Sometimes I am, shall we say, less than perceptive about the manifestations of my anxiety and depression. Like, after I left my last real job eight years ago, my life got much better. I started volunteering at the Emergency Food Program. I turned their weedy yard into a highly productive vegetable garden full of lettuce, cilantro, collard greens, kale, tomatoes, beans, corns, and squash. I was having the time of my life.
My relationship was great, my home life was good, I felt excited about what I was doing.
But I would still have constant bad dreams about the workplaces where I had been so miserable. And I would still wake up every morning with a sense of dread and impending doom.
I kind of shrugged it off, saying I'm just not a morning person. True enough. I like to stay up till about midnight every night, and I pretty much always have.
It has finally dawned on me that I shouldn't be waking up every morning with a sense of imminent disaster. And I have just now realized that perhaps the reason I feel this way every single morning is that maybe somewhere in my subconscious mind I think I'm getting up to get ready to go to Work (capital W "Work", as in Job, as in Office, as in Corporation), not work in the garden, or work around the house, or work on an art project, or volunteering. Work, that bad place where I used to have to go. Even though I haven't been there in eight years now!
So this could be the reason that I am more likely to be deeply depressed first thing in the morning than at any other time of the day. It's because my conscious mind takes a while to catch up to the fact that I'm not going anywhere bad that day, not if I can help it anyway.
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