Last night I was lying in bed, ruminating and worrying about things that have been playing on my mind. I've always done this to some degree (it's probably because of the complex PTSD that I'm certain I suffer from) but it's been making my life particularly miserable for the past six months or so. It's a habit I've been trying hard to break, because it's a waste of energy and apart from anything else I simply don't have enough spoons to devote to something so pointless any more. I've discussed this a lot with my therapist, which might be why shortly after midnight, I found myself thinking, "Why am I putting all this mental energy into grieving for the normal life that I'm never going to have, or wishing I had the sort of mind that would let me live like that? It makes no sense, because I'd hate to be normal. It would be deathly dull and, quite frankly, incredibly boring."

At that moment I realised I would loathe becoming someone like that, because while they might have a traditional nuclear family with 2.4 kids, a couple of dogs and the usual crippling debt, they also wouldn't be me any more. That same inner voice went on to point out that I haven't lost any of the interesting aspects of who I am just because I've discovered that I'm neurodivergent. And they're right; I haven't, have I? Do I feel diminished in any way? Do I believe that I'm a lesser human being as a result of finding out I'm not the person I thought I was? No! If anything, the joy which I've always taken in standing out from the crowd and just being weird has been validated. "So why are you being miserable about it?" I asked myself.

And just like that, the heavy depression that I've been suffering from for months lifted. It happened in seconds, like the sun coming out. It felt very strange, like my mind had suddenly shifted gears and was now running at a more appropriate speed. Even more bizarrely, I fell asleep just a few minutes later.

I don't know if this change of mood will stick, but the reasoning that triggered it still seems pretty solid to me, and I've been mulling it over all day. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I feel happy today, but I feel content with being me, and I haven't felt like that for a very long time. It feels good.

My creative mojo has decided to reappear, too. This morning I realised I was actually looking forward to seeing what I was going to come up with in my home studio. And despite the fact that it's ridiculously hot here today (at teatime, it's still 34°C (93°F) outside) I spent most of the day in there, having completely lost track of time.

So I now have eight songs listed on my profile page for this month's song sprint. The target, remember, is to write five by noon UTC on Monday. And I don't think I've run out of steam yet.

I wish I could shake off this bout of depression because I'm really not having much fun at the moment.

The last couple of days have been really tough. I don't know why. I've been struggling to find any joy in anything at all and yesterday was about as bad as it's been all year. Pushing myself to sit down and work on some new music was the only way I managed to get through the day without breaking down in tears again. I need a hug. But I'm still here.

I've been keeping myself busy (and distracted) working on this month's FAWM Song Sprint and I've already blown past the challenge's objective of writing five songs in nine days. Yesterday I uploaded my sixth song in four days, so I made sure that it was a prog rock instrumental in 6/4 time, because that's how my brain works. Despite feeling awful, I managed to make something that I was happy with, and I've already been given some nice feedback about it which compared it favourably to Steve Hackett and Steve Rothery's latest album (which was recorded at Real World, of course). I need to remind myself more often (or even better, be told by my peers) that I'm actually pretty good at what I do these days.

I plan on working on another track or two today, at least until the back bedroom gets too hot. Yesterday I dropped into hyperfocus so hard that I didn't even notice how warm it was getting in there, which might explain why I was two pounds lighter when I weighed myself this morning...

Even after a really big mug of coffee this morning, I just can't seem to pierce the brain fog. It's lying particularly heavy today. Every time I drop out of hyperfocus or creative fusion or flow or whatever you want to call it, I wonder if I'll ever be able to attain that state again. Although it seems absolutely effortless at the time (and believe me, it's a powerfully addictive feeling), I know from how drained I feel afterwards that I'm actually doing a lot of cognitive heavy lifting. Thanks to the mess I'm in at the moment I've been desperately pushing myself to get into that state all week in order to leave my feelings behind and escape for a few hours, and each time it happens it feels miraculous. It's difficult to describe how intense the whole experience is to anyone who's never had it happen to them. I know it's a privilege to be able to work like that, and I worry that one day it simply won't happen any more.

I've learned that stressing out about this is counterproductive. I'll just get on with what I planned to do and hope that the creative guy eventually shows up and starts telling me what I should be doing.

And if he doesn't, and I spend the next hour just staring out of the studio window watching the neighbourhood squadron of swifts hurtling about, that's fine too.

The summer's next heatwave began to build yesterday and I was already sitting here at my "office" desk downstairs and sweating profusely by half-past nine this morning, although that might have been because of the home-made chilli oil which I put in my breakfast coffee (which really hits the spot, believe me). Whatever the reason, I'm really not looking forward to another few days where the outside temperature here is expected to exceed 30°C (86°F) even if the Met Office are saying it won't be getting quite as humid as it was during last month's record-breaking spell. Things are supposed to peak on Friday before gradually cooling off.

I've been making sure to leave plenty of fresh water out for the local wildlife. It's not just the starlings and the local cats who have been having a drink, either...

Someone was VERY thirsty.

Unlike last year when the camera picked up four hogs together on the back lawn several times, the hedgehogs have been keeping to themselves this summer. There are several different ones which visit regularly and they're easily distinguishable by the different patterns of light and dark spines on their backs, but they've been distinctly antisocial so far this year. I do like watching the trailcam footage every morning and seeing what's been happening out there while I was asleep. It's become a welcome part of my daily ritual.

In case recent posts have left you feeling worried about me, I just want to say that while I'm clearly not okay, I have absolutely no intention of doing anything silly. I've seen the damage that does to the people left behind, and I couldn't inflict that on anyone. I get through each day more or less intact, and I'm trying my best to be kinder to myself. I managed to get through yesterday without needing to retreat under the duvet, I got some exercise, and I was able to keep my mind busily focused on nice things rather than the bad stuff. As a result, I fell asleep remarkably quickly last night and I even managed to remain asleep for the duration. It's amazing how much a simple thing like a good night's sleep helps to improve my perspective on life.

I had another therapy session this morning. Once again, I ended up in tears after breaking down trying to explain something. But as I said to my therapist, I now think that's a good thing because a year ago I would have grimly pushed all those emotions back out of sight and left them where I've kept them for the last thirty-five years, festering away quietly in the depths of my subconscious—where they were free to cause further damage. Pretending I'm fine has never helped, so I'm not doing that any more. I feel drained right now, but I also feel better having talked about what I'm going through. I think these blog entries are part of the fallout from that, too. My parents are both dead and I don't expect to ever hear from the other people involved again, but if any of them ever stumble across any of this, maybe they'll finally be able to appreciate the amount of damage they did and the pain that they caused. I've kept it all bottled up, together with the grief and the shame and the guilt, for long enough. It's no use to me and I want to be rid of it.

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.