My View from the Top of the World

Most of us have heard about relapse in people who are in recovery from addiction, or from certain diseases.   Relapse is defined as "a deterioration in one's condition after a period of improvement."  Well, as I've recently discovered personally, relapse occurs in our mental health recovery, also.  Quick heads up:  this is going to get personal.   I've realized that you can get a little over confident in your own journey, but then, as always, life has its way of forcing you to stop and take notice.  Often, with relapse, there are warning signs that something is going wrong.  With physical disease, this might be recurrence of symptoms.  In my own depression relapse, I started to notice weeks ago that I was feeling more frustrated and angry, more frequently.  I was also feeling more and more exhausted, where all I wanted to do was curl up under the blankets with only the heating pad and dogs for company.  I noticed these things w...

My brain is a jumble and I had no idea what I was going to write about today until I saw this tweet.  And, honestly, I still have no idea what I'm going to write about so we'll just see how it goes.   So, yeah, this grabbed my attention.  I'd been thinking of heading in this direction, but really didn't want to be a downer.  And I didn't want to make peoples' eyes spontaneously roll by talking about the hard times, and the mental health, and the importance of self-love and self-care, and the inevitable conclusion of "find the positive."  Because, not everyone is in the same place right now, and that's obvious with all the dissension in the media and social media.  In fact, you have to admit that social media is a bit of a cesspool right now.  It's practically impossible to post anything other than puppies and kittens without igniting a firestorm of conflicting, and often, nasty and inexcusable comments (and I've even seen those on puppy pos...

  You had to know that eventually, I'd have to go there... you know, running is a metaphor for life.  Well, lots of things are a metaphor for life, but running and athletics definitely are. I've always said that the last two miles of any run are the hardest.  It doesn't matter whether I'm running six miles or twenty - six, those last two are killers.  Even running a marathon, when I've put in all the hours and miles of training... I know, in those last two miles, that this is it... it's almost over... the finish line is in sight, and so is the celebratory meal.  When you've put in all the hard work, expended the energy, and survived all the obstacles of training, with twenty minutes, or so, to go, you just can't wait for it all to be finished.  Everything goes back to normal... no more four hour training runs for a while, you just get to be a "normal" runner again - if there is such a thing.  How about all of this as a metaphor for quarantine l...