Looking For the Little Joys with SMA

Recently, I began going to see a therapist for my depression and anxiety. I was diagnosed with major manic depressive disorder. This means when I’m down, I’m really down.

Therapy is a slow-moving process, but it’s a step in the right direction for feeling better. I’d started noticing my mental health was beginning to go in a very bad direction again and that the depression medication I’d been taking for over ten years just wasn’t helping anymore. I really needed something to change because my mind was becoming a really dark place. So I talked with my doctor and finally agreed to do talk therapy. That was a huge step for me in itself, reaching out and asking for help again. But I did it!

Depression as a side-effect of SMA

I think having depression is one of the worst parts of spinal muscular atrophy for me personally, aside from not being able to walk. For me, depression makes the tough things I go through daily even more of a challenge.

Getting out of bed is that much more difficult when your brain wants you to sleep to preserve itself. Eating and drinking becomes tedious when you have to force yourself to chew the food. Feeling any ounce of happiness is hard.

Sometimes I feel numb all day. My thoughts tell me there’s nothing to be happy or excited about each day, especially when I’m spending most of my time confined to a wheelchair, not actively participating in the world around me like everyone else. Social media plays a huge role in my moods as well, even though it shouldn’t.

Rewriting the way I'm thinking

I’ve told my therapist all of this and she’s reassured me that it’s completely normal to feel this way and experience all of this with severe depression. She told me that in order to try and change my way of thinking I need to rewrite my brain step by step and little by little. I need to find a way to find the small joys in each day. Romanticize my life a little.

When she first said this it struck me as a really unique way of looking at finding happiness. By her breaking those words down into small segments it seemed less scary to me to fight the darker thoughts in my head.

After that session I went home and turned the phrase over in my mind and started to think about the small joys I did experience in my day that I simply overlooked altogether because I was to busy finding comfort in the sadness instead.

Looking for the small joys

I wasn’t seeing the small joy in my dogs greeting me at the door when I came home. The Chick Fil A I picked up on the way home. The cute photo of my nephew my sister sent me. Those were the small joys I’d missed out on in just one day.

Now whenever I find myself beginning to dwell on the bad feelings in my head I tell myself to think about the small joys. It’s not easy and sometimes I still don’t remember but I’m trying to retrain my brain to think this way instead of thinking about how sad I feel. This was a really beneficial tool my therapist showed me and I wanted to share it with all of you too.

Having a disability and spinal muscular atrophy is hard. Our brains don’t need to make it that much more challenging. Please know you’re not alone in feeling this way. There’s always someone beside you who will understand, I promise.