Category: mental health

I am so tired these days, tired beyond any of the words I could ever hope to fill this page with. My bones are exhausted, every muscle is spent, every neuron in my brain is overshot, my soul is in tatters from the constant fight to stay alive and try to make it to the next day. Every night, I languish in an emotional roller coaster that fills the cavity where my heart once resided, now banished to a place where it only occasionally sees the beauties that the light of day illuminates. I lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling, pills blunting but not stopping the blows of every horrible thought you could imagine.

Seeing the loved ones I have lost.

Seeing mothers grieving and screaming over the bodies of their dead children.

Seeing the faces of so many helpless people begging me to intervene, and being so afraid to fail them.

Seeing the things I have done to myself to numb the pain, the things that leave scars on my body and in my mind.

Not seeing an end to all of this pain and suffering.

It all makes me so tired.

I remember once being a man, a man of purpose, a man of action, a man exclaimed, a man proud of his accomplishments, a man thanked, a man blessed, and a man people turned to for help. Now, I all I see in the mirror is whatever shell is left over when that flame, that burning passion, has been snuffed out. I see my face covered in ash, remnants of a life now burned down to dust and embers. What am I supposed to build with this field of cinders? What new edifices can I build with the stumps of once great and towering trees? How will I till this land when all that is left are the vultures that pick over the tattered remnants of my life, the crows that look into my soul and see it lacking, and soil left barren by the salt of endless tear-filled nights?

I wanted to change the world, and I felt like I was on top of it all. I could move mountains with with my words, I could part oceans with my tongue, I could inspire with my passion, I could will the world to change with my mind. How much was madness and how much was me I will never know; these diseases, these diagnoses, these labels are so intertwined with my personality that I will never be able to tell if my hands move because I will it or the demons tell me so.

I am slowly trying to make a sandcastle with these ashes, but the going is hard. Every day, it seems like a new wind comes to blow away what I make, and another day is lost trying to move forward.

But that’s just it, I am always moving foward.

Every day, no matter how much pain I feel, no matter how much I lose connection with reality, no matter how hard I cry, no matter how deep I cut, no matter how much I scream at the birds yelling in my head, I keep on going. I must.

I cannot let this beat me.

I know that I can have a life, a better life, maybe even a glorious one.

I can find something worth living for, something worth giving everything for, instead of just another reason to die.

I know that maybe this moment of clarity will not last, and I know that I will always suffer; but I hope that one day I will learn to live with all of this. I know that I will never control the demons that scream at me to do horrible things, that I will never quell the beasts in my chest that stampede and rob me of sleep; but I know that I can learn to make it a little better. I know that one day, it’s possible that I can live a happier life.

I am so tired of all of this, all of this constant sorrow and suffering.

So I am going to do something about it.

I am going to keep on putting the work in. I will let myself heal. I will get to a place where I can once again help heal others.

I am tired, but I know that one day I will wake up and this will be just another memory.

Tomorrow always comes, and I will do everything to make sure I seize it.

“Close your eyes and tell me when you’re ready to begin.”

I say ok, close my eyes, and the film starts again.

I’m watching myself. She’s there too, standing where she always does; who she is doesn’t matter, their faces are all the same. She turns to the left, and I take another picture. I am asking questions as I take photographs with my phone, but I don’t hear what I’m saying. I can only see my same actions, over and over and over again. I cannot see my face.

*tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*

She tells me about what happened to her. She tells me the same story I have heard from countless women just like her. I cannot hear her speaking, but I can feel the weight of thousands of words spoken by dozens and dozens of people. I watch myself hide behind the phone taking pictures, hoping my face doesn’t betray my empathy, my shock, all of the emotions coursing through my body wanting to scream out that I am in way above my head. I feel the need to control, but all I see is myself taking more pictures. She lifts her shirt to show another bruise. I get closer to get a better shot.

*tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*

She sits back down in the chair. So many have sat in that chair. Stalin said one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic; I can only say that one sad story is horrible, and that a library of them only brutalizes the soul. The film blurs for a moment as she changes into someone else for just a second, a single frame spliced into the reel. It’s jarring, and it pulls my chair closer towards the screen. I ask more questions I do not remember but feel, while I sit and watch. Another splice. Another inch closer towards the screen and the fourth wall.

He stops tapping on my knees, “Ari come out of the film, open your eyes.”

