Yay!

Today when I woke up the sun was shining and the birds were singing. I decided that I really wanted to do everything I could to make it a good day; at the same time I had so much I wanted to get done. While I did make some progress on a paper I'm way behind on, the most important thing I can say is that I had a good day. In fact, a great day. The whole thing. Seriously.

I made Aidan lunch this morning--after experiencing the crappy cafeteria food, I could sympathize when he asked if he could bring his own PBJ. I threw in a banana and a brownie and voila! Impromptu sack lunch. Tonight I asked him how his lunch was. His response: perfect. That made me so happy. Ah, the little things.

Got him to school on time, and then finally made it to the gym. I biked for 20 minutes straight and it felt SO good. After that I was afraid of crashing again, but I made it home and got dressed and made it to the doctor's appointment on time. By 11:00 a.m., I was still having a good day.

We talked about my meds and I told her that I had been coming down a lot in the afternoons, and that Saturday and Sunday were the most depressed, unproductive days I have had since I started the meds. I wasn't foggy and disconnected like I had been before, I was just straight up depressed. I couldn't do much at all. Anyways, I like that she called them "lost days," because that's how I feel about them. And the point of me getting help is that I cannot afford to keep losing days! Anyways, she decided she wanted to increase my meds again. I was very worried about this because I was thinking that all the haziness I was feeling was because of all the meds. I was wrong. I took the second dose of Wellbutrin this afternoon and I didn't crash. I haven't felt foggy all day. This is the most alert I have been in over a month. It's amazing. It turns out the chemical imbalance was THAT bad that even on the meds it was really messing me up. So I feel like today was really a huge breakthrough. Yay!

This afternoon, I had my evaluation at KU Psych Clinic. It was kind of like a personality test, I guess. I answered 567 true/false questions on the computer and then filled out a sheet of about 40 finish-the-sentence prompts. I really liked that one a lot, because you had to write the first thing that came to your mind. It was very revealing, but it also reinforced the fact that I am happy with where I am in life and the goals that I have met and set for myself.

Finally, this evening I made it to the support group. It was small, only four other people, and one of them was also new. It really put things into perspective for me. First of all, it was nice to be in a room of people who could talk about mental health problems with no stigma attached. We were all going through it; it was normal. In fact, what I am going through is so mild compared with what some people have to deal with every day of their lives. They were all such nice people and were very positive. They talked about meds, therapy techniques, all sorts of stuff. I learned so much about an issue that really isn't discussed often enough in the public arena.

Today was definitely very, very encouraging. I was beginning to worry a lot. Now I feel that my goal of getting caught up by spring break is a realistic one. And I also am not as worried about trans-Atlantic travel as I was before. Whew. It turns out everything IS going to be alright.