Anxiety, depression, difficulty regulating attention and time, difficulty communicating – all these things get worse with the changing of the seasons.

Today the inside of my head feels life a hellscape.

The bleak stories that I tell myself feel unequivocally real. They might not be.

For better or worse, I’m somewhat intelligent. If I try to use reason to argue against my own rumination spirals, try to convince myself that they’re wrong… there’s a fair chance the rumination spirals are going to win, because the mind that creates them is mine, and my mind is good at arguing. Attempts to comfort myself by challenging the truth of my own perceptions often fail.

It is useful to remember that the stories that I tell myself are directly related to my physiological state.

I feel better equipped to do something about my own discomfort when I think about myself as a functional system exchanging materials with the environment.

I’m a beautifully sophisticated arrangement of ashes and dust, a finely tuned machine whose existence was contingent on billions of years of random happenstance. So are you, kid.

I will never be done appreciating how neat that is.

Maybe I’m remarkably small and insignificant, and none of the stories I tell myself matter.

Maybe I’m a feeling thing that thinks, not a thinking thing that feels. If I can care for whatever is wrong with my body, I can also start to unravel whatever is going on in my head.

I feel so much better when I wash my hair, drink water, take my meds, sleep, cuddle with my cat, go for a walk, eat good food, slow down enough to breathe.

This is complicated by executive dysfunction.

Often, I know exactly what I need to do to take care of myself and feel better. I want to do the necessary tasks, but I get stuck in a place where my nervous system is frozen and I can’t move.

No matter how many times I tell myself… hey, come on, you need to sleep… I still get stuck not sleeping.

So I find people who struggle with the same things that I do and tell them to get enough sleep instead.

Endearing hypocrisy.

Look, we do the best we can.

One day at a time.