I hear his voice like an usher asking me to leave the theater, but something makes my mind ignore him. I’m glued to the scene, to the emotions flooding into me as I delve deeper into this archetypal memory from an archive of similar stories. I feel the hand starting to grab my chest, wrap its fingers around my heart and squeeze. I’m starting to forget that this is a film and that I’m in my social worker’s office doing this exercise.

“Ari, Ari, come out of it open your eyes.”

The theater is slipping away and I’m walking into the film. I’m getting sucked in again. I can feel the rage of helplessness washing over me again. I’m fighting to open my eyes, tears starting to pool at the corners of my eyes, but the anger is keeping them locked shut. I am locked in this forced recollection, my imagined self is getting dragged into the scene. I am becoming my memory again. I am losing it again. I am losing control. I am becoming me. I can start to feel the chair turn into the one I once sat in. She is in front of me.

“Ari!”

I open my eyes, but I don’t see where I am. The social workers are in my office, and she is sitting next to them. I cannot tell if I am still watching the film or not. I cannot tell if this is my memory or reality. I cannot tell the difference between the two. Is any of this real, am I still watching the film, or did I disappear in the ether between this world and the one in my head?

“Ari where are you?”

I look around the room and I see the social worker’s decorations and I wonder why they are in my office. I feel like I am neither awake or asleep. For a moment, things almost become black. I don’t know where I am.

“Ari where are you?”

“I…I’m in your office”

“What day is it?”

I check my watch and say, “Monday.”

We run through the secular and Hebrew months, and I am starting to come back to reality. Whatever self I created to watch that film is almost entirely back in my head. She is gone too, banished back to my nightmares and to those moments when someone’s face on the street changes to hers.

They say this is going to help, but that it’s going to get worse until it finally turns for the better. All I know is that last night was the same as the one before: unable to sleep, mind raving, and waking up at 4 am from another nightmare and gasping for air like I’m suffocating.

Three months of this all and I can function, but I’m still living one day at a time. I guess that’s an improvement from not wanting the morning to come, but I’m getting tired of living stuck in this series of sessions and days that blend together and have nothing to differentiate one from the other. People ask me what I do for a living, and I give the half-truth of that I’m between things. The reality is that I live for these sessions. Everything is all too often a blur. I can still feel the cheap cloth of the hospital clothes on my skin, but I’m so far removed from those days and those people.

This is my life. Sessions. Session after session. I just want to live, but she and all of the others keep me up too late at night. My mind won’t stop, no matter how many times I beg and plead just for a little sleep each night.

The next session is next week, same time, same people. I’ll see them all again.

I’ve been gone for a while, more than a while. It’s been more than two months since my last post, and so much has happened that I felt compelled once again to share the innermost secrets and emotions occupying my heart and mind for the past few months. The months I’ve spent away from this blog felt like an eternity, each day blending into the next in a never-ending stream of constantly questioning the nature of my own reality. I spent days looking so deeply inside of myself that I completely lost track of where I’m looking, blurring the line between myself and the memories I am trying to unlock and the peace I seek. While I was away, my poked and prodded brain was forced to recall all my past traumas, pushed far beyond the edge of sanity, to the point where even words lost their meaning. I lost the ability to pick up a pencil and put it to page and express the enormous range of emotions that coursed throughout my body. I was literally reduced to drawing stick figures to try and express the immense intensity of of everything I was going through.

So where the fuck was I?

I just spent two months hospitalized in a mental institution; well 50-something days to be a little more precise. Now, I’m close to halfway through outpatient therapy, which takes up half of my day. One day, all of this living with mental health problems, living with the darkness, with the voices telling you to hurt yourself, to end your life, just got to be too much. There was one day in my life where I had to make a choice: go to the hospital and get help or take the very large risk that my life would end in a few days.

I chose to get help, and that decision is probably one of the biggest I’ve ever made. It’s changed my life, but I’m still trying to figure out what it’s been changed into. Being hospitalized has me gripped with so many questions about myself, but more about how I will have to probably explain for the rest of my life this turning point in my life; my scars bare testament that I have something to explain.

How do I even explain any of this? I feel like I’ve been given a new life, and that my old one is just another shell shed in life’s many transformations. In so little time, so much has happened to me that has changed everything. I’m afraid that I will never return to where I was, that my former self is an impossibility. There is only this thing which I must explain over and over and that is truly inexplicable. I must take every day at face-value and live without looking forward or backward. I have to live in the moment if I have any chance of surviving, and possibly making it to a point where I can pick up my head and look to the future.

