{"id":2492,"date":"2020-12-31T20:06:32","date_gmt":"2020-12-31T18:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/?p=2492"},"modified":"2020-12-31T20:06:32","modified_gmt":"2020-12-31T18:06:32","slug":"the-black-pit-of-despair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/2020\/12\/31\/the-black-pit-of-despair\/","title":{"rendered":"The black pit of despair"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The year&#8217;s been hell, I think most everyone agrees. For me, in addition to all the external problems, I&#8217;ve been fighting with depression ranging from bothersome to near-crippling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is not advice, this is not a magic solution. This is a unordered collection of thoughts and observations with no real purpose other than writing them down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is not new, I&#8217;ve struggled with this for 8 or so years, probably longer. The events of this year have made it way worse however, partially by adding a massive external stress and uncertainty and partially by removing several of my escapes. No weekend gaming sessions, no afternoons at a coffee shop, no browsing a book shop for a couple hours, no trips to the coast. And even though I&#8217;m usually fine alone, the weeks of solitude sometimes broken by only a couple of meetings has been hard. The cats are good company but not great conversationalists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Easy things are hard, hard things are near-impossible. On the worst days, something as trivial as making lunch is a challenge, not because it&#8217;s inherently difficult, but because of all the sub-steps. Deciding what to have, cooking whatever it is (or thawing out frozen stuff), remembering that something&#8217;s in the oven before it evolves into carbon, etc. There&#8217;s been many days when it was easier to just get another cup of coffee and a handful of nuts, or just a cup of coffee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Focusing on something for any significant amount of time is hard. I&#8217;ve resorted to pommodoro timers, adjusted to 5 minutes\/1 minute and it kinda works. Most of the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve found that a good measure of how well I&#8217;m doing is the size of the laundry pile. Currently it&#8217;s about three machine-loads in size.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have just about no interest in new tech. This is, obviously, not a good thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think I&#8217;ve read maybe 15 books this year. Compared to my usual of around 70, that&#8217;s not great. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I&#8217;m going to try and do from next year (4 hours time at this writing) is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Spend at least half an hour outside every day, with a book. I spent a lot of time and money on the balcony, and it&#8217;s now at the point where it&#8217;s nice to sit out on it. I wish I had a real garden, but, block of flats, so no.<\/li><li>Not go to bed at 2AM. Bad habit here, needs to stop<\/li><li>Write more. Here and on my personal blog. This is going to be&#8230;. difficult.<\/li><li>Try and focus on an online course and spend some time each week on it. This is also going to be difficult.<\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The year&#8217;s been hell, I think most everyone agrees. For me, in addition to all the external problems, I&#8217;ve been fighting with depression ranging from bothersome to near-crippling. This is not advice, this is not a magic solution. This is&#8230; <a class=\"read-more-button\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/2020\/12\/31\/the-black-pit-of-despair\/\">(Read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Blog post: The black pit of despair","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7h6n-Ec","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2492"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2493,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2492\/revisions\/2493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}