This morning I woke up, went over to the Low Road Cafe,and ate a tasty breakfast of avocado on toast. Then I drank an industrial-sized mug of coffee while critiquing a friends story, made some notes about what I’m going to write today, and generally felt good about my life.
I’m pondering this at the moment, because one of the questions that routinely appears on any test for depression is Have you lost interest in things you used to enjoy? and my default response, when contemplating that, was how would I know? How do I tell the difference between things I enjoy and habits I’ve established to keep me vaguely functional?
It’s only in the last week or three that I’ve started being able to make that distinction between habit and happy again. But going to the cafe? Critiquing good stories? Definitely on the happy side of the list. Also on there: eating pork belly; going to the movies (who knew?); catching up with peeps.
Still figuring out where writing and blogging fits in there, because I’m acutely aware that my whole relationship with getting things written has shifted in a lot of ways. Not in terms of writing things – I wrote a lot of pro-wrestling fanfic over my week off, which kinda suggests I enjoy the act of writing – but it’s much harder to figure out what I want from writing after years of treating productivity as a kind of emotional band-aid.
I expect it’s going to be a very strange couple of months.