How do I tell my friends that they haven’t heard from me because I cut myself off from them while I was in the four walls of that place? That talking with people on the outside was too painful, that seeing social media streams was so petty in comparison to trying to get to the root of my madness. How do I tell them what I saw? How do I tell them what happened to me? What I did? How I felt every single emotion to the infinite degree? Do I tell them about the time that I got so lost in a memory recall session that, afterwards, I had to be sedated and dragged off to my room in a near-catatonic state, the ward cleared and nurses scared by the new patient? Do I tell them about the near daily toll it takes on a man’s psyche to see the people around him go through the same? To sleep next to a man whose nightmares from war still haunt him years on, screaming in his sleep? That every day, I saw another person I grew to love break down; and I had to stand by as some professional took care of it, while us patients were left to pick up the pieces. That place created such deep bonds, shared connections over grief and pain and trauma, that I cannot help but think of those people now as knowing parts of me more than anyone else on this planet. How do I explain to my friends of decades that a person I’ve known for two months has seen more of my soul than they ever have? How do I explain any of this to the people I love?

Do I show them my arms, now the bearers of scars, monuments to moments where the urge to harm overwhelmed any kind of sense of self-preservation? Do I tell them about the calm you feel when that cut over your arm relieves you of the guilt you feel for past misdeeds? To focus on the immediate pain and not the demons screaming in my mind? That seeing the red blood flow down your arms feels like the warmest blanket on the coldest winter you could possibly imagine for a troubled mind solely focused on ending the pain in one’s head. Can you explain to someone who has never had the urge to hurt oneself the indescribable screaming in the back of your head just to do anything to make the pain focus somewhere else? How can I explain madness to the sane? It’s like trying to describe color to the blind, or music to the deaf, or the overwhelming feeling of wanting to die to those whose lives are entirely dominated with the indomitable will to live? At a certain point, words just seem to lose their effectiveness.

I’ve moved to outpatient care for now, but I’m just trying to get by every day. I wake up each morning and spend the rest of my day in a state of trying to link myself to reality, to reign in my mind’s attempts to escape this plane that I live in now. Everything familiar is alien, everything comforting is bizarre, everything that I thought was constant seems like its constantly on the precipice of crumbling. I have good days, or at least good parts of days, before it all starts to come back. I am not at the point I was two and a half months ago, but I am now at another point of being adrift on this long journey. I thought of an example of how my brain feels. Imagine you have a very large bowl of water, with another smaller bowl of water floating in the middle. Slowly, you start to spin the outer waters, and slowly the inner bowl spins as well, it’s waters matching the pace of the outer waters. You keep doing this, increasing the pace, until the water is almost tipping out of the outer bowl. Then, suddenly, you stop your hand and start spinning the outer water in the opposite direction. The water in the small bowl breaks and swirls in confusion. That’s my brain, a small bowl of water spinning in two directions, trying to make sense of everything happening around me.

Honestly, I sometimes feel so lost and aimless these days. I feel like whatever shred of self-image I had was torn from my skin by the process of psychiatric evaluation and reevaluation. Whatever compasses I had in my mind, pointing towards hope, towards G-d, towards what I thought was the path in front of me were smashed along with the idea of the man I’ve become over some thirty-odd years. I sit here writing this truly only living for today, expecting nothing from tomorrow, not knowing what the future holds. It is existentially terrifying to be rudderless in this sea, in this ocean of fixing the deep flaws in my mind.

There was my life before this, and now there is this. I never would have thought it would have taken me to thirty to have such a life-defining time, and one especially like this, but it is what it is. I am no longer Ari; I am Ari with this. Even after these scars fade, I will still be forever changed by time in the hospital. Even now, I am still struggling to stay afloat, although it’s gotten a little easier after spending my time away. I still have dark thoughts and dark nights, but I can smile now, I can laugh, I can even crack a beer and spend time with friends. I’m functioning, but I still hope to thrive one day. I can experience joy now; my wife has even said that these days have been better than they’ve been in a long time. I know that my time in the hospital, and my time in outpatient care, is working. I can enjoy life, even if there is still darkness in the corner in of the room. The voices are mostly silent these days, and I hardly notice the birds flying around me. If I do, I can get through it. I am still trying to figure out what it means to be me, and that is not always filled with rainbows and light, but it is better than being three days away from another statistic.

This is just a portion of what I must write on this part of my life. Fuck, I might write a short book about all of this, if only to give justice to every person I met along the way that got me to this point. The fellow patients, the staff, my family, all of them deserve to know more; but I can’t give it all right now.

