The Small Days Count

This has been a good week in some ways and a lousy one in others.

On the plus side, I walked nearly 10,000 steps and did not collapse into a fibro flare afterward. In fact, this week has been harder mentally than physically.

 Thursday was nearly a perfect day aside from getting lost on the way back from getting my sugar checked. Even that turned into a positive because I ended up walking over 9,700 steps and used my bus pass for the first time in a long while. But that was also when the bad luck for the week seemed to begin. When I got home, my key would not work in the front door, so I had to use my phone to get into the building. I assumed it was a one-time problem and just sent a message to Ruth to let her know.

Friday I stayed home and did food prep using what I had left in the freezer. I managed to make enough dinners to get me through to Thursday, which felt like a small victory in itself. Other than being tired from all the walking the day before, it was not a bad day.

As the weekend went on, though, the front door still was not fixed. Each day I sent another message to the building manager, and tenants started stopping me to ask about the problem or tell me their own experiences with the door. I also sent an email to her and her boss because it was becoming clear this was no longer a minor issue.

Then on Sunday, when I went to do laundry, I found a broken crack pipe outside the laundry room. After that I checked the hallway connecting our wing to the other side of the building and found a pile of garbage blocking part of the fire door area. Again, I contacted the building manager.

 Later that same day I discovered someone had stuffed paper into the latch section of the outside door so people could come and go freely without needing a key or access code. That was the moment the situation stopped feeling frustrating and started feeling genuinely unsafe. I live in an area where there are a lot of crack houses nearby, and with the building now easily accessible, outsiders could come and go as they pleased. Many people in this building do not lock their apartment doors during the day. Suddenly the possibility of break-ins did not feel abstract anymore.

Sunday was also Mother’s Day, which always brings its own wave of dysthymia with it. Physically I was fine, but depression has a way of making everything feel heavier. Mother’s Day usually leaves me struggling for a few days because of my mother, now gone, and the complicated history between us.

By Monday the depression was still sitting heavily on me, so I stayed home from the Y and decided to work on my poetry instead. Unfortunately, the poem I chose to work on was one about living inside depression at its worst. Unsurprisingly, that did not exactly help.

Physically, aside from a stupid headache, I am okay. Mentally, not so much.

Which brings me to today and the pièce de résistance for the week. I tried to contact the Landlord and Tenant Board and instead ended up being scammed by a site pretending to be legal help. On top of everything else, I now need to replace my bank access card.

I know situations like this eventually pass, but sometimes when I am in the middle of them I have a hard time remembering that there is always a way around or through even difficult circumstances. “This too will pass” is something I have lived with for a long time now. Sometimes it is the only thing holding hope open long enough for things to begin easing again.

 And the small wins — walking nearly 10,000 steps, preparing meals for the week, continuing to show up for my life even while mentally struggling — they matter. They count.

Sometimes far more than the bad days do, even when the bad days temporarily seem louder.