Looking Inwards

During the last school holidays (two weeks after Easter) I had grand plans of spending time writing more of my story to post on my “Corruption of Mrs Jones” page. I was feeling very positive and upbeat about life in general after spending a week pottering around a small beach community with my family. But, as the saying goes, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. I wrote a small amount and the rest of my time go swallowed up with things that seemed important at the time but right now I cannot remember what they were. 

In the past I would have beaten myself around the head with guilt at this failure to complete what I set out to do but I have learned to be more gentle with myself these days. Instead I noted it, and then got on with life. Rather I got on with letting life push me along at its whim. It wasn’t until I had a conversation with Mr Jones about a few things that are happening in our relationship that I realised this wasn’t the best pathway to choose. Our relationship is not suffering, in some ways it is stronger than ever. But the level of physical and emotional intimacy between us at the moment is very low. 

There are a number of reasons for this, related to what is happening in our house at the moment; 

• Mr Jones’ parents have just moved in with us
• We have two teenage children who take up a lot of our time and emotional energy 
• For the first time in about seven years I am working full time.

All of these things of course ar the result of choices that we have both made about the direction of our lives. Having said that when we made these decisions we didn’t imagine that they would converge together in this way. Except maybe the parent moving in part. We knew that wasn’t going to be easy but we felt it was necessary. 

What we didn’t consciously choose to have going on was for me to develop depression. To be fair I am not contemplating death constantly nor am I self harming daily but I have noticed that I have a tendency to disengage from “real” life. This means I sleep a lot more than I really need to and also spend a lot of time doing pointless activity like gaming on my iPad. Sometimes I justify this as ‘me time’ but really it isn’t healthy. It also means I have disconnected from important people like Mr Jones to a certain extent.

After my chat with my husband about where we are at with our sex life I came to think about all of this as looking inwards. Depression is a very strange beast. To me, most of the symptoms and behaviours are things that I just need to tell myself to “get over it and get on with it” but I am learning as time goes on that it isn’t as simple as all that. Sometimes I do need to just buck up but sometimes I need to be a little more cunning with my approach and trick the black dog into letting go.

And so at this juncture I find myself searching for ways to look outwards more often. I can’t completely stop dead looking inwards because deciding to do that is setting myself up to fail. I just need to choose to look outwards more often. The form the outwards looking will take is not entirely clear in my mind. Like a lot of things in my life I will just have to make it up as I go along. I am not sure if all of this will enable me to continue to share my story but I hope that I will visit these pages more often to shre my musings as a kind of therapy. 

So here is to looking outwards and re-connecting with the world. Even just a little bit.