PDA fae

Tag: low mood

  • Update: struggling a little

    Recently I’ve been very lonely. I don’t see my friends in person very often, nor do I have that many. Where I live is only a small town. All the activities are attended by women in their 50s and 60s.

    My care coordinator said it best when he said ‘there’s nothing to do in X for 30 year olds, unless you like drink or drugs’. Suffice to say, I don’t intend to take up substance abuse to gain social connections!

    I struggled making friends at university in Cardiff. So it feels like if I couldn’t manage whilst surrounded by 30k students my own age, how do I expect to make friends in home counties small town? It leaves me feeling like the problem is me – that there’s something wrong with me.

    This loneliness and low mood has been making food a particular struggle at the moment. It’s feeling far too demanding to decide what meets my sensory needs, shop for it, store it appropriately, prepare it, cook it, eat it and clean up afterwards. I’m tempted to survive of Huel and toast for a while – low spoons food. Nut butter for protein, toast for carbs, Huel for vitamins and minerals. Not the best diet, but better to be consuming something at least, and it would be easiest with my spoon level and sensory needs at present.

    Hopefully things will get easier soon. I am very glad to be spending a Christmas with family, in the community, doing all the usual Christmas things. I missed out in a big way last year, and I have a lot to be thankful for that I’m well (not psychotic) this time around.

  • Low mood

    A big component of my neurodivergence is my bipolar disorder. Last year I had a big manic episode and became psychotic. I ended up in hospital, which is how it was identified that I needed supported accommodation.

    Now, my mood is a lot lower. It’s probably not a good thing that Taylor Swift’s Anti-hero is a trend on tiktok, because the words ‘It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me’ keep cycling through my head, because it sums up an long held self-belief. I’m trying to tell myself ‘I have problems, I’m not a problem’, but a lot of the time I just end up believing it.

    I’m finding life very mundane and dull. Things feel repetitive and that’s constraining, I feel like I’m living the same week over and over. Moving between the same few places: the school, my flat, the communal lounge, the swimming pool, my parents. It feels like there’s nothing that really adds meaning or fulfilment to my life. At the same time, I’m not sure what I could add that would make a difference to that.

    It doesn’t help that my flat has descended into a state of chaos. A support worker helped me tidy my bedroom and it feels like a little oasis. My living room is still a mess unfortunately. I find that working on it with someone else reduces the sense of demand and makes it possible to achieve. That’s not a long term solution as I won’t always have the supported accommodation, but it works for now. In the times between being able to get that support though, my flat is cluttered and untidy. It definitely isn’t good for my mental health.

    In general, depression is my usual. I get very little time in ‘normal mood’, instead I spend most of my time at some degree of low. It’s frustrating that we can’t really medicate for that, as antidepressants will make me manic. I just have to deal with it, and it really saps the enjoyment from my life.