hang on to while I gather the strength to pull myself back out.

These days, that something for me is hedgehogs. When I feel overwhelmed by the world, I think of hedgehogs, or I find a cute picture or video or gif. And that image of a hedgehog makes me sublimely happy. It doesn’t last after I leave the hedgehog image behind, but it keeps me going.

Besides, hedgehogs are adorable. No Happy Place ever lasts for me, which I consider to be a positive, since it means I’m still in motion, even if I feel like I’m stuck. But I enjoyed watching hedgehogs long before they became my Happy Place, and I sense that I will continue to find them worth watching after I’ve moved on to a new one.

Such is the power of cute animals, sometimes.

No One Else Can Save You: Saving Yourself

Posted on by Kai Raine

So, having recognized that I do, in small ways in daily life, need to be saved, and having acknowledged that I am, in fact, worth saving, how does one go about it?

I started small. It started with acknowledging that I am, in fact, human and as such, do have limitations.

I learned that most of my guilt is pointless.

I have excessive amounts of guilt. I don’t know if it’s a born or a learned trait, but if left to my own devices, I could easily feel guilty for virtually everything that’s gone wrong anywhere near me. I had to learn to counteract this. Largely it helped to acknowledge I am not special, and that every adult in my life is also in possession of a brain and agency. Therefore, most of what I feel guilty for cannot be my fault unless I also blame everyone else around me. Which I generally find ridiculous to consider. Therefore, I can argue to myself, it’s not worth blaming myself either.

I learned to say no.

The guilt over saying no was, of course, inevitable. I learned to coax myself out of it by repeatedly reminding myself that I am of far more use to everyone if I am happy, functional, and capable of generating enthusiasm.

I learned to set more realistic expectations of myself.

There was guilt over this too, but I learned to manage that. It did, in fact, help that I had pushed myself to the limit so often in the past that I had a sense of where my limits truly lay and what would happen if I pushed myself beyond them.

I learned to push back.

One of the cornerstones of my former way of life involved caving to any and all needs of those I cared about. I thought this was what caring and loving was all about. But the fact was, the more I caved the higher expectations became until I could no longer fulfill them despite my best efforts, and ultimately it almost always headed into a nasty terrain filled with anger and tears.

Since it was a change, there was a lot of resistance when I first started pushing back. But once I overcame that bit, it turned out that a lot of things were a lot better when I defended myself. I respected myself in a way that I hadn’t been able to envision before, and it seemed that other people grew to respect me more as well.

I learned not to take other people’s emotions or words personally.

Once I respected myself more, it became patently obvious to me that I’d been largely concerned with the opinions of people who most likely didn’t think much about what they said to me, or how I felt. And it became easier to overcome any criticism tossed my way. Even when it is something intended personally, even when I can empathize that I did in some way unintentionally hurt a person emotionally, it helps to be able to take a step back and recognize that I am not entirely at fault, because emotions tend to be a function of a variety of circumstances, rather than one solitary event. Obviously this isn’t always so clear, but it helps me to keep it in mind.

I learned to find courage.

Saving myself still takes courage. It sometimes requires conflict, and it always requires me to face something unpleasant head-on and keep going. When I feel intimidated, I remind myself that ultimately, I am one tiny person in a gigantic, unimaginably huge universe. I am one of six billion people on the planet. My mistakes and failures are not the end of the world, and I am not alone.

It’s all about finding the right angle to manipulate myself, to put it cynically. But so far, it’s worked to keep me moving from day to day.

No One Else Can Save You: The Realization

Posted on by Kai Raine

We live in a society that teaches us that we will be saved.

This isn’t usually a teaching we explicitly propagate, or even teach on purpose at all. In fact, I hear it frequently being explicitly contradicted.

Yet we worship deities that save us. Most of our folklore is characterized by someone who saves the protagonist, or even all of a society or humanity. (Such as fairy tales, for example.) We tend to place an astonishing amount of weight on the notion of “finding someone” without putting very much effort into discussing what that “someone” is supposed to contribute to our lives, or what we are supposed to contribute to theirs. Families are sometimes held together by the notion that they’re the ones who stick by you when things get tough.