Look out for more. I don’t know what format it will take, but it will come out. There is also a collection of images that I drew while that I was in there that I may release via here and Instagram @htxtoholyland, so keep an eye out. For now, much love from the holy land, and hello from the new me.

I turned thirty last week, and I did everything I could to try and erase my birthday from my life.

Last year, I remember celebrating with a group of my new friends from ulpan, my Hebrew school, at one of my favorite restaurants in Haifa. The group of us, of which my wife and I were the only native English speakers, enjoyed ourselves over amazing salads, grilled meats, and tasty beverages. I remember them all giving me a present, something I never expected from this group of people that I had only known for a couple of months. The only thing that united us was our shared identity as new immigrants, finding support in one another what we missed from our respective countries of origin. It was a beautiful thing, this little group of ours struggling in English and Hebrew, but loving every moment of the camaraderie.

This year was completely different.

I haven’t had the best couple of months. In the span of three months, I’ve been through a worldwide pandemic, I’ve moved cities and lost my support network (or whatever I had of one), I got fired from my job, my trip back to America was cancelled, been in actual self-quarantine, and my mental health has been the worst its been in a very long time. To be a new immigrant in a country, without any family, and in a new city where the normal welcoming committee is scared to even have you in their home is incredibly isolating and emotionally crippling . I went from speaking with coworkers, neighbours, and friends every day to staying in my home for days on end, either out of fear or by government mandate.

Which brought me all to last week. I’ve been dreading this birthday for months, pretty much since we moved here to Netanya. This year, my Hebrew (according to the lunar/solar-based Jewish calendar) and my English (Gregorian-based) birthdays were back-to-back. I knew that it would be a lonely couple of days. I knew that it was going to be another reminder of how unreal these times are.

Mostly, I knew it was going to be a reminder of how much I feel like I’ve fallen short of where I thought I would be. It was going to be a 48-hour testament to my failings and disappointments.

I thought that by now that I would have a normal career, now I’m unemployed again for the umpteenth time in my life. I thought I would have a home and all the trappings of a professional life, instead I feel guilty about buying anything over $20 for myself. I thought that I would be a father, able to hold a child in my arms; but it seems that G-d has decided not to grant me that yet. I thought I would be emotionally-stable and happy, and now I just see that kind of mental well-being as the ill-informed dreams of a pre-diagnosis self; I don’t truly believe that I’ll do more than survive. I can’t imagine what thriving would even look like now. I still struggle with daily tasks, I still have difficulty maintaining a relationship, I still struggle constantly trying out how to move forward from here.

So I hid every bit of information that I could, secreted away the evidence of my birth on social media. I hid it on facebook (surprisingly got wishes on linkedin because of course I forgot about linkedin), ignored all of the notifications, and told my wife that I didn’t want gifts or a party. I didn’t want to be reminded of my perceived shortcomings and I didn’t feel like I had done anything to deserve a gift.

So, when the big day came, I still ended up getting a few birthday wishes, and for those I was genuinely grateful. There were still a few friends and family members that remembered without a notification in their feeds, and even my wife’s grandparents called me to wish me a happy birthday. Maybe I would have gotten some kind of fleeting joy from a sudden deluge of wishes, but I’m glad that I didn’t. Not because I think that any of there messages or posts would have been lip-service or meaningless, but because I knew that I would have only just obsessed the entire thing had I spent 24 hours counting the number of people that remembered. G-d knows that I would never remember without something external, so I would never blame anyone that didn’t know or remember.

I ended up spending the day with my wife doing one of the few things I still find some joy in: cooking for people whose company I enjoy. I grilled up some chicken and sausages and we had a nice Shabbat with some of the only family we have in this country. We played games the next day, and it was the first time I enjoyed myself in a very long time. I still hold onto that day a week later.

So, I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, and I am still in survival mode. I may not be the man I thought I was going to be at 30, but I still got some things right. I somehow managed to keep hold of my spouse, I live in the country of my dreams, and I made it through today. I spent so much of my life thinking that I had to constantly be productive, that my worth was directly tied to my work and my status, and that I had to always be changing the world. I still think that deep-down, but I’m at least starting to work on the idea that I deserve to be happy and loved not because I do X or because I am Y, but that I deserve those things simply because I am me. It’s a struggle to change your entire way of looking at life, and having bipolar disorder doesn’t make it any easier, but I know that life has to be more than just goals. As sad as it seems, sometimes I know that a win for me is just getting out of bed, or going to bed, or daring to think that I deserve to see tomorrow. I don’t have to be ok all of the time, and I often need help, but I have to just tell myself that I am worth it.

