(no subject)

[chess]

I feel a little irritated that I didn't get to the LJ picnic today, but on the other hand my dissertation did need some love. It is still an anemic 5.2k words, but that's rather better than it was this morning.

Yesterday, amongst failing to do work, I went on a nightbash with TT, which was fantastic. Mostly because I desperately needed to get out in the fresh air and run around a bit.

I have a counselling appointment tomorrow, but I feel something of a fraud as my 'depression' appears to be basically entirely the fault of my project and exam doom and job worries rather than anything more fundamental, given how it lifts when I make progress and when I get out of the working context. Also, I probably should be spending the time working on my dissertation. But I feel guilty about cancelling at short notice, even though I suspect it will just be wasted, frustrating time on both sides. (I don't get on with counselling anyway; counsellors in my experience are all intensely social people who expect responses from me that it's quite exhausting to either give or explain the absence of.)

Comments

[passage.livejournal.com]

"Mood shouldn't be context dependent"

Really? I suspect everyone on the planet, every person in history, is going to turn out to be depressive by that criteria. Jesus' moods swung pretty drastically between different contexts (although of course I can't produce a Bible verse saying 'Jesus didn't suffer from any mental illnesses').

I'm inclinded to think the reverse, if you mood isn't context dependent then something is seriously screwed with you. If your mood has no relation to any stuff in reality, at all, then you're probably in some kind of weird denial or numb state.

I confess to being curious as to whether are you about to advise me that I should urgently see my GP based on the (correct) guess that my moods are context dependent.

[angelofthenorth.livejournal.com]

OK, so closely context dependent.

I get *stressed* when there's stuff going on, but having battled and overcome depression over the last few years, I now know that even when things are really tough, I don't have to be down all the time.

It's hard to explain properly. When I study, I have major focus problems, and I find that all my feelings of inadequacy surface. I'm intelligent, I feel as if I should be able to do this. A lot of the time I will attempt to avoid things, but that doesn't help. I either need to revise the way I do things, or I need to revise my expectation set. Either of which will put me in a different mood from the one I'm in presently. Within that mood my temperament may shine through, and I will act appropriately to a situation. I'm trying to find a way of expressing the difference between a short-term problem (oh, it's just this dissertation) and the long term one (it's this entire final year).

I suppose it's the difference between mood and temperament. Jesus had a temperament that was appropriate for the situation.

In the short-term one, there's a sense of light at the end of the tunnel (and some counselling may be appropriate), but the longer term one, although it may end soon, will benefit from counselling, because long term stress happens in life, and being able to adjust oneself in order to deal with it is a crucial lifeskill if we're going to live in the fullness of God's grace and mercy. I have to address my studying issues, because I find the same distraction happens in other realms, but it's not as obvious, however the problem builds up and becomes intractable.

My concern for chess is that this has been going on all year.

No, I wouldn't advise anyone to see their GP, unless I'd been reading their LJ for several weeks, talked to them online a number of times, or they were apparently going into meltdown.