A Quick Life Update

For the past couple of weeks, you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting as much as I normally would. My goal for this blog was to post something at least once a day since there are always things to talk about in the book world. That is still my goal, and one that I fully intend to get back to this week, but I wanted to take a moment and share a little bit of information about myself in case something like this happens again.

I’ve dealt with depression and anxiety for most of my life. It started in middle school and comes in waves. I’ll have long periods where I feel completely fine and happy, and then something will set it off and I’ll fall back into a period where I feel the effects of both conditions before I find a way to deal with it and get back to my happy state. Generally, those periods of anxiety and depression will last anywhere from a few months to a couple of years.

For the past few months, I’ve been dealing with it again. My full-time job is incredibly anxiety-inducing and can be very intense, and I believe that’s one of the main things that triggered the current depression and anxiety that I’m currently dealing with.

Three months ago I started taking an anti-anxiety medication after having multiple panic attacks while at work or while driving. Although I thought the medication was working for the first couple of weeks, it really wasn’t. Rather than lessening the effects of my anxiety, it’s actually been making it worse, as well as causing me to feel more and more depressed with each passing day. Along with that has come insomnia, nightmares when I am lucky enough to fall asleep, zero motivation, no interest in things I normally love, and poor eating habits.

Fortunately, I have an incredible boyfriend who has been helping me through it, and I have a doctor’s appointment today to get on a new medication that will hopefully affect me better. I took most of the week off work to rest and take care of myself, and that included taking a bit of time off of blogging.

Myself and my incredibly supportive significant other

Starting today, I’m pushing myself to get back to blogging every single day, because creating and writing for Read Yourself Happy brings me a great deal of joy and I adore being part of the book community. I just wanted to give you guys a quick look into my own life and let you know why I was absent for the last week. I’ve also been thinking about adding a weekly or bi-weekly feature on this site about ways I’ve found to deal with anxiety and depression, and if that’s something you’re interested in seeing, definitely let me know.