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A Beautiful Pie
Jan. 6th, 2023 09:31 am
Yesterday was not the greatest. I spent an hour doom-scrolling through Twitter instead of meditating in the morning and it was all downhill from there. No writing, no SQL study, no exercise. I did finish the fifth section of The Bone Clocks though; it was the climax of the entire book, surprisingly twisty with one last payoff that I had forgotten all about! I was very impressed by the sequence and how well it tied together the various threads of the novel up until now. I'm curious about the denouement, which seems to be the entire sixth section.
R. had a pretty bad mood crash yesterday after gym. He also has depression and he's chosen not to take medication for it, so I understand that will happen sometimes. When it does, I also understand that I might not be able to do much beyond being available, so I try to resist the urge to "fix" his mood. But when someone is angry, upset, or depressed, I can FEEL it radiating from them. It's this...pressure that says "something is wrong in the world, there is someone suffering right here, why aren't you helping?" I think this is a pretty common feeling for people, to be honest; at least, judging from my typical response it is.
Meditation has really helped me check that reaction, though. Now I just try to offer a few things that would help him feel better, but I also just sit back and let him handle the situation in his own way. When I stop trying to "fix" the problem, it's actually a lot easier to sit with compassion and actually be available. Like, the depressed energy is still felt, but once you stop thinking it's a problem to be fixed it's easier to be present with it.
I keep thinking about this little blurb I saw on Tumblr about Eeyore. It talks about how no one tries to fix Eeyore's depression or avoid him because his constantly-dour demeanor is a bummer. They still include him in their adventures, they treat him as a friend and accept his behavior as part of who he is. It shifted the way I think about depression -- well, for the most part. I learned that sometimes the best thing you can do to combat depression is just be available and willing to be in that space with them.
The drive to do something to make someone feel better comes from a place of wanting to make ME feel better. Even though I'm doing something for someone else, the intention still centers my feelings. Being around a depressed person makes me sad, or at least feels like a spiritual rock in my shoe. I have to get it out. But accepting it allows me to act from a more compassionate place where I think about what the other person *actually* wants. If R. wants to sink into video games as a coping mechanism, we can do that.
During a 1:1 session yesterday, a coworker told me that I'm really good at asking questions that probe deeper into someone's response and that I would make a good counselor. Today, I hosted a "Midterm Social" event at work that only one person attended -- and we ended up having a great conversation anyway. I tried to explain yesterday how...fun it is to use questions to learn more about people, and how non-verbal cues can often reveal things they hadn't intended to divulge about the things we're discussing. That, combined with my ADHD tendency to follow anything that's shiny, makes it really easy to be an active listener, to pick up on things that might be missed otherwise, or to make connections that spin the conversation in interesting new directions.
It's a small joy to think about something I'm good at, how I got good at it, and why it's important for me to BE good at it. I really love conversations because it helps me see how other people understand the world AND it helps me calibrate my own experience. So many times, we think we're the only ones with a certain feature of our mental landscape -- but then, through connection, we find that our experience is much more common in the human tapestry than we thought. That kind of connection makes me feel...connected to human beings in general and a lot less crazy. I realize that even if I have anecdotal evidence that something isn't just me it doesn't mean it's exactly common, but it's...grounding in its own way.
R. had a pretty bad mood crash yesterday after gym. He also has depression and he's chosen not to take medication for it, so I understand that will happen sometimes. When it does, I also understand that I might not be able to do much beyond being available, so I try to resist the urge to "fix" his mood. But when someone is angry, upset, or depressed, I can FEEL it radiating from them. It's this...pressure that says "something is wrong in the world, there is someone suffering right here, why aren't you helping?" I think this is a pretty common feeling for people, to be honest; at least, judging from my typical response it is.
Meditation has really helped me check that reaction, though. Now I just try to offer a few things that would help him feel better, but I also just sit back and let him handle the situation in his own way. When I stop trying to "fix" the problem, it's actually a lot easier to sit with compassion and actually be available. Like, the depressed energy is still felt, but once you stop thinking it's a problem to be fixed it's easier to be present with it.
I keep thinking about this little blurb I saw on Tumblr about Eeyore. It talks about how no one tries to fix Eeyore's depression or avoid him because his constantly-dour demeanor is a bummer. They still include him in their adventures, they treat him as a friend and accept his behavior as part of who he is. It shifted the way I think about depression -- well, for the most part. I learned that sometimes the best thing you can do to combat depression is just be available and willing to be in that space with them.
The drive to do something to make someone feel better comes from a place of wanting to make ME feel better. Even though I'm doing something for someone else, the intention still centers my feelings. Being around a depressed person makes me sad, or at least feels like a spiritual rock in my shoe. I have to get it out. But accepting it allows me to act from a more compassionate place where I think about what the other person *actually* wants. If R. wants to sink into video games as a coping mechanism, we can do that.
During a 1:1 session yesterday, a coworker told me that I'm really good at asking questions that probe deeper into someone's response and that I would make a good counselor. Today, I hosted a "Midterm Social" event at work that only one person attended -- and we ended up having a great conversation anyway. I tried to explain yesterday how...fun it is to use questions to learn more about people, and how non-verbal cues can often reveal things they hadn't intended to divulge about the things we're discussing. That, combined with my ADHD tendency to follow anything that's shiny, makes it really easy to be an active listener, to pick up on things that might be missed otherwise, or to make connections that spin the conversation in interesting new directions.
It's a small joy to think about something I'm good at, how I got good at it, and why it's important for me to BE good at it. I really love conversations because it helps me see how other people understand the world AND it helps me calibrate my own experience. So many times, we think we're the only ones with a certain feature of our mental landscape -- but then, through connection, we find that our experience is much more common in the human tapestry than we thought. That kind of connection makes me feel...connected to human beings in general and a lot less crazy. I realize that even if I have anecdotal evidence that something isn't just me it doesn't mean it's exactly common, but it's...grounding in its own way.