The undercurrent that we need someone else to save us, to stick by us, to put up with our craziness and love us anyway, runs through our lives everyday.

It’s not entirely wrong. Humans are social animals. We do tend to need some form of social life, some support and love.

That doesn’t mean we need to be saved. In fact, in my experience, even the subconscious expectation that I will be saved by some external force makes it that much harder for me to overcome obstacles.

I had to learn that no one can save me but myself.

I don’t mean that I have to fight my battles all alone. But if I need someone’s help, it’s much more effective if I can articulate to them what I need. Even if that person can’t necessarily offer me what I need, the understanding of what I need makes them more effective at supporting me where they can.

As long as I seek to be as self-aware as possible without being clouded by what I think should be, no one can know me anywhere near as well as I know myself. Certainly, some things are clearer from the outside looking in. Sometimes I don’t become aware of some behavior of mine until it’s pointed out to me by a friend. External observations are helpful. But those behavioral observations alone are not me. If I am the sum of my past, my behavior and my thoughts, emotions and beliefs, then only a portion of that is observable from the outside. If I ever claim that someone knows me better than I know myself, I am either woefully unaware of my own behavior, or willfully ignoring a very large part of myself (or, most likely, joking).

So, being the person who knows myself best, it stands to reason that I am the best person to work out what I need to remain adrift; the best person to gauge my own limits; the best person to identify what I want and what I need.

This may sound like common sense. But it took me a good twenty-five years to work it out.

The Necessity for Internal Strength

Posted on by Kai Raine

The sad reality is that no matter how much I try to stay afloat and happy, there are times when circumstances align and create really sucky days. But sometimes, it just takes one or two wrong comments at the wrong time, and I’m locked in a dungeon in gloomsville for a week.

For me, the worst of these are unexpected left turns in social situations. An unexpectedly negative comment about something I’m excited about, from someone I thought would be excited for me. A sudden outburst directed at me that seems strangely disproportionate to what started it.

Events like these can take my day from somewhere between OK and mostly happy straight to the land of gloom and I-can’t-write. These generally take place in the morning or evening. Similarly to the reason why I can’t exercise in a depressive episode (the exercise creates a racing pulse and heavy breathing reminiscent of an anxiety attack, which triggers an actual anxiety attack), I already have low energy, and with the onslaught of distressed and/or sad emotions, my body can misinterpret this as depression, which becomes an actual depressive phase that I struggle to shrug off.

So what do I do about it?

Well, it depends. The most direct approach is a conversation with the person. I can confront them about why their words are upsetting. But this, I’ve found, only works with certain people. Some people get angry, and not having the energy to fight back, I get pushed further into the ditch. Other people get overly apologetic, compelling me to comfort them, which again drains me and pushes me further into the ditch.

I could make the argument that in the long run, it’s worth having this discussion anyway, even if it is potentially distressing. But in this context, I’m talking about a scenario where I would have to sacrifice my mental well-being for awhile in order to sustain that discussion. That is never a choice I would consciously make. My policy is always do what’s best for me first and foremost. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to end up spending the day in a daze, just trying to make the unhappy feelings go away.

What I need is internal resilience. That’s far easier said than done.

I find that it helps to remind myself that the other person’s words and/or actions were very likely not just about me, but largely about them. I find it helps even more to ask myself, “Why did this phrase bother me so much?” And then to follow through on that train of thoughts. Very frequently it will lead me to a self-revelation of an insecurity or a fear, and with that brought to the forefront, I can begin to confront it directly and try to work through it.

Sometimes it helps to talk it through, though I’m increasingly finding that this puts the train of thoughts in the hands of someone else, which can make any useful self-revelations take longer than they would if I worked through it by myself. That said, there are times when solitude only makes it harder to see clearly, and a second pair of eyes truly helps.

