Thursday past, I was on a flexi-day to take Christopher to see his surgeon for his regular six monthly check up - and they are so happy with his progress that they don't need to see him again for a year - which definitely made me float a bit higher.
I also took advantage of the day off to go to speak to C's nursery about the stars, planets and gravity - the nursery like to encourage parents to speak to the children about their jobs etc. I don't mind my job, but I can't imagine any child in their right mind wanting to know about Insurance, so I fell back on having done quite a cool degree... One thing that made it a good bit easier is an incredibly cool piece of software called "Celestia" which is free to download and allows you to "travel" around the universe and do some sightseeing. Christopher loves it - so does his dad!
Anyhoo, almost as soon as I agreed to do the talk, I realised how tricky it is to describe gravity in simple terms (specially to 3 and 4 year olds!), but I had to give it a go. And I think that I managed to an extent, with the help of thinking about things falling, a video of Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt dancing and singing about on the moon ("I was walking on the moon one day...) and an improvised experiment involving a ball and a bit of string. I don't know how much they understood, but at worst I showed them a funny video, some cool pictures and a silly game with a ball!
We followed that with a nice (and carefully calorie counted) Pizza Express lunch as an early celebration of Freya's birthday, cos she was headed down to see her "Ooh errr Matron Of Honour" Iain to see Rocky Horror on her actual birthday.
Yesterday was slightly odd - left to our own devices, C and I had a chilled morning, but things got a bit stressful over lunchtime when C wouldn't eat his soup - small things, but they can really tell on your mind. I find (in a vague parallel with C's TOF issues) that the worst part of being a depressive is that it's not big things that cause down times so much - more an accumulation of small things. Like tiny crumbs of discontent and failure that swell and stick in your throat. Small failures like winding up shouting at C for things that are ultimately my own fault. So when we headed along to C's swimming lessons, I wasn't in the best headspace - but how quickly things can turn around...
Once the Wee Man was ready to swim, he headed off and did very well, which definitely started to lift my mood - and I made sure that I told hum how proud I was. Then our friend Chrissie took him off for an hour so that I could head to the gym and he could play with her wee girl Caiomhe. That finished the job for me - the combination of physical exercise and Killing Joke at high volume really lifted my mood back up.
That seems to be typical of my experience with depression - I don't have more things than anyone else to weigh me down - I just seem to interact more strongly with gravity... Though with the love of my friends and family, music and exercise maybe I can fire my engines and take off from this black planet and at least orbit it a bit more distantly, so the tides of my moods are smaller.
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