Hey Yall -
Last year around this time I had a bit of a breakdown. This year is even more stressful, so I'm taking some precautions to try and prevent that from happening again. I want to share some of those things here at the very least to encourage others to prep
I am by NO means a therapist or an expert. I'm just a dude with depression and anxiety. So I'm not giving you a list of things to do, but more a list of shit that I'm doing. You should make your own list.
1) I'm increasing my therapy visits. Usually do every other week but I'm moving to weekly. Honestly, at the moment that may feel like overkill, but it's good to have that in practice before things go wrong.
2) I've got several "happy lights" at my desk. These are certainly not a silver bullet, but in a place like Michigan (it is grey outside from now until late march) it helps you feel somewhat normal.
3) I got out of frequent exercise practice during the summer (in part because of how often I was able to be outside moving around). I'm restarting a low stakes exercise schedule to make sure I'm scheduled to move around a lil bit daily and more strenuous a few times per week.
4) Cutting down my workload. Work is infinite. I work very hard. It's fine for me to scale back a little bit to rest up a bit. That means pretty firm start and stop times daily and no work on weekends.
5) Cutting down on caffeine. I LOVE coffee. Sometimes the only thing getting me out of bed. But it's also pretty clear it doesn't help with overall anxiety and depression. Cap at 2 cups a day.
6) Buying lots of microwave/quick meals. I love cooking, but the things I cook take time and when i'm down I often don't eat because I don't want to spend the time cooking. Nice to be able to just nuke a trader joes meal and eat that
7) I have a text loop of supportive folk that I check in with daily (like there's concern if I don't check in). That way I don't go very long spiraling alone if I spiral.
8) No phone in the bedroom. No doomscrolling at night.
9) Beefing up some of my hobbies. Writing more jokes, committing to more open mics, starting and hosting a trivia series, screenprinting. Things that I like doing that are fun and semi-public.
and 10) continuing to be open about how I'm feeling. Important both to break down barriers about discussions of mental health and to help me process.
That's it. Go make your own list of 10 things. Do it before the time changes!
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You know an interesting thing I think alot about? How so much of economic justice organizing is built around the scarcity model. We talk about hating that model, but the constantly make "how come we can afford x, but not y" arguments.
I am VERY guilty here.
It's actually really hard to wrap our minds (and messaging) around the fact that we can afford both a useless billion dollar military helicopter AND healthcare for all. We can afford a ridiculous large steroid driven frat boy police force AND quality schools for all.
I'm really grateful that I spent time in an organization that taught me real difficult messy inspiring beautiful tiring exciting grassroots organizing. I wish everyone on our side had that chance.
I came out of college organizing thinking that what we all needed to do was read Marx and fanon and shit and come up with the best and most revolutionary ideas, then find a coalition of people that thought those same lefty ideas and work with them exclusively. (Slight hyperbole)
What I found out is that college gave me an unrealistic idea of what actual change and organizing is. All the systems that you had convinced yourself you had dismantled in your own politics still exist in our base, and most haven't had the luxury of exclusive thinking about it.