I may have cancelled my birthday, but I don’t want to cancel life. No matter how hard it is, and I know this may sound pathetic, but I will keep on fighting the urge that makes me just want to give it all up and go back to living a life where I was shocked to reach another birthday. I don’t know what my next birthday will be like, and whether I’ll want to celebrate it; but I know, or at least I hope, that I will spend the time until that day living and not looking to cancel the next day.

If I’ve made it thirty years in the kind of life I’ve lived, what’s a few months of horror in the grand scheme of things? I’m not going to to let a bunch of meaningless disappointments keep me down for too long.

I fought too damn hard to get to 30 to let one day do me in.

Honestly, I feel like I don’t have the right to write about anything right now. As of today, there have been 20 deaths here in Israel and over 5,000 cases of COVID-19, and the rest of the world is grappling with a pandemic that will, in all likelihood, change our lives for the considerable future. I know people who have lost family members to this disease. Friends have lost their jobs. People everywhere are afraid about what the next day is going to bring, and it feels like everything is spinning out of control.

But I have to say something about what my life has been like.

Three weeks ago, I had a life-changing day. One of those days that someone with my mental health issues always fears, something that I dreaded ever since my psychiatrist in the United States first diagnosed me as bipolar three years ago. One of those things that once you experience it, there’s no going back. I had one of those events that demonstrates why people with my diagnosis in general have a ten-year shorter life expectancy than your average person:

Two weeks ago I was treated at a psychiatric hospital following a hypomanic episode.

The days prior to March 11, 2020 saw increasing frequencies of the signs of trouble on the horizon. At nights, whenever I was supposed to be sleeping, I was pacing my office for hours in a circle, talking to myself and the voices in my head that just wouldn’t stop talking back. Each day, my heart rate spiked at around 130 (thanks Apple Watch for the friendly reminder that you’re going insane). Each night and throughout the day, it felt like there were electrodes attached to my heart and someone was pulsing them with a car battery. I felt that instantly recognizable feeling of having jet fuel for blood, burning at a thousand degrees. My body was exhausted from constantly running overclocked, but none of the (legal) sedatives I could get my hands on would do anything to stop my body and mind from running at full speed into the brick wall of full-blown madness.

Then it came.

It happened at work (doesn’t it always?). I was getting ready to give a class (I’m an English teacher now guys!), when all of sudden I felt it: the uncontrollable desire to move. I got up to try and prepare outside in the fresh air, anything to calm me down; it didn’t. I got up and started walking and pacing in a big circle in our outdoor area. I started talking to myself again, repeating again and again and again and again and again, “calm down, calm down, be calm, don’t lose it.”

By the point my hands had moved to the back of my neck, grabbing at the scruff leftover from my last Israeli-style haircut. I pulled at whatever I could grab, try and feel something other than the compulsion to keep moving, something besides the burning fire going through my veins. I took off my hoodie and started screaming into it, screaming because all of my thoughts were going too fast to actually form words. Every single emotion I felt could only be expressed in the primal desperation of a full and throat-killing scream. I wanted to jump and fly, I wanted to run until I passed out, I wanted to bash my skull into a million pieces, but most of all I screamed to just have everything stop.

There was a moment when I grasped enough clarity, enough of a gap in the episode to see that I needed to quickly get the fuck out of there before I had an actual meltdown. I bolted inside to my boss’ office, told her I had to leave and that I needed to get to the train station immediately. I told her I was bipolar, something I was hoping to never bring up again in work for the rest of my life. She took me, I collected my things as sneakily as possible (I probably looked way the fuck out of it), and got the hell out of there.

After that, it starts to get a little bit hazy. I really lost it. Like, not knowing where I was, where I was going, not being able to understand anything. I devolved into a shaking mess talking to himself and seeing devils around every corner. I was taken to one hospital, not admitted there, taken by ambulance to another, finally seen by a psychiatrist, given some drugs, and brought back down to earth. I left that night and got back to Haifa around midnight, having been through one of the worst experiences of my life.

I haven’t been back to work since. Not very long after my episode, I was put on unpaid leave along with most of the employees at my work. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve left my apartment (other than to walk my dog) to do anything. The restrictions here are getting tougher and tougher, and our government warns us that it’s only going to get worse.

Social distancing is my life now.

