Sometimes a day is just a day

Thanks to all of you who read and commented on my post from two days ago.

I was wondering why I was choosing behaviors that I knew were unhealthy for me.  After reading your comments, I realized that my choices were directly related to some significant stress in my life at the moment.  (My husband is in the middle of a career change; we have been in limbo for a long time now and we have big decisions up ahead.)  It seems ridiculous that I hadn’t made this connection earlier – but such is the benefit of blogging about these things!  🙂

So there’s stress.  And that means I need to be even more diligent about my growing self-care skills.  I haven’t been mindful of that, and I think that definitely contributed to my day of self-sabotage.

But perhaps the biggest lesson I took from the comments is that I can write off a day as a not-so-great day, and start over again the next day.  Janice from Crazy Good Parent suggested that I can channel Scarlett O’Hara: “Tomorrow is another day.”

The idea that tomorrow offers a fresh start may seem obvious but it struck me as being very different from how I usually approach things.  I’m a scientist – by nature and by training – and I approach my depression with that perspective.  I like to collect data, to analyze results, to identify trends and correlations.  A bad day like the one earlier this week doesn’t stand alone – it gets added to the pile of data I’ve already accumulated and analyzed.  I try to figure out how it fits with recent trends. Maybe the bad day confirms the feeling that I might be slipping.  Or maybe it’s related to my menstrual cycle.  Or maybe the fact that I had a glass of wine means that I’m not fully committed to removing alcohol from my daily life.  Or maybe I should be working harder in therapy to prevent such poor choices.  Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe.

I would be in seventh heaven if I could input all these data points to a spreadsheet and have it spit out a graph that summarizes my mental state.

But… I’m beginning to see that I overthink these things, and in so doing, I create even more anxiety about my mental state.  Sometimes a day is just a day, plain and simple – with a beginning, an end, and a bunch of stuff in between.  It doesn’t have to be analyzed in 14 different ways.  I don’t have to draw profound conclusions and expand my lists of Things I Should Do When Stressed or Things I Should Avoid When Expecting My Period or Things That Could Possibly Indicate an Immediate Meltdown.

It’s just a day.