Exercise: Breaking Out of a Lifelong Rut

Posted on by Kai Raine

Ever since childhood, I haven’t been very athletic. I always preferred to curl up with a book or a puzzle over any outdoor activities. Even when sports were required at school, I was always among the slowest runners in my class, or even my grade. I was on a swim team for awhile as a teen, but I was always the slowest or second slowest swimmer on the team. The only “exercise” I could do with any confidence in my own ability were table tennis and skiing. I also enjoyed swimming and dancing, but all four of those activities were difficult to access with any sort of regularity.

At some point, I realized that exercise had become something that I associated with general unpleasantness: pushing my body into exertion knowing that I would only get sweaty and uncomfortable (and probably look ridiculous doing it), knowing that I would be terrible at it. I knew that if anyone was around, surely they would scoff and mock me for my sheer inability to run fast enough or long enough, or the way I’d keel over after what to anyone else wasn’t very much exertion. (Unfortunately, the mockery I’d experienced throughout my childhood and teenage years had created certain expectations in me.)

In short, I had come to dread the prospect of any sort of exercise. As I’ve mentioned before, I also was unaware for a long time that I had anxiety, and couldn’t explain why the prospect of doing anything that got my heart rate up was sometimes an extremely psychologically tumultuous experience. But even after identifying this problem, while it did give me a defense at long last, I couldn’t find a way to effectively exercise. I also couldn’t find the will to try very hard to learn to like something that I knew I hated and could never remember enjoying to begin with.

The change began with my sister’s invitation to do a 30 days of yoga challenge on YouTube with her. We lived an ocean away from each other, but she suggested we do one video a day “together.” It was exactly what I needed. The idea that it was for my mind rather than my body got me over my dread of exercise. The instructor Adriene was soothing and offered enough alternatives for people with varying degrees of flexibility, which helped me by letting me simply enjoy the movements and the poses and the breathing without getting caught up in my lack of flexibility or weak muscles. The prospect of doing this “with” my sister kept me going even on days when I didn’t necessarily have that much will to exercise.

At first, I only did yoga in little bouts of a week or two, only to forget or lack the time for another week or two before resuming the habit again. But little by little, I grew more comfortable moving in my own body, and I grew more comfortable with its abilities and limitations. I came to enjoy exerting myself through yoga. Before I knew it, the sheer dread I had once felt at the prospect of exercise had faded away into a light pulse of nervousness.

Veganism: Pancakes

Posted on by Kai Raine

Sometimes, I have down days and just want to not have to think about anything. Pancakes are a great way to start days that are already taking an effort.

Vegan pancakes are insanely easy to make. If you’re feeling particularly low-energy, just mix together 1 part flour and 1 part non-dairy milk and fry it up in some oil. It can be as simple as that.

But if you think it’s worth the time and effort, vegan pancakes can be extremely delicious: better, in my opinion, than their non-vegan counterparts.

This recipe from Ceara’s Kitchen is one of my favorite recipes, and the one that made me fall in love with vegan pancakes in the first place.

This recipe from One Ingredient Chef is a similar version, though slightly more work in its use of flax egg.

And this recipe at All Recipes isn’t quite as elaborate as the two above, but still delish!

Each of the recipes above can also work in waffle irons. 😉

(Is this a cop-out of a blog post, you ask? Perhaps, yes. But as we’re headed for about a month’s worth of introspective, long-ish posts, I could use some pancakes.)

Depression as a Friend, Not an Enemy

Posted on by Kai Raine

I find that I benefit from conceptualizing depression as a friend that is a part of me. We are usually at odds in some ways, but it is a part of me that I can’t ignore or belittle. It needs to breathe just as much as the rest of me. I don’t always succeed at holding on to this conceptualization, but when I catch myself talking too frequently about “fighting” depression, I can take a moment to remind myself that my mental framework might be slipping.

