Reinventing happiness: Mac & cheese

Beautiful Things, beauty found, Diary, Feelings, happiness, Life, Thoughts, Well being, words

For the past few years I have been through some difficult times (disease in the family, mental health issues, etc, etc). All these eventually left me lacking happiness.

It’s not only hard for me to feel happy nowadays, it’s almost impossible. No, I don’t have depression (but I do have OCD). I feel something like happiness, but it isn’t it!

After a lot of thought with myself and conversations with my therapist, I decided what my next step would be.

Reprogramming my brain so it can feel happiness, in some way reinventing it.

Paying attention to small things I like, looking in the past and in the present, giving myself tasks, trying new things.

I’m going to document all these here, starting from something quite simple: a dish (ok, I had 1.5 dishes) of mac and cheese!

And here’s a selfie after having a very good mac and cheese….

Happy!

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Living with/out OCD (no.13)

Anxiety, Diary, Feelings, Life, Living with/out OCD, Mental Health, OCD, Thoughts, words

To be honest, the title of this series of posts feels a little bit off lately. I started working towards a life without OCD a few months before I stopped my medication (details about it in previous posts). Since the period I stopped my sertaline things have been… difficult. But lately, I have been feeling much better.

The only “leftover” is the increased anxiety levels. For almost three years my brain was used to getting its daily dose of sertaline and I had managed to create a balance in order to be functional.

And now, I’m in the process of reorganizing that balance, with a meds-free brain. I’m researching for ideas to decrease my anxiety.

The process, and all the tons of anxiety I’m going through lately, remind me of a dream I used to have since I was a kid. It was one of those that are closer to a nightmare than a dream.

I was in a car, I was driving (even though I didn’t know how to), I had to find the right way to go and then I couldn’t stop the car.

Now, I see my anxiety as that car. I have to learn how to handle it under the current circumstances and manage to go forward.

Living with/out OCD (no.12)

Anxiety, Feelings, Life, Living with/out OCD, OCD, Thoughts, words

Going of antidepressants, after almost three years of taking them, while still having OCD and being in therapy.

It’s for the better, but the fact doesn’t make it any easier. I wrote a few posts about the procedure and all the things that I felt. This one is about the time that things got better.

It’s been 5 months since I stopped taking my meds (after a period of tapering tge dose and always under my doctor’s instructions). And, I won’t lie, it was one of the most difficult periods of my life (until now).

The uncomfortable feelings, the massive amounts of crying, the demons and memories awakened.

During all the above, that are totally normal by the way when you stop giving your mind the extra sertaline that it really liked, there was one thing that I realized: how much tired my body and mind were. So, after trying many things in order to feel better until the storm was over, I decided to press pause for many things in my life, take time for myself, learn to do nothing and relax. A couple of weeks after putting my idea in action….magic!

One afternoon I finally felt better. And calmer. The calm I was feeling with the antidepressants. And the storm was quite over. Yes, there are moments that things get weird and tough, but I deal with them pretty good!

In the past months, the progress I had already made with my self-awareness helped a lot, and the therapy was there to help at hard times, but I believe that what was really crucial was the fact that I knew it was just a really difficult period that would eventually end, during which I was willing to feel it all and look for ways to feel better.

And that combo of patience and fighting the darkness paid off in the end.

Maybe now it’s time to continue with my “Living with/out OCD” project!