It’s been a while since I’ve been here. The quick version of events is I went on a trip to Mexico by myself, I stop taking all of my meds at once, I walked 10 miles on the side of the highway, my Aunt died, and I got in a physical fight with my dad.
Despite how all that sounds, these last 8 months have been very uneventful and stagnant. I’m not proud of where I am, and it’s hard to judge how much more I could be doing.
One of the first things my therapist taught me when I started seeing him again was how to calm down and respect the limitations depression puts on you. But my Dad fired him while I was hospitalized, so I don’t know what he would say now.
I’ve been doing a bad job of maintaining relationships with people. I arrived at a friend’s place of work at 10pm and asked her boss where the homeless people sleep before they called her and she drove out and got me McDonalds.
A friend of my Dad’s drove 3 hours to pick me up from a tiny town in Georgia after I was released by the Wilderness Therapy people. I haven’t spoken to him since.
I haven’t contacted any of the people who were on the retreat with me in Mexico, people I promised to keep in touch with. It has been 6 months.
I know I’ve got social anxieties. I know I’m worried about saying the ring thing and making people dislike me. But that doesn’t make it ok for me to ghost people. I need to do better.
So that is my commitment for this month. Starting on January 1st, 2024, I decided to exercise every day in a row, with the pressure of not breaking the streak as my motivator. I have exercised and, consequently, showered every day this year. I am proud of this and plan to continue.
This month, I want to work on being better at communicating with people I know. Ideally, every month this year I will come up with something I want to change, and execute that change in a way that I can sustain.
The reason I am making this post is to make myself accountable to people. It’s not the dramatic info dump I usually do, but it’s the only appropriate way to make this commitment at 3am. By March 1st, I want to have contacted all 11 names on my list.
I think I got all the letters of SMART in there.