I hear a lot about fighting depression. I know I’ve used the phrase quite a lot in this series. I’m not against the use of it, because friend or not, depression and I do fight in many ways. But I try not say it too much, because that turn of phrase would make an enemy of depression. I can’t view depression as my enemy, because then I have to actively try not to fear it, adding another layer of effort. I have found that fear of depression is not much better than depression itself.

I had a moderate to severe depressive episode in my second semester of university. I didn’t know what was happening at the time. My roommate moved out, and I stopped going to class or work and spent my days under my bed—no, seriously, under my bed—with my computer. The thought of doing anything sent me into an anxiety attack.

After I recovered from that episode, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t let it happen again. I tried to hold myself afloat by remembering how awful it was to be so useless. I was trying to hold the depression at bay using fear. To put it more clearly, I was trying to hold anxiety at bay using anxiety.

Certainly, I was continuously a functioning member of society. But I didn’t like myself. I hated myself every morning that I just couldn’t do the things that I told myself I was supposed to be able to be doing. The only thing I had in abundance was self-loathing for my weakness and lack of control; I barely ever had enough energy to get through the day doing the bare necessities. I continuously wanted to get away from people: socialization was draining and made me irritable. When it got particularly bad, I would tell myself it was because of the environment, the culture, the anything that allowed me to place the blame on someone or something other than myself. That was the only way that I could forgive myself. Amidst all of this, I only occasionally missed work or class, and never anything essential. I kept my grades up and even made time for arts and crafts, writing and reading.

Functional though I was, I don’t think any part of this was particularly healthy. I was trying to force myself to be what I thought I should be. I was constantly at war with myself, unconsciously making my own life that much harder from one day to the next. I frequently had insomnia or hypersomnia. During bouts of insomnia, I would have waking sleep tremors that terrified me: initially because I thought they were seizures, and later because they would occur just as I was drifting off and I would mistake the shaking for an earthquake. I was usually either under-eating over overeating.

Nowadays, though I am generally happy, I frequently catch myself at quiet moments succumbing to morose, sad thoughts.

I catch myself, but I don’t hold the thoughts back. I let the sadness or despair wash over me. Maybe I take a walk. Maybe I try to channel the emotion into a story. Maybe I just sit there and curl up with my computer and a YouTube video. Maybe I text a friend about how sad I am right now. Maybe I blog about it. The point is this: I don’t push it away. I embrace it.

It’s difficult and it can be frightening. In these moments, I can feel depression beside me, sapping me of energy. I said I might walk or channel the emotion into a story, but that tends to be far more easily said than done. For the most part, I don’t have the desire or the will to do anything at these times.

Sometimes this strikes while I’m in the middle of something that I can’t get out of. The dark mood takes over but I’m still in action. I become less talkative and more pensive. But I can still do what needs to be done. If I feel the need, I might excuse myself to the bathroom or something to create alone time.

It is a balancing act of sorts, trying to give the darker corners of my mind the breathing room they need without completely sapping me of willpower. I feel sure that at some point my careful balance will not be enough. But I have found that since I’ve been making an effort towards greater introspection and acceptance of my own depression and limitations, I’ve been happier in my happy moments. Even the sharp, senseless irritability that used to take over from time to time has lost its hold on me. But even for that irritation, when I feel its claws settling in, I don’t fight it. I ask myself, instead, “Why am I so irritated right now?” There usually is a reason: because I want to be somewhere else, because I’m tired, because I had expectations that aren’t being met, or even because someone is expressing an opinion of me that conflicts with my own.

I try to identify a problem, if there is one, and solve it; or if my psyche just wants to be sad for awhile, I don’t stop it. This is my attempt to bring sustainability into what I suspect will be a tumultuous lifelong relationship.

You Are What You Read

Posted on by Kai Raine

I’ve always been in love with books. When I was a teen, this love turned all-consuming and obsessive. It got to the point where I would go to work with my mother because her office was next to a bookstore. There I would sit all day, devouring books like my life depended on it. At the time, my mother told me, “Be selective in the books you read, because you are what you read.”

