Mornings with the Black Dog and the Blogger Dashboard

I didn't wake up so well this morning. As soon as I was conscious I felt irritated, disconnected and anxious. My mind was running over in circles of negative thought. I felt the shadows of the night's dreams - quite a string of disconnected anxieties - still present in the morning light.

This is something I'm used to. It's a common feature of a depressive illness - to wake up in the midst of the hardest emotions, and to struggle to rise out of them somehow to reach the realities of the day that is unfolding. Taking care of how I wake up is an important part of my mental health management. The discovery of the blogosphere was a remarkable boost to my morning experience, possibly the best one since I discovered tea-drinking in my late teens.

First thing, when I wake up in the morning, I make a cup of tea. I often dream of having someone to make a cup of tea for me and bring it to me in bed - oh, surely, the very definition of luxury - but in the meantime, the thirst for tea will win out over the cozy cocoon of the bed sooner or later, and I get up and make it myself. Then I check my Blogger dashboard and read all the posts in my blog list.

The main purpose of this is to focus my brain on the things I want to be thinking about, rather than letting it just run a cognitive riot. All the blogs on my blog list are selected basically for this reason. There's something about each one of them that reminds me of the things that are important to me. Somewhere in the day's accumulation of posts will be something that I can really connect with, or inspires me, or just reminds me to be grateful for the good things in life, for the strengths we have and the beauty in life than shines through even the sadness. Perhaps several things on a busy day. I am so thankful to all these talented and thoughtful people who are sharing these gifts with the world through their blogs.

Today, it was this post here at Lulastic and the Hippyshake that did it for me. This lady is generally one pretty brilliant blogger, but this story of her daughter as an Olympic athlete competing in the Toddler Heat of the Breastfeeding Olympics is just gold. To laugh out loud that early in the morning - priceless.

Comments

  1. this post is seriously one of the best blog posts I have ever read on any blog, ever.

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