I thought at first that this time off right after the episode would give me some space, some room to breathe, some time to recover, some gap where I can focus on just getting better. It was at first, I spent the first few days trying to get as much rest as I could, to let myself heal.

Then the nights started to get to me again.

1 am. 2 am. 4 am. 6 am. Let’s just try and rest the sleep cycle.

I haven’t been able to sleep, to even make my mind still enough to sleep, before midnight in three weeks. Three weeks where my responsibilities were limited to fifty-five square meters. Normally, in times after an episode, I’d heavily rely on my social network to get me back on my feet. A good pat on the back, a beer with a friend, or even just a nice conversation with a stranger at the store.

Social distancing has made that all disappear.

I played Animal Crossing: New Horizons (super plug) today with my cousin in America, and I honestly think that he was the first person that I’ve spoken to that wasn’t my wife, my dad, or someone interacting with me in a medical relationship. I’m starting to lose my Hebrew, I haven’t spoken with an Israeli in a long time (my mind being fried doesn’t help). For those maybe 15 minutes, I was happier than I had been for a solid amount that I had been in a week. Even though I knew he was thousands of miles away, it felt like he was there with me. It felt so good that I could have almost looked next to me and seen him sitting next to me, playing along and exploring my little island.

Shabbat has become something I dread. My wife and I haven’t had a lot of meal invitations out before everything hit the fan; but this somehow has made everything so much worse. Out of 25 hours, I spend maybe an hour trying to eat with my wife, and the rest of it struggling to overcome how sad I feel inside, how alone I feel, how scared I am about my future, how I feel hopeless. It’s incredibly emasculating to have to tell your wife that you have to save your strength to share a meal because it hurts so much to get out of bed. What’s worse, I don’t have any of the normal electronic distractions to keep my mind from wandering to the darkest thoughts. All I can do on these sleepless Friday nights is hold myself as hard as I can and pray that the drugs kick in soon.

In the past few months I’ve shared probably more than I should, I’ve told you and the world more about my personal life than the average person would deem appropriate, or even safe. I went radio silent for two weeks on social media, and it nearly killed me. I got tired of people asking about me, asking my wife how I was doing. There are very few things in the world that hurt more, in my experience, than hearing your spouse tell you that people were calling her just to ask how I was.

I felt like I wasn’t a person anymore, just a problem.

I can’t keep it in anymore, I can’t not say something. People that know me know that I thrive on interaction, on talking, on sharing. To be silent is worse than any cutting I could do, any binge drinking, anything else that would push me closer to the edge. I need to get this off my chest, I need to be free from the weight dragging me down. Social distancing is already enough of a threat to my life, I don’t need to add to the danger by silencing myself.

So, I’m writing all of this to just say what’s been happening in my life, to let someone else besides my wife and psychiatrist know that I’m suffering, that I need help. I need all the interaction I can get. This is my desperate plea for you to reach and talk with me. It can be a text, a Facebook message, a WhatsApp, anything, please. Play Animal Crossing with me. Give me the social support that I need to live; because otherwise this social distancing will only continue to make it harder to get better.

I’m better than I was three weeks ago. Other than the insomnia and occasional negative thinking, the depression that came in right after the hypomania left is mostly gone. It comes back at nights, like it is as I write this, but that’s why I’m writing this again in the first place. I wouldn’t say that I have hope again, but I wouldn’t say that I’m hopeless. I’m on the slow process of getting better. I smiled multiple times today, and that was a really big deal for me. I cooked something interesting today for the first time in weeks. I had fun, and I can’t say I’ve had that in a while; but I need more help.

Please, in this time of social distancing, please remember me. Remember your friends and loved ones with mental health issues that are likely suffering because of the isolation. Take some time just connect with those you care about, maybe even reconnect with someone you haven’t talked with in a while. I think that one of the unspoken threats in this whole crisis has been the idea that we human aren’t meant to be separated for this long. We thrive on active and dynamic relationships, we need the support networks we all create for ourselves. If they have to go digital these days, so be it, but we need to remember that all of this social distancing can be dangerous too. Wash your hands, but make sure you stay connected to. With someone like me, reach out and check in your friends. This can be a time where it’s easy to get absorbed and distracted by the news, and easy to forget the people in your life that matter more than the latest political development that won’t change your daily health habits.

Thanks for reading as usual, and please be in touch. I’ll be playing in my little island, Kfar Ari, for pretty good chunks of the day here on Israel Standard Time, come visit 🙂