She told me that she had the experience of reading too many wartime German books that had made her depressed. Eventually, she had realized that the books were the cause, and stopped reading those books. When she described the experience, I had an inkling what she meant. I had read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon when I was fourteen. It had pulled me in and drowned me, making me live from childhood through adulthood into old age, despairing at the futility of attempting to preserve a way of life. Even as the characters made peace with the changing times in the end, I could not. I remained broken and devastated and utterly listless for a month. This was my first experience of a mild depressive episode that I can positively identify in retrospect.

So what was the lesson, then? Stay away from books if I find them upsetting? Of course not. I don’t regret reading that book, nor the effect that it had on me. It had that effect because of the crisis I’d been going through, being (I felt) forced to adapt to suit Buffalo in ways that were not exactly comfortable to me.

I don’t feel that there’s anything I should have or could have done differently at the time. That book and the effect it had on me were profound. I am inclined to say that a part of it lives and breathes within me, nearly as much a part of me as a memory of my own life. It has guided me and continues to do so. I instinctively steered clear of heavy-seeming books for months afterwards.

Yet no light-hearted book could measure up to the force with which that book had pulled me in. Having sunk so deeply into a book so recently, the books I read afterwards were still entertaining, but also underwhelming. A part of me still craved that pull, that sense of complete immersion.

So I don’t believe it’s important to stay away from depressing books to keep from being depressed. I try to balance the books I read with the effect they have on my mind, and the effect that has on my real life. There is an effect, there’s no doubt about that. I try to take note of the ways books I read recently are affecting my thoughts and my actions. So far, I’ve not found any cause to steer clear of any type of book altogether.

Veganism: Knowing What You Need

Posted on by Kai Raine

Being vegan isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. A lot of my friends have told me that they simply could not be vegan because it makes them miserable to so limit foods that they enjoy so much. I can sympathize. At times when I break my vegansim (generally for convenience’s sake), I very much enjoy the taste of the non-vegan food. But if I listen to my body, that enjoyment doesn’t last. My body begins to feel heavier and more sluggish if I eat dairy or too much meat. This serves as a reminder that veganism is right for me, and if I was wavering, provides motivation for me to go on being vegan.

But life also isn’t as simple as eating what I like as a vegan. I came to realize that there are certain things that I need to watch. I need to make absolutely sure that I get enough protein. Especially if I’m visiting someone who knows that I’m vegan, the common assumption is that I live on salads. I’m actually not all that fond of the green salad, but more importantly, it doesn’t contain most of the nutrients that I need. At such times, I have to find a delicate way to supplement my diet with something more nutritious.

Furthermore, even if I have total control of my diet, there are some nutrients that are either absent or insufficient in vegan food. I use Holland & Barrett’s Vegan Multivitamin & Mineral Tablets for this. But because I am mostly vegan, I don’t take them routinely—only when I’ve been consistently vegan for a few days or more. Because I’m not consistent, sometimes I lose track.

A friend once told me that she finds it easier to combat her depression if she has vitamin C in the morning: whether by tablet or by orange juice. I was in a shallow depressive phase at the time, and this made me think. I looked back and tried to remember the last time I’d taken the multivitamin tablets. I’d been eating consistently vegan for months, but I hadn’t had taken the tablets recently.

I took to making sure that I had orange juice in the morning and that I took a tablet a day. My depressive phase was gone in a few days. (I also developed a hilarious craving for orange juice that lasted for a few months afterwards. Friends I visited on a regular basis started stocking up on orange juice if they knew I was coming over, knowing that I would be raiding their fridge for it. I took to joking that my body was worried that I’d give it scurvy.)

I never used to pay very close attention to my own eating habits, so in some ways this has been a steep learning curve. If I’m feeling off—in mind or body—I don’t automatically review my recent eating habits to see if there’s anything I might fix there.

Sometimes changing my eating habits doesn’t do anything to help me. But I have found that it helps quite a lot if I keep an eye on it.