First of all:
Look, I know I'm late to the party, but Lizzo is so great. I just want to listen to "Juice" on repeat. I'M INTO IT.
Secondly:
This whole thing of emotional resilience is fucking amazing. I don't really know where it came from...maybe I was building the muscle while I was on Gabapentin*, and then when I dropped the med I bounced straight up into the sunshine? Like when you walk around with a heavy pack for a while and then when you put it down you feel like you might float up into the air. I can't think of another explanation but it's amazing, and I hope it stays.
Like, my godmother is extremely ill right now--she has a treatable but incurable cancer, so there's no knowing how much time she has. That is truly awful news, and I sat in my car and cried for an hour when I found out. But miraculously, I'm ok. It's a horrible thing that is happening but it's somehow not blackening my entire landscape.
I've gotten middling to bad sleep for the last week, and I had hoped this past weekend would be my chance to catch up--but (probably because of who I am as a person, or maybe because it's my Fate to never go to bed on time) it wasn't. I still averaged between six and seven hours, when I'm a person who needs eight. And then last night I'm not sure I even hit five. For most of my life, a night like last night would have had me in hysterics. But it didn't.
Guys, walking through this world every day without wearing the 1960s solid metal deep-sea diving suit that is chronic depression is like winning the goddamn lottery. It's incredible. 10/10, would recommend.
*In case I didn't cover this before (since I never write this decade), I was on gabapentin for several years to address the nerve pain I get due to an inherited degenerative neurological disease, but since Ian and I are considering starting a family, we were trying really hard to find a way for me to function without it. My nerve pain is triggered by stress, and for the last several years the prevailing theory has been that it got too bad for me to handle (without medication anyway) while my dad was in the hospital for two straight months with an infected pressure sore, and my friend went into the hospital at the same time with ovarian cancer. But then when we examined the situation further, we remembered that I had also started drinking coffee during that time period, and I decided to experimentally cut back on coffee. My pain was instantly a hundred times better, so I've (very sadly) dropped coffee and dropped gabapentin, and now I control the pain with CBD capsules and/or Lion's Mane Mushroom capsules, depending on my pain levels.
And gabapentin...I knew it was rough stuff, but man. The withdrawal made me sick for days, and once I was off of it I realized that it had been keeping me depressed and giving me pretty extreme brain fog and memory problems. Life is so much better without it, and I'm so grateful that I'm able to function without using it now.
