I Went Back to Therapy
And other positive changes this dreary December.
This week has been a slog. If you live in the Northeast like me, you may have experienced what I did: Seasonal Affective Disorder hit me hard with the cold, dreary, gray (shorter) days. To make matters worse, I had no work this week. This doesn’t mean that I have no work period — there’s just a lull in my projects, and they’re going to pick up again next week — but to my PTSD freelancer brain, that’s what it feels like.
While I’m very self-directed and motivated, having structure helps me a lot. And without it — and amid this dreary December — I quickly fell into a rut. Aimless. Untethered. Sleeping late. Taking long naps. And lacking the motivation to do, well, almost anything. Even though work will pick up next week, and the holidays are notoriously slow, without anything to do this week, that old, familiar fear of never getting work again started to surface.
But that’s not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about how, even though old patterns are resurfacing and it’s been hard to get out of bed and I never want to leave my house in this oh-so-cold weather, and even though it feels like everything is always the same and nothing will ever change, I am, actually, taking positive actions. And that’s what I want to tell you about.