Living with mental illness.

One of the things that can be difficult to explain is it’s never really one thing that’s making your mood low for a long time – it’s a constant drip, drip of little things, each of which saps a little bit of joy out of your day which add up over the day to the background depression until you end up having a bit of an emotional collapse, tired, hungry and just… snap.

Today is typical.

My alarm goes off at 7:00, I get up, brush teeth, make coffee, pull on the [indoor safe] clothes which are slightly damp from the wash, curl up in bed with the iPad and coffee and try to wake up. It’s unusually cold. Autumn is finally here, which I was prepared for – I washed my hoodie (the only concession as someone who grew up in Scotland that I make to the mild winters that we have down here I ever make) on Saturday.

// At this point the day is fairly normal, load 0.01

Of course being October 2023, Twitter is full of horrible pictures of world events.

Pull on jeans which are not so much damp, as soggy. And cold.

Shudder, unplug iPad, iPhone, work iPhone, Steam Deck, turn off Wifi on all of them for I am heading into London and who knows what bad things could happen with it on.

Pour two Tenzing Energy drinks into my IBM Innovation Lab branded bottle thing, slip into my Crocs without needing to touch my feet.

Head out the door.

It’s surprisingly bitter and I can feel the cold through the holes in my Crocs. This makes me realise I’ll probably have to go back to boots soon, with all the problems that entails, both in touching things and causing me some pain.

// load 0.03

As I turn into Ennersdale Road, there is a massive squishy looking dog turd in the middle of the footpath which I neatly dodge around. Ennersdale road is too narrow and for reasons the council have decided to paint parking spots half on the pavement all down the road. This means at many points it’s effectively two feet wide, and thanks to some asshole dog owner, it’s now mined. I know that when I come back, because of the way the street is lit, the poo mine will be in complete darkness, so I add a small process in my brain to remind me to either go up the other side (which is lit, good going Lewisham Council) or go up the other road on which leads to the takeaways + Co-op. I curse the dog owner under my breath.

This is a persistent problem on Ennersdale Road which makes me suspect it's deliberate - that there's a particular dog owner responsible - a sociopathic rebel against pedestrians.

// load 0.10

For reasons I’m fractionally late and so get a later train than usual from Hither Green. This sets off a chain of events where I am flustered and the lateness builds up as I transition from Southeastern Rail to ThamesLink at London Bridge. Triage email on train. Broken email from OD about mandatory training as if there’s nothing better to do with my day.

// load 0.12

I pick up my doughnut and coffee at the coffee shop under the library and chat to the barrista – we commiserate about how cold it is and I cross the road and enter the office. Someone else entering the office gives me a weird look as I enter the building and I’m then trapped with him awkwardly in the elevator.

// load 0.13

Plug laptop in and start dealing with the actually important emails.

Have daily stand-up on Teams where we all sit down briefly whinge about the weather and then update everyone on where we plan to be by the end of today.

// begin interlude

Today is meant to be good, because I’m helping out as a demonstrator for other parts of the course I’m lecturing in later this year, and I really like working with students because they’ve not been ground down by life yet.

// end interlude

Looking at Teams, the teaching has been moved to a different room. Fine, schlep over to the IoE. New room is fairly cramped with no-where to put my stuff except on another chair. Unfortunately this becomes problematic as there are barely enough seats and I have a small queue of people asking for help, which is not itself helped by me having two separate instances of my brain just not working and things taking longer than they should.

My hoodie ends up on the floor.

MY HOODIE ENDS UP ON THE FLOOR.

Now as mentioned elsewhere this causes some problems – I now have additional processes in the background – I must change my shirt when I get home so I don’t contaminate the bed. I also think a bit too hard about how Ansible is packaged in Homebrew so I have something technical to worry about, so that’s running in the background too.

// load 0.5

James and I merge our 1-2-1 into lunch to save us time later. We have a good catch-up and the important mutual whinge, but in the end I know there is an massive unfixable thing overshadowing everything that’s not his fault and nothing any of us can do anything about, namely about accommodation for the department which is only ever a source of bad news and getting worse.

