As I have dug deeper into the effects of my depression, I have also dug deeper into my triggers. Not the causes, because the further back I look, the more earlier I recognize the symptoms. I thought my symptoms first manifested at 16, but I’ve since remembered stuff from grade nine.
So, I don’t worry about causes, I just assume it’s always been there, and I only worry about triggers.
One of my primary triggers is tiredness; a single poor night’s sleep and I’m at risk. Just a couple of days ago I was noting that failure causes me a lot of trouble, and this got me to thinking about ADHD.
It’s a tough row to hoe when failure sends you into a depression, and your life is set up for constant failure through the inability to stick to any task you find boring. That’s all ADHD is, the inability to focus on the boring shit.
There’s so much boring shit, and so much of it is necessary shit. So you fail at important stuff, because doing it bores you, and you get distracted.
Forget happiness, the combination of ADHD and depression is deadly to success in life.
Enter small disciplines and 1% improvement.
Recently I’ve noticed that, while the depression is never far away, the recovery seems to be getting closer. I think this is because I’m using the incremental creation and reinforcement of good habits to give me a baseline of daily success to combat the inevitable failures.
In addition, the daily writing out of tasks to be done gives me a physical manifestation of tasks to be done. Crossing them off the list is a physical manifestation of accomplishment, of success.
i.e. a way to keep the darkness at bay.
