Untangling Mental Health, Part 3: Apathy

I swear I didn't plan to wait three days before posting the blog about procrastination. That was not deliberate! But appropriate, nonetheless.

Part 1: Depression and Anxiety

Part 2: ADD

Apathy is the most tangible and poorly justified of depression symptoms. There's a lot of stuff I haven't done simply because I don't want to. I need to do it. But I can't bring myself to do it. It's procrastination on a chronic level.

• A fraction of this is simple procrastination. I'd rather be doing something else, so I do something else. This is totally normal (and this is why the blog is three days late.)
• Lack of motivation is also a minor factor. What's the point in doing something? This is the classic not-getting-dressed symptom of depression.

Neither of these are the real culprits in my situation. The second one sometimes affects self-care tasks, like meals or showers, but most of the things on my to-do list have a very obvious point, for the children if nothing else. 

• "Planning how to do things is as good as doing them." This is an absurd bit of illogic, but I was in my mid-thirties before I realised that this is exactly how I operate. I work out the hows and whats of a particular project and get a sense of accomplishment that mentally ticks off that task. I have to be really careful to make sure that it doesn't then go onto the backburner indefinitely.

This may be an ADD thing. It's certainly an ongoing issue for me, and a significant problem. But it's still not the main contributor to my apathy...

• Every task has inertia: the bigger (more important) the task, the harder it is to get started. The longer I put it off, the more self-loathing I have for not doing it. The more self-loathing I have, the bigger deal it becomes. The bigger a deal it is, the more afraid I am to tackle it. Ad infinitum.

This is a classic way for my anxiety to manifest. Almost twenty years ago, I had a nervous breakdown while attempting a high school teaching career. In theory, every evening, I would mark work, plan lessons, etc; in practice, I would spend up to two hours staring at my folders and weeping before I could bring myself to start work for the evening. Unsurprisingly, I failed to keep up with the workload.

Thankfully, I'm not in that state now, but because I've been so overwhelmed by the workload this summer, I've focused on the house and put off the job and friends part of the to-do list.

The job in particular has now been blown totally out of proportion in my mind. On the one hand, it feels like such a grotesque privilege to not have to get a job immediately; on the other there's a social stigma attached to not working, particularly an unemployed woman who is having a man provide for her. Oh, and that man is the kid's father and we've already covered the issues surrounding him. 

Being unemployed is an ever-increasing blow to my self-respect, to the point where it's almost impossible for me to address it because of the associated anxiety.

Solution 1: Keep calm and carry on.

I don't need to feel guilt over having financial provision. 

1. The wisdom is not to count on a spouse to support you forever, in practice, it's difficult to prepare for both eventualities: the failed partnership and the successful one. In supporting my husband's career and caring for our family, I effectively reduced my income capacity. It is entirely fair for my husband to provide for me as I make the transition to being the primary earner for my household. to our changed circumstances.
2. I'm earning my keep. I'm raising the children full-time, and that means I'm still reducing my income-capacity for the sake of my family. Put very cynically, I have freed their father from all the impacts children have on your lifestyle, but I continue to enable his relationship with them. (Obviously, this was not his intent and certainly not his wish, but it is a result of our circumstances.)

I also don't need to feel unreasonable guilt over procrastinating here:

• As I have a form of income, the greater priority is to establish a home for my children and get them set up at school.
• I haven't totally procrastinated. I signed up with a recruitment agency and sent my CV to a handful of local nurseries in the hopes of getting lucky without having to invest a lot of effort and time that I didn't have. I did not get lucky.

I've been telling myself that for a month, with limited effect. 

Solution 2: Finish everything else first.
 

Last week, I ran out of relocation Things To Do. Oh, there's still a few odds and ends to finish up, but I suddenly realized that there wasn’t anything hanging over me and causing stress. That stupefied me for a day or two, then on Thursday, I woke up and decided to sit down and look into the job. And I did.

In other words, once I eliminated other stress factors, I felt prepared to tackle this mammoth source of anxiety. Simple solution... but there were over two months of "procrastination" before I could put that solution into effect, and I'm lucky that in this instance there was a natural endpoint to the other stress factors.
 

I've got a multi-year career track to figure out and that's going to take me a lot of time and research, so the job is a work in progress, but it is in progress now. I’ve got some momentum going. I just have to be aware of the hurdles still ahead.

Coming soon... Social Anxiety.