The most often forgotten impact of anxiety/depression

Three years ago now, I’ve shared the “wierder” impacts my anxiety and depression caused on my body. Ranging from a phantom stomach problem making me throwing up all the food I was taking, up to a huge rash on one side of my face — thanksfully for me, as I advanced in my recovery with medication and the likes, thoses wore off.

However, there’s things that changed in my brain that still affects me today. Thoses aren’t only serotonin/mood disorders, they affect so many more things within your brain – like concentration and memory.

When this blog came to life, I was really struggling with concentration and being able to picture what I was reading in my head. Many of us alike, I was reading as an escape to the world, thus needing that “nothing else but this book” feeling it gave me.. which had now been robbed from me.

Because of that, I was unable to even read a book cover to cover anymore. Small little noise would distract me from whatever I was reading, and after reaching the middle of the book.. I would be so lost and absolutely forgot what in hell was going on in the first place! I DNF-ed so many books in this period, which of course made me even more depressed, as this gift had originally came from my godmother; and hell I sure wanted to fight it.

Having other readers sharing my taste in books and to converse them with greatly helped that. I’m now able to read 2-3books a month on average, when in that period ONE BOOK took me 7+ months.

Great ameliorations if you ask me, however even in my recovery I still need to work on the concentration aspect; hence why I usually aim for night reading time, as everything -specially yappy weeins- are asleep and all so much calmer. Reading anywhere else need greater energy from me, as mother’s chattering or the background television needs to be blocked off until i’ve read enough to be in the book.

Ironically enough being a blogger, it also impacted my creativity. Now- I’ve started suffering as a young adult (~19yo) so I don’t have much to base myself on, really, but I never was “that” creative to start with. I also can’t pinpoint the exact moment where it left me.

This probably also had a role into imagining what the words on paper meant in my head– but while I can do that again, I’ve decided to not even go to the fantasy genre. Because i’m not skilled enough to be able to picture complex-world building or too long descriptions, and i’m mostly afraid of how it’d fail me. Everything ofcourse being so much harder on my brain capacity in english, being a second language and discovering new words..

Back to the blogging area; I do get random sprouts of ideas to write here and there.. but you can imagine that covid and the lack of energy/outing/etc is making this one even harder for me. Although it’s not coming from the fact that I don’t like it or anything like that- my mind just.. blanks. Though not the most exciting, thoses moments can be helped with meme prompts– but when everything goes wrong, mental health comes to my rescue 😬 always love opening and talking about thoses.

Last one on my list, that I can think of currently, is memory. It has grown to not being applicable to books anymore, as I’m no longer so lost in what’s happening in a book that I gotta stop reading. But I feel like people often forget that it also impact your short-term memory; though I feel it might be easier for us in a way as so does dialysis, so mother has a case of that aswell.

So many times have my boss asked me a specific question, like if I had locked the doors or when I took something out… and I shamely can’t remember. Mind goes absolutely blank, and idk what to answer her because really.. I don’t really wanna admit I don’t remember anything at my age? 😅

Do you share some of my struggles?
Are you experiencing others that are different than mine?