How Well Am I Coping?

CW: Suicide

I have a metric I use to track how well I'm coping with, y'know, life. I haven't seen anyone else use it, and I think it's probably very particular to me.

What I do is any time I find myself thinking about death - my own death, not others' - I briefly reflect, and ask myself how long it's been since I last remember thinking similar thoughts. Then I have a scale on which I place myself. How long would it have to be before I'm surprised it's been so long?

For example, two days ago I thought about how none of [this] would be a problem for me if I didn't exist. Then I reflected and realized I had no similar thoughts the previous day, and was briefly pretty happy, because I'm currently on the 1-day part of the scale, and I hadn't had any such thoughts for 1 day.

The scale:

  • a few hours - things are bad. Tell someone, get help, etc.
  • eight waking hours - things are not good. Look for interventions.
  • one day - problematic. If you know why, okay. If you don't, prioritize figuring this out.
  • a few days - eh, life's normal, wish it were better but meh
  • a week - cool, things are going well
  • a month - awesome, haven't been here for years
  • a year - literally never been here
I don't have to wait for a thought to gauge where I am on the scale, but I try not to do that, because thinking about it non-spontaneously makes a feedback loop that renders comparison to non-feedback-loopy times meaningless. Also, like, it's probably not a good idea in general to intentionally think about your death a bunch.

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