Hi friends,

Regular readers might remember that I’ve been in and out of experiencing the Bigs Sads over the past few months. Not the little old ‘always-there-in-the-background’ type of sad, not that dull ache you carry around. This was Big Time Sad Time. I won’t go into it and trauma dump out of the blue, just to say: who knew grief could be triggered many years later when you hit a life milestone? I didn’t see that one coming. Life really is odd and unforgiving sometimes.

So I have been feel all kinds of numbness and nothingness. I have been zoning out and staring into space, and, of course, ruminating. Most of all I’ve been finding myself just crying out of nowhere (and not just at the state of daytime TV).

Safe to say, things have been weird here at Wavy Towers. I knew, deep down in my logical side (that very, very small part of me), that this wasn’t right, so I thought ‘What would Dr Ren say?’

Dr Ren does not exist, as real life Ren hates blood and bureaucracy, so would not last five minutes in the NHS. Dr Ren, a figment of my imagination, is a clear-eyed, pragmatic know-it-all (we’re similar in some ways, I too like knowing a lot, please ask me about the Bee Gees).

After basic online research, also known as a quick look at Substack Notes, it occurred to me that I really just need to do some things to take my mind off my mind. Is this avoidance? Should I be tackling this depression head on? Maybe, but I’m tired and there really is only so much I can do without therapy, which is unattainable in this economy. Good mental health? But the cozzy livs hun!

I sat with my sadness and realised a number of things. All of them sound a bit trivial when written out, but they have all helped me feel a bit better:

• I have not gardened much this year. I am very fortunate to have outdoor space and access to the cheap plants at Lidl. On a recent trip to pick up some scran, we bought two dwarf apple trees and brought them home. New life is cool isn’t it? These trees are new here and now it’s our responsibility that they stay alive. One day they might produce apples. We might bake a pie with those apples (ha, I say ‘we’, my partner might. I am banned from the kitchen for good reason). Also, and not that the people I know believe me much, but sticking your hands in soil is transformative in a way I can’t describe. I can feel my nerves grind to a halt when I pot a plant. I’m not exaggerating here. Monty Don and Alan Titchmarsh must be two very zen dudes.

• Taking things further, I realised that my partner and I hadn’t been out in nature for a good while. So we psyched ourselves up and made a very detailed plan to catch an unfamiliar bus to a new-to-us country park. In the scorching heat we’ve been experiencing in the UK recently. This, as you can imagine, was a very big deal. We made sure to pack a load of food and drinks, including those freezer pack things I remember from picnics when I was a kid, and we reminded each other that we could ‘nope out’ at any time and come home. But we didn’t. We had a wonderful time amongst the forest and the water and the sunshine. There was so much birdsong that I’ve downloaded the Merlin app on my phone, really cementing my millennialness once again. Being in this massive expanse of parkland, hearing nothing but birds, made me feel like I could at any moment start levitating, leaving my sadness in the dirt. Again, weird to write out, ‘woo’ to think about, but I swear this is how it made me feel. I even said at one point this rather daft sentence: ‘Here I am feeling upset and yet trees are here just tree-ing. I’m worrying about details whilst life is just happening around us.’ Not sure why this experience made me speak like some 60’s drug casualty, but here we are.

• I’d stopped reading books. Ok, this one doesn’t involve touching grass, but it does involve not being on a screen, and at this point I think anything offline probably counts as touching grass. By brute force, e.g. by taking off all the interesting apps off my phone and starving myself of anything that could be classed as ‘fun and easily accessible’, I’ve managed to get back into reading books again. Books are actually fun! Your mind plays tricks on you! I’m currently reading ‘Notes from a Small Island’ by Bill Bryson and it’s once again inspiring me to do that travelogue series about bus journeys in Greater Manchester that I keep threatening to do then chickening out of. One day.

• The last one surprised me a little. Yes, I’m keenly aware that I live in my own head a lot (‘autism’ comes from the Greek ‘autos’ meaning self, after all) (also, I literally write a weekly newsletter about myself, I mean…) It embarrasses me somewhat that I need to force myself to think of other people’s perspectives, and although my empathy runs quite high - in the sense that I cry at life insurance adverts - I’m hyper aware that I’m embarrassingly wrapped up in my own sad little life, Jane. So this weekend I started volunteering. It was a try out and I really enjoyed myself. I knew it would be a lot for me - a new environment, lots of new people, the dreaded socialising and a lot of noise. I very very very almost didn’t go. But I really liked the experience. I like helping people and it made me happy to see other people happy. So that was nice.

The Sads are still there, but they’ve moved to the back of the brain again, floating around moaning to themselves. I’m taking up brain space with stuff that is good for me, hopefully giving the Sads as little space as possible to move about in. Sometimes I can’t hack the thought of doing the good stuff and just sit there (all these things require a mental effort and discipline that sometimes I just don’t have, and that is totally fine).

But I don’t want to rot. I want to live a good life full of love and fun and experiences. I want to stop being extremely sad - I’m ok with a low level hum of sadness, it’s this big spike that I wasn’t prepared for.

This is the new toolkit for combatting the big spike, and the big spike will appear again, that’s for certain. It’s how I deal with it that matters.

Take it easy,

Ren

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