good for me

I went and walked for an hour....I'm not cured, but I feel better.

a bit.

which is good.

catch-22

my depression problem is because I don't move.  I sit on the couch and don't activate...I don't go exercise, I don't clean my house, I don't do laundry, I don't do any of the things needing to be done.  I don't move or get them done because I'm depressed.  The worst kind of vicious cycle.

melancholy

for no reason that I can think of, melancholy.

the onset of Fall?  cooler days?  not quite sure.  Just a vague feel of being unsettled, wanting to get in a different place----in shape, skilled, working, talented, something.

it's a soup of stuff:

first, politically.  I never considered myself a very political person but I've become more so.  And I'm just disheartened and dismayed by the incredible lack of information on which people makes decisions.  How could hundreds and thousands have died for our freedom only so we could become imprisoned by ignorance and bought by billionaires only looking out for their own best interests?  How could we come to this?  Actually, in a word:  FOX news.  That's how.  It seems grim and depressing to me at the moment, and for the first time in my life, the thought of Europe or Australia or Canada doesn't seem so alien.  We are a country of intellectual dwarfs.  People's perspectives are narrow and biased.  There's no worldview or world perspective.  There's no desire for facts or more information or expanded knowledge.  Learning more, becoming informed, apparently takes too much effort and people just settle for what's emotionally comfortable.  And the standard for that is so incredibly low.......  So that's part one of the soup ingredients.

second, which is connected to the first, I think of someone I know who recently just *bam* out of nowhere has decided that she apparently can't be our friends anymore.  Our politics don't align and I guess that's the only thing that matters now.  Every single day I'm bewildered by this.  Our history is long and entwined and intense in parts, distant in other parts, but always connected.  So every day I'm bewildered as to how---without even a conversation between the two of us---she could decide that she just apparently can't mingle with the likes of liberal me, liberal us.  Since we haven't had political conversations, she really has no clue where I stand on anything.  She's decided tho, I guess, that she knows...and so....here we are.  I'm not crushed or devastated.  Baffled.  Flummoxed.  I mean, really?  Where did that come from?  Really?  Sigh.  Whatever.

there's probably more ingredients to this melancholy soup but I've bored myself so I think I'll just resign from this exercise. :)

another weird symptom

They're kind of stacking up....

Anyway.  You know that feeling you get when you get the goosebumps?  That fuzzy, fizzy, tightening of the skin?  Well, all day today I've had that feeling off and on throughout my body---mostly my legs and sometimes my arms.  Just the weirdest thing....and it just stayed that way for long periods of time, coming and going.  What's that all about.

It's like there's an alien in my body.

rolling blackouts

That's what my nights of sleep / non-sleep are like.  I awake and lie there, sometimes for an hour or more, uncomfortable; sometimes on fire from the bed of lava I seem to have fallen in.

and the anxiety follows me into the day---a sort of restlessness, anxious for change but paralyzed in a non-motivated freeze-frame.  Ready for something new, something to do; terrified at the thought of that first step.

an october summer's eve

Went on another bike ride tonight with my guy.  I know it's the second day of October but she's October going on July...was over 100 today and still in the 80s, I'm sure, when we left around 7....was a lovely evening.  I was a bit cranky when we left---not for any particular reason; but I'm finding that apparently I don't need a particular reason anymore---but there's something about riding a bike that makes me ridiculously happy and light-hearted.  I feel like I could ride for miles and miles and days and days...am I trying to escape?  Ride into the sunset?  Ride into another life, another phase of life, another landscape?  I don't know.  Not really, I guess.  It's mindless, really---just riding and wind in my face and warm air on my skin and the ground whizzing by.  I feel a sort of nostalgia and melancholy and happiness...all rolled into one.

hormonal soup

I'm 45 and starting menopause?  How is this even possible?

How I know:

*  the absence of the obviously main thing....for months now.  ??

*  more cranky than usual.  That's a hard one to track, really

*  mood way up, way down, way up again.

*  trouble sleeping.  Tension in my body

*  HOT FLASHES.  Not flashes, tho.  Long periods of burning fire.

I don't know how to navigate through this part, and I didn't think I'd have to be doing it already.  I had great plans to already be in excellent shape before I entered Menopause (it should be capitalized since it's like its own country) because from everything I've heard, losing weight/getting in shape is ten times harder after Menopause.  But instead of being in fantastic shape, I managed to actually put ON some of the weight that I recently---at great effort---had lost before summer.  Way to go, me.

I'm thinking there must be a club for women like me?  The Menopause-Too-Early Club?  Where is it?  How do I join?  

Sign me up.  Please.