Wait, what? It's July already? Where did the last six months go?

I have no plans for the rest of this week, and very few plans in place for the rest of the year. If you've been reading the blog regularly you probably already know that I've been suffering with a number of mental health issues for the past year, and although things are better than they were back in March when I was shocked to find myself categorised as being severely at risk, I'm not in a good way. For decades I've always told people that I'm fine when they ask me how I'm doing, but that's always been a lie. This year I finally managed to break that habit and ask for the help that I need, which I should have got a long time ago. I've started having therapy, and it's helping me to gain a healthier and more realistic perspective about my life than the one I've been relying on for the last twenty or thirty years, but all it takes is one bad night and I feel like I have crashed right back to where I started. Making any plans—even if they're something as simple as buying a ticket for a concert by a band that I like—feels like too much of a commitment right now. At the moment I can barely cope with leaving the house.

Avoidant behaviour is a classic symptom of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and since I stopped working, it has gradually taken control of more and more of my life. If something bad happened once when I did a thing, it means I just don't do that thing any more. If that involves driving on a particular stretch of road, or visiting a particular place, it starts to become a big problem. It's bad enough now that it's having significant effects on my quality of life and that's one of the reasons why I've been having therapy for the past couple of months.

And yes, I know on an intellectual level that avoidant behaviour is not only bad for me, it's also ridiculous and irrational, but as I have learned to my cost lately, mental illness doesn't follow the rules of logic. I need to build my resilience back up, because it's pretty much disappeared.

So I've been setting myself little tasks each day that I can count as a win; that I can use to show myself that I'm not as worthless as the voice inside my head (which sounds suspiciously like my father's) keeps telling me I am. Yesterday that meant firing up GIMP and creating enough banners for the Blog to last me until Christmas. Twenty years ago, I had enough of them in hand to last the Blog several years, but lately—since I became ill, in fact—I've ended up making each one on the day that I needed it, and just doing that would leave me so exhausted I couldn't keep going to add a few more in reserve. Having half a year's worth of banners in the bag is highly unusual.

And yes, that's trivial and you may well find it pathetic but at the risk of labouring the point: that's what I'm reduced to, not because I'm making it up to avoid work, or because I'm lazy (and I can hear my father's voice telling me exactly that as I type this). It's because I'm seriously ill. I really didn't want to accept that, but it's the truth.

One thing I do have planned for this month is a new challenge that will kick off later today when the FAWM website reopens for it: "Song Sprint" sets participants the new goal of writing five songs in the nine days beginning on July 4th, so that is exactly what I plan to be doing for the next week and a bit. As it doesn't involve leaving the house at all, I'm totally fine with taking part. Each track I make will count as one of my daily wins, and each spammer that I catch signing up to the site and block will make me feel better, too.

I realised today that I'm genuinely looking forward to taking part, and that's a nice realisation to have. It's been a while since I felt that way about something.

I'm glad there's a FAWM challenge coming up. Making music helps me to switch focus away from all the gloomy ruminating thoughts rattling around in my head, and after I sat on the sofa playing the new bass for an hour last night (using my Boss Katana Go through my IEMs) I could tell that my mood had lifted a little bit.

After writing yesterday's extremely bleak blog entry I retreated under the duvet and fell asleep again in the afternoon for a couple of hours. I'm definitely very under the weather at the moment and I've learned that whenever things get this bad, all I can do is rest up and hope that my mojo eventually decides to come back. I had a slightly better night's sleep last night, which is a good sign. I think that figuring out why everything hurts so much at the moment has helped matters, because I'm an inveterate worrier and finding a mundane explanation for how rough I'm feeling (that I'm not as young or as fit as I used to be, and I should act accordingly) was reassuring, in an odd sort of way. The pain seems to have eased off slightly this morning and I'm profoundly grateful for that, but complex PTSD is not an easy thing to recover from and it's been giving me a thorough going over recently, as you can no doubt tell.

Another reason why I've been feeling so miserable is that I'm being clobbered by hay fever at the moment, although I think the effects might finally be tailing off because my eyes aren't quite as itchy today and I haven't had to wash my face with a cold cloth every half hour. I haven't had a single sneezing fit yet this morning either, although my sinuses still feel like someone's been hitting them with a brick. When I looked through back issues of the blog this week I noticed that it's usually late June when I mention how much I'm suffering from it, and it took me exactly one day to start complaining about the fact after I first started the blog, twenty-three years ago, so I'm not just consistent, I'm bang on schedule.

But I feel shattered again now; I think the coffee I had for breakfast has worn off, so I'm going to have a glass of cranberry juice and then do the ironing that's been sitting on a chair in the living room for the past fortnight (which will be another small win), and then fire up the studio and prepare for next week's Song Sprint shenanigans.