Depression, Anxiety, and Control

I think about my mental health a lot. I'm not ruminating on it. I'm making sure I'm aware of it so I can address it when needed.

I began my recovery journey in February 2023. In the following months, I had hundreds of hours of therapy (nine hours each week for months). I gained a lot of insight and learned powerful tools that continue to change my life. In my entire living memory, I've never been as mentally healthy as I've been the last 20 or so months.

I'm not a mental health professional. I write only from my experience. Expressing that experience helps me. And, maybe, it can help someone else.

One cognitive framework I learned to understand my mental health addressed depression, anxiety, and control:

My depression is ruminating and regretting my past. My anxiety is fear of the future, both immediate and distant. My past and my future are not in my control. I can let them go and live in the now.

It lacks nuance, but that's not the point. It helps, and that's enough.

I have an easier time with the past.

When I start any kind of roleplaying game (whether Dungeons & Dragons, my 67th playthrough of Skyrim, or anything else), I plot out a plan for my character's progression. I have spreadsheets outlining the order in which I'll take feats, skills, abilities, and spells. It's all there. It's not (always) about "min/maxing" or optimizing; it's about getting the vision of who I want the character to be and how the game mechanics help me get there.

This is also how I ruminate on my past.

I don't make a spreadsheet, but a relentless thought pattern has lived in my brain as long as I can remember: If I could give my current knowledge and ability to reason to myself at age five, what would I do with that to reach the vision of who I want to be (or wish I was)? I do this all the time; probably every day.

It's never been very productive, but used to be damaging. That optimized version of me and my life was the yardstick against which I measured myself. It was a cudgel with which I'd beat myself.

The thought experiment still happens, and I try to accept that having a thought come unbidden isn't blameworthy. (I might write about that more later.) But now I apply my framework: I can't control my past. It happened, and, even if there were moral failings, my past is not a moral failing now. I don't blame myself for it, because I can't do anything about it.

The future is harder for me.

In part, this is because I need to distinguish between "influence" and "control." I can plan. I can set myself up for success. I can influence my future. I cannot control it. And unlike my past, I also don't know it. Things will happen that I didn't imagine. Things will happen that, even if anticipated, couldn't have been stopped.

I can't throw up my hands and leave my future to fate. But I can't allow myself to think I can set my future, because I'll fail. The future will have terrible things in it, but I can't blame myself that they will happen. When the future becomes the present, I will have the power to decide what to do.

My past and my future are not in my control. What can I do in the here and now?

A hell of a lot.