// load 0.45

We then have the ARC SLT which has a very upsetting presentation I don’t really want to discuss (I ended up feeling a bit like I exist as a point in someone's chart only I don't because they forgot to ask me).

And more serious discussion about the accommodation issues.

// load 0.7

On the upside, during the presentation I manage to write Ansible to automate the deployment of all the Docker stuff that the students will need for my part of the module so I’ve made their lives slightly better in the future?

If we aren’t fighting WWIII at that point.

We get an email second hand that there’s a mild information security thing we need to sort out, so I deal with that, which involves co-ordinating with people and then poking the annoyance that is AWS. (don’t worry, it’s not a breach or anything like that, but it’s security so I have to take it seriously and get it precisely right).

// load 0.75

It’s now 4pm and I decide I’m not going to get any (more?) useful work done today so I might as well do the mandatory training. Only, I can’t find it. Sure, there’s a link in the email, but I’m sure as **** not going to click on that and put in my UCL authentication details (for some reason if you go to many of our O365 authed cloud shit apps the wrong way they try to do their own auth). For reasons that escape me there is either no link to LearnUpon that auths with O365 auth on the OD website or it’s so well hidden it might as well not exist.

// load 0.9

I eventually click on the “enrol in fire safety” link which luckily doesn’t re-enrol me in that course but does auto-sign me into LearnUpon so I can retake the mandatory training course on GDPR and Freedom of information that I took on the 22nd of Sept 2022 but for reasons presumably of sadism we are meant to retake every year.

I’m fairly certain this course has not changed in the 13 months, indeed I’m fairly certain the test questions at the end are the same.

I get 100%.

// load 0.92

One of my staff has some questions about things and so we discuss those issues a bit and have a bit of a sanity boosting chat about how annoying this place can be.

// load 0.79

I leave the office later than usual and trundle to St Pancras. As I enter the ThamesLink station, I can see that the roof has been leaking into buckets of fairly disgusting water. Thinking nothing of it (why would you?) I step past and as I do, some of the water splashes up INTO MY LEFT EYE.

WHAT THE **** I QUITE LIKE HAVING TWO EYES BUT I GUESS ONE IS GOING TO ROT AND FALL OUT.

If it doesn’t kill me.

// load 0.99

I’m so discombobulated that I miss my train at London Bridge twice – once because it’s short formed and the second time because my mind skips as I try to ineffectually remote-debug a problem someone is having with a C++ compiler via Slack on my phone.

I get to Hither Green at about 18:40. Luckily the “poo reminder” process is still working and I decide that rather than reheat the slightly disappointing pasta from last night, I’ll get a takeaway.

This takes me up the other street, which is well lit and avoids the poo mine. I kill the poo mine process, setting it to restart tomorrow morning.

Sadly, all the takeaways in Hither Green are part of some sort of nefarious agreement where they don’t open on Mondays (at least some of them are never open, and most of the rest it is random). Neither of the ones I hoped was open is.

I am now hungry, tired, late and starting to feel somewhat unwell.

// load 1.2

I trundle home ruminating on the Ansible stuff.

I get in and Heather reveals she’s spent the day having a sort of guerilla war with the mice who after several years absence are passing through the area again.

// begin interlude

Now, if mice didn’t shit all over everything I’d probably not mind them at all, indeed if we could come to some sort of truce, where maybe we left out specific food for them and both humans and mice kept to themselves I would be very happy. But no. That’s not how life works. We now need to mouse-proof everything again.

// end interlude

I note that there’s suspiciously mouse shredded looking paper on my mandolin case so I can worry about that at some time in the future.

I reheat the disappointing pasta and curl up on the sofa with Heather to watch an episode of television while we eat.

Then I spend some time fretting about Ansible and looking at the Brew recipe for it.

We are now at present time.

It’s now 9pm. I usually go to bed around 10. This means I have about an hour to do… anything non-work related.

I’ll probably veg out doom-scrolling the Internet, take my pills, have a bath, go to bed, doom-scroll for a bit more or if I’m feeling more together play some games on the Steam Deck before passing out.

It’s the end of the day. I’m emotionally exhausted. I am at least no longer hungry. And every day is like this - it's hard to pick any one thing that made the day bad - just lots of little bad things buiding up until the end.