I’m not going to do yoga today. My hips are aching.

I’ve been doing about three hours of it a day these past ten days or so. I suspect that’s excessive. It’s not all at once. A twenty-minute cycle here, fifteen minutes of poses there.

It’s about not being sedentary and placating my eating disorder voice. I do not have the energy to deal with her right now so I’m trying to keep her quiet with small, reasonably meaningless wins. Hence the prolonged yoga. And even as I criticize myself over my lack of perfect flexibility, it calms.  

It soothes.

It’s probably why I dropped into malasana when I started to panic and think about stabbing the bread knife on the counter into my leg.

Squatting is obviously a better choice. Plus, I had a mental image of trying to explain the consequences of my moment of despair to the paramedics. They were very unimpressed with me.

I made a mistake, you see. That’s sometimes hard to live with when you’re deeply depressed.

Today is garbage day. In my neighbourhood, garbage collection works like this: weekly, compost and recycling; bi-weekly the pickup includes actual garbage. I got off cycle. I didn’t check. I thought it was garbage next week. Now I won’t have garbage for two more weeks.

I was so devastated. Failure. Loser. A part of my brain was screaming in the background, reminding me that the dump is a thing, that my son works where there is a large bin, that we don’t have much garbage anyhow, that this is probably the first time I’ve missed it in twenty years. It didn’t matter. Anxiety rises. Feelings of failing at life rise.  

Depression leaves you thin-skinned. You cling to tolerable with your fingernails. It seeks any excuse to attack. And I hate it. I hate the ridiculousness of it all.

I’m not sure I’m doing well with my meds, either. I think I’m missing doses. I don’t have one of those daily ones because of reasons that seemed logical at the time. I have the storage side of the pill cutter. I get the box with my meds down after I eat. Mostly. But I don’t take them right away. I get distracted by this thought or that.

I have the attention span of a squirrel on meth. And now I feel a bit guilty about stereotyping squirrels. But staying on task is hard these days. Everything becomes bite-sized.

And none of this was supposed to be what today is about. I’m supposed to be taking off grout and sealant and redoing the shower in the bathroom. I’ve started but pushing through is ridiculously hard. Seeing my friends post pictures of the bedroom they repainted in an evening makes the sense of failure even worse, even while knowing “comparisons are odious.”

On the bright side, the range of motion I’m bringing to my cobra has increased.