Lyrics: Little Changes – Frank Turner, 2018
I was about to write how there isn’t much to tell. Which isn’t quite true, I guess. It’s just that I can’t quite find the write words to entangle the jumble of thoughts and emotions. Not all bad thoughts and emotions, just… messy. I still have a bit of a hard time to get motivated to do things. Anything. My therapist is aware of that and from next week on I’ll have to fill out a “let’s monitor this depressive episode” questionnaire. It still feels a bit weird to talk about “my therapist”. It also still feels weird to actually lable my state of mind with “depressive”. On the one hand, I think: “I’ve felt like this before. This can’t be an depressive episode.” Wrong, obviously. It might as well have been before and I just didn’t realize it. On the other hand I keep thinking “You’re not ill, you’re just lazy, pull yourself together, for God’s sake.” Which is not right either.
I will try to focus on the good things of this week so far and not dwell on the few / many (?) moments in which I worried and dawdle too much and in which I flagellated myself for doing that. The same old cycle.
I managed to not get dragged down a cycle of self-loathing on earlier this week when during a committee meeting I had to attend for work my mobil phone accidentally made way too much noise. It went on for much longer than it should have, because I couldn’t turn it off in panic. And for a about an hour I was worrying that everyone (of the important people) in the room will remember me for that moment forever. Which they won’t, I know, because it was just a small blip on their radar of a busy weekday. Like I said, I managed to stop that spiral early on. It all got overshadowed anyway by quite a nuisance caused by the right-wing politician on that committee. That’s the thing that will be remembered from that meeting for a while.
On that day I brought my camera with me to do some urban / street photography of this typical former industrial / worker city. I also stopped at a park on the way home, just because…
Another good thing to remember: Last night I mostly kept my calm and didn’t take it too personally, when the guys (brothers and friends) I went with to a stadium concert kept moaning on and on about how long it took to get off the parking lot I picked as designated driver. It took us an hour and I was annoyed myself but not surprised, because thousands of people want to get off every other parking lot. But I would have loved to skip the 60 minutes play-by-play about what was all going wrong and why there was no movement. In their defence, the guys were all quite inebriated by that point and they weren’t unfriendly in their commentary. But they just didn’t shut the fuck up *g*! Deep breathing helped to shut them out of my mind for the most part.
I only took my compact camera to the gig and we were sitting way up high, so most of my shots didn’t work out as well. But that’s okay. It was a good set and it was fun to scream along to many of the classics.
I wasn’t quite sure how I’d feel in such a big crowd and because it was outdoors I wasn’t sure if I should actually were my mask. But I put it on for most of the gig even at my seat and whenever I walked around. Even on my seat, because yes, it was outdoors, but sort of stationary, not a lot of wind, people sitting side by side. I smelled the smoke from the illicitly smoked cigarettes around us for quite a while. I don’t know if COVID aerosols can be considered similar to cigarette smoke, but there was no reason to risk it, right? I’m fine with wearing a mask in those kind of settings for a while longer.
I plan to head out in an neighbouring town later today for another photo shoot as well. We’ve got the day off tomorrow and I feel like being creatively active (being out, but also processing the photos a bit later) keeps my mind busy in a good way. So I’ll try to do more of that.
