Mind Management Angela May

Depression and Confidence

Went a bit dark for awhile there, I apologize. To be honest I was fighting off some personal demons, depression in particular.

A few things were happening in chorus. I'd just come off Emerald City Comiccon, which was so intense, and amazing and this big release of fear and stress. It was awesome, but the effect that this can have - especially on me - is that when you IMMEDIATELY return to your regular life, it can make the experience feel like it never actually happened. I find that in these situations that I'm prone to falling into my own echo chamber of self doubt.

Usually I can combat this. Usually.

Unfortunately, around the same time I ALSO decided that I'd like to try becoming what I call "more Vegan-aware". I'm vegetarian right now, and this has made such a positive impact on my life and health that I posited "hm, if giving up meat was such a benefit, perhaps doing the additional step of giving up milk and eggs would prove even more beneficial!"

Of course I knew this would be a very challenging thing, so I didn't even TRY to go full on Vegan cold-turkey. That's where "vegan awareness" comes in. I decided to enter a phase where I would become more aware of which foods were and were not vegan and learning to work with the alternatives.

The first phase was to stop buying milk, and this was easy. I tried a few rice milks and then settled on a Soymilk that I like. This was not a problem.

The next phase was trying to give up eggs. Now, I eat a hard-boiled egg every day because I feel it goes a long way to keeping my protein and iron levels up. Of course, this was an assumption and I like to challenge assumptions. I'd tried giving up eggs in February in a "1 week on/1 week off" pattern and I was noticing that I would fall into depression at the end of my off week. I took a break from the experiment for the Emerald Con (I NEED the energy during cons!) but I had decided that the depression was just a phase that I needed to push through - my body would eventually adjust.

Well, without the benefit of milk to mitigate the effect of dropping the eggs, I went into a much deeper depression than I experienced in February.

I withdrew and I felt very lonely. I lost confidence in everything I was doing, including this blog. I had posts written up already - a few in fact - but I couldn't bring myself to post them. They didn't seem good enough, and I couldn't see how to fix them.

I had very little energy. It was very hard to get up in the morning and go to work (but I did). It got so bad that I caught myself actually hoping that I would get sick so I wouldn't have to go in. I would go home and just crawl into bed and cry for awhile. For no reason in particular. It sucked. I tried to compensate. On a particularly dark day at work, I went out at lunch and bought some intense vegan sources of protein - some cashew nuts, a protein shake, lots of tofu... it got me through the day but it was still rough. I was surviving, but I wasn't myself.

I didn't want to quit, though, because I knew that if I could just hang on, maybe I would adjust. Maybe it would get better.

But I was out of time. When it starts interfering with my work, that's when it's gone too far. I bought a bunch of milk, cheese and eggs and I IMMEDIATELY started to feel better. After a week or two I was starting to feel normal again. That was 1 week before Stumptown comics fest, and I had to push to get everything finished that I'd been too depressed to manage earlier.

But now I'm back. And I'm feeling better. I'm not done with my vegan-leaning experiments, but I definitely have to be more careful. Veganism doesn't cause depression, but I have to come to terms with the fact that I live my life very close to the line. Maybe, because I'm so prone to depression, I'm too sensetive to manage the imbalance caused by dropping milk and eggs. I manage the depression on my own - diet control IS my medication, and I can't take that lightly. Life is too short to go through it depressed.

Lessons learned:

- Listen to your body. Experiments are cool, but if it's interfering with things that are more important to you, tread lightly.

- If you're prone to depression, just recognize that dark days just happen. It's usually not your fault (in this case it probably was my fault ) but your brain is the way it is. Don't give up. Keep moving forward.

So now I'm back to The Work.