Escape from the pit
I'm gonna talk about grief and pet death and depression and stuff so if you don't wanna read about that then this is your cue to peace out. I won't mind, promise.
Anyway:
I feel like hot garbage
It's been a little more than six weeks now since the dog died. So: it's been shit. I feel like shit. And while I am past the stage where I'm just crying every day, things do still regularly set me off. Like I woke up this morning and saw it was a beautiful sunny day – clear blue sky, the kind I had started to forget existed after the prolonged sogginess of this past winter – and all I could think was that the dog wouldn't get to enjoy it.
I have tried to give myself space to grieve, and to cut myself a lot of slack while I let my emotions work themselves out. No pressure to work on any projects, or to overload my schedule with activities and socialising. But honestly, I think I've crossed the line into wallowing.
The problem with this approach is that not doing much also means not doing a lot of the stuff that I find fulfilling. Like writing, for example – that was the main thing giving me purpose before all this, and I haven't done it in nearly two months. Which kind of means I'm just tacking another void onto the grief void. I know I'm maybe 15k words off finishing the first draft of Undertow, which is something that would have seemed very achievable in better times, but it now seems totally unsurmountable. I think getting back into it would probably be helpful for me. But I fire up Scrivener and I just stare at it like ?????????? and then I close it again.
I also haven't done any archery since January. Some of this has been because of the shitty weather, but now I think it's just the fear of not having done it in a while. What if all my muscles have atrophied and I can't draw my bow properly? What if I'm so out of practice that going again and being that bad just destroys my self esteem? And also what if people ask where I've been for the past two months and I have to tell them about the dog and then I just start crying again and it's really embarrassing??? Too much. Urgh.
The other day I realised that I had barely even listened to music for a week, at least not properly – maybe the odd song in the background, but I wasn't putting on an album and enjoying it. That's an easy one to fix, at least. It doesn't take much to take a CD out of the case and stick it into the player. But it is an indication of the current state of rot.
Anyway, enough is enough. Grieving is one thing, but sinking further and further into the depression pit is another. I mean, I feel bad enough as it is, for fuck's sake.
And the only person who can get me out of this pit is me. It's time to Get My Shit Together. A plan emerges:
1. Write something
I think finishing the first draft of the book is a little intimidating right now, especially as I left off in the climax and it's all very plotted and emotionally fraught and just... generally a lot. I have been bouncing around ideas for my other book project (Threshold) but starting another draft of that is also a lot.
So I need to write something short and utterly inconsequential. Fanfic could be a good shout, possibly in a fandom I've never written before so nobody is expecting anything of me. Hell, I could even write fanfic of my own original stuff, and then I get to play around with the characters and refamiliarise myself with them without the massive book pressure. Nobody even has to see it.
So, promise to myself #1: I'm going to write something.
2. Go to archery
Just a short visit, then I can go home. I can even go at a weird time when the people I normally see aren't around so I minimise the chance of uncomfortable "what have you been up to?" conversations. But I know this is a thing that I enjoy and I'm not going to deprive myself of it.
Promise to myself #2: I'm going to archery for an hour.
3. Touch grass
This is pretty self-explanatory. Without a dog to walk, it has been very easy to just enter 24-hour potato mode. I need to at least wander around the block or something.
Promise to myself #3: I'm going to leave the house every day for the rest of the month.
Wish me luck
In theory, none of this should be hard. It's not like I'm psyching myself up to get dental surgery or something here – all of these are things that I actually like to do. But if you've ever been in the pit, with depression and dysfunction just zapping all the joy from your life, then maybe you get that it's easier said than done.
Still, I am going to give it a good try. And now I've written it down here so it'll be embarrassing if I don't. (No, I am not going to think of it like that. This is me trying to be nice to myself.)
Anyway, check back in a few weeks to find out if I have achieved my noble goals of having a nice time and being less of a miserable cow. Fingers crossed.