Colour My World
This morning someone mentioned to me that they knew a person who wore only blue - until her depressive mood shifted, and she began wearing more colours.
That comment got me thinking about my own wardrobe and the rather obvious lack of colour options. In fact, it’s not just my wardrobe - my default colour for everything is blue, be it clothes, towels or stationary. If it not blue, the majority it black or grey.
So when I was instructed to go buy a notebook with a bright fancy colour to record my positive emotions (my “Happy Book”, as I now refer to it) my hand automatically went to pick the blue one up, before straying to the plain black visual diary. Recalling the story about the woman who only wore blue, I made a conscious effort to choose the pink.
Reading up on colour therapy and my wardrobe, I do feel that I need a change, something to help lift my mood. I don’t need to go out and re-design my wardrobe (I don’t have the money, for starters!) but even just the conscious idea of seeking colour for my life is uplifting. I want a pair of brightly-coloured striped socks to change from the mundane white socks I always wear. Looking in my draw now, I don’t see any t-shirts that are not black, grey, dark blue or white. It’s depressing, to say the least.
I need colour in my life.
It’s Official: I’m Depressed
According to the doctor I saw this morning, this is a diagnosis that has come at least six years too late. Knowing what I know, I have probably been suffering from it for almost (maybe more) half my life.
Scary.
The diagnosis of clinical depression is not a surprising one as such - I have been through periods where I could not even bring myself to get out of bed in the morning. It was a good day if I actually managed to get to class in clothes that I did not wear the day before, and had slept in. It was a great day if I wore clean clothes. An excellent day if I wore clean clothes and had had a shower. Pity the psychiatrist did not agree with everyone else - she refused to even say whether or not I had depression (leaving me in a state of limbo, essentially), saying that I would let a diagnosis take over my personality.
So it was a bit of a surprise when I was finally diagnosed, as apart from recent episodes I’d been rather fine. A bit dozy, a little bit weepy (especially over the news regarding Heath) but I was functional. Well, semi-functional. My brain sort of stopped working beyond a certain point. It’s taken me half an hour of knuckling down to get to this point and even now I am nodding off at my desk. Not quite at the point where face + keyboard = OTP, but soon. Soon.
It’s only 3.30pm.
Although it is a relief that I finally have a solid answer (which I always have needed before I fix anything) and there is finally a solution in sight, I have to admit that I am more than a little worried.
It’s now 3.50pm and all I wrote in the past 20 minutes was that paragraph. Oh, wait. That’s a sentence. That’s basically my level of functioning. Sometimes I have good moments where I can read a chapter of a book. Other times I can barely finish one page of a three-page short story. In the past few weeks I have suffered from mental blocks - I will be in the middle of a sentence, and when I reach for a word… nothing. Just a big white wall in my brain, preventing me from even finding a somewhat similar word no matter how wrong it may be. My tongue stops working, too, so I just sit there waving my hands why mentally ramming myself against the White Wall of DoomTM.
Tomorrow is when I can start my round of pills, although the sleeping pills start tonight. Until then I am merely one of many people who have suffered from, or are suffering from, depression.
And as everyone tells me, I am not alone. Not alone.