If I write about low moods, it’s usually from the vantage point of having some perspective. I’ll be relating the tale of someone else’s low mood that I’ve helped them with, or remarking about one I’ve experienced myself, and how it didn’t last.
But today, it feels like wading through sludge. I’m actually in one!
So at the risk of being quite literally ‘self-indulgent’ (for what is a low mood but a congealed sense of self?) let’s do some mood-anthropology and see what it looks like from inside.
🕵🏻♂️
Not much! There’s a heaviness and a slowness. Enthusiasm is sorely lacking – things that would normally interest me, just don’t. Everything feels wrong. Nothing seems ‘good’. Not even music.
I’ve started writing this Daily Reminder, using different topics from my long list of inspiration, three or four times, and each time it’s just been rubbish. I feel I have nothing helpful to say, even though I know deep down that there’s gold in some of those ideas – I just can’t get to it today!
I was trying, and it obviously wasn’t working, so I gave up trying. Stepped away from my desk. (I’m writing this in the bedroom, on my iPad.)
The mind has packed its bags, ready to take me to ‘never-land’ but I’m not biting. That one’s too obvious and I have enough evidence under my belt that things will flow again, another day. So I haven’t deleted the good ideas or anything, I’ve just put them to one side, to be re-examined on one of those ‘other days’.
A low mood is not the place to be making decisions!
I don’t feel like I’m much use to anyone—wife, daughter, you—and I’ll play small for the day. But I made food and I put laundry on and I hung it out when it had finished and from the outside it all looks the same as any other day.
I have dozed. Just 15 minutes. Upon waking is when it occurred to me to write in a low mood (rather than avoiding it).
And it’s not so bad, is it? I have always described coaching as ‘being human with people, to show them it’s ok to be human’ and this one’s delivering in spades! 😆
I think the only drawback to writing about this state of mind, from actually within this state of mind, is that it’s all a bit same-y, isn’t it? Don’t know about you, but every low mood I’ve ever been in feels identical to the rest of them.
Flat. Heavy. Unenthusiastic. Same-y.
But I’ve done it now. Can’t say I feel any different—a bit amused, perhaps—but it’s done.
Tomorrow’s another day!
💟
Giles
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Giles P Croft
Remembered this one too – such a lovely poem! 💝