A Look at Depression

I’ve been thinking lately about the nature of depression. The thing that got me really started was an excellent post from the blog The Belle Jar dated April 8, 2013, titled “How to be Loved.” In this post she gives the best description of the internal workings of depression that I have ever seen. I highly recommend her blog. She has a lot of good things to say about a lot of topics that I care about, and she writes about them much better than I do.

The entirety of last week very hard for me to get through.  It was my first week back to work after having broken my arm. Between dealing with the pain, catching up at work, getting written up at work, and having a hearing with Minnesota Care, I just was not able to maintain very well. All my coping mechanisms went out the door. If it wasn’t for my sister, I don’t know what I would’ve done. I’ve taken a good hard look at what I need to do to improve how I work with in my depression. Here is what I’ve discovered so far.

I struggle constantly with the voice in my head telling me that I’m stupid, that I’m worthless, that I’m a waste of space, and that I’m not worth the effort. Usually this is the voice of either my dad or my ex-husband, both of whom were very abusive and really did say such things to me. Because this comes from people who were supposed to care about me, I take it personally and I believe it. After thinking about it for a while, I changed that voice. That voice is now Niedermeyer, the nasty frat boy bully from the movie "Animal House." It’s a caricature and somebody that I don’t need to take personally. So now, anytime I start hearing that horrible, mean, abusive voice telling me how horrible I am, I can either ignore it for being silly or I can tell it to fuck off. So far that seems to be working. I also created a nifty little picture of Niedermeyer yelling at Flounder with a “no" symbol on it, which I printed out and taped in places that I can see them easily, especially in places where I know my negative thinking gets triggered, such as my bathroom mirror and that my computer.

I need to replace all that negativity with positive things, so I also do affirmations. I have a wonderful little app on my iPod called Affirmation Works. When I’m awake and not using my iPod for something else this app displays affirmations. They change every 10 seconds. That way, whenever I look at my iPod there’s a positive thought sitting waiting for me to read it and absorb it. Affirmation Works!

I’ve also been working very hard at my WRAP. This is short for Wellness Recovery Action Plan, which is a system for looking at how to recover from various things by defining wellness and coming up with strategies for when things are not going very well. It’s a program worth looking into, not just for mental illness, but other issues of wellness requiring foresight and planning. Wellness Recovery Action Plan

Another thing I’ve been concentrating on again is DDP Yoga, not just for the workouts, which are fantastic, but for the whole mindset change that DDP talks about and help to work through. Seriously, this guy is an amazing motivation. I highly recommend checking out the whole system, and even if you’re not in the space right now you want to actually work out with DDP Yoga, at least look into his audio book “Own Your Life", and over at Team DDP Yoga look for his lecture “Living Life at 90%", which lately I have been listening to over and over again. Basically, he boils it down to 10% is what life throws at you, and 90% is how you react to it; he goes over what to do with that 90%. What can I say, I like his style. DDP Yoga    Team DDP Yoga

Affirmations of the moment: "You Can Do It!" . Think it in DDP's voice.  It's way cool that way.

Being a Catholic Geek

I've realized this week just how big of a geek I really am as far as being Catholic is concerned.

First of all there are several apps that I use on my iPod. First of all I have Laudate, which has everything imaginable in it, including daily readings, the liturgy of the hours, rosaries, chaplet, and a ton of different prayers. I also have Catholicpedia, put out by divineoffice.org, which also is a good general reference. I also have by them a Prayers app. I have the Roman Catholic calendar put out by Universalis. I have several rosary apps. These include iRosary, The Rosary app by the Daughters of St. Paul, and the Divine Mercy App by the Congregation of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I also have a couple of apps which help to do and examine of consciousness before confession. And my favorite, a simple little Pocket Angelus app from Objective Products, LLC. All of these can be found in iTunes. I'll give the links down at the bottom later for some of the app info sites.

Here's the big geeky thing, and it involves that Angelus app. It's a very simple thing. You can set up alarms so that it rings up to three times per day at the hours of the Angelus. You can pick a couple different kinds of bells to ring. My favorite is the Angelus bells. I usually have my iPod with me, and sometimes the Angelus bells go off while I'm in public. This week, I had two very interesting conversations when my Angelus alarm went off. It went off while I was checking out at Leaflet Missal, and I ended up showing the cashier all my apps. The second one was yesterday during Easter dinner at my sister's. So I ended up showing all my little Catholic apps to some of the people there, including my sister's dad, his wife, and Father Fitzpatrick and his mom. The good father is a mega-geek himself (he played Angry Birds with my son earlier), but he didn't know there is all that out there. So it was cool that I could show him all that stuff.

Here though are a couple of my complaints. First of all I was kind of shocked that a tech savvy priest and a store with an online presence had no idea about these apps. There's got to be a better way of getting the word out that there are really awesome apps out there to enhance a Catholic's spiritual life. Second, the reason I was at Leaflet Missal in the first place was to try to find a CD of a beautiful chanted version of the Angelus that I found on YouTube. When I'd originally gone to the site for the nuns who had recorded this Angelus, they had no way to order the CD from iTunes, which would've been my preference, so I ran over to Leaflet to see if they had it.

Please, please, please, if you have gorgeous music you want to sell to support your congregation or your cause put it on iTunes or Google play so people can buy it more easily.

Fortunately, at least there are some websites that either have discussions about Catholic apps or are dedicated to listing Catholic apps. I'll get the links for those as well. Since I'm the one sitting here complaining about lack of general knowledge regarding Catholic apps, I should at least do my little bit by adding those links.

13 essential Catholic Apps
http://catholicapps.com/
Pocket Angelus
http://daughtersofmary.net/music.php
Universalis web store
DivineOffice app store
Leaflet Missal
iRosary
Laudate at iTunes
Daughters of St. Paul, Pauline Books and Media App Store
DvineMercy.org App Store