How do you eat an elephant!
One bite at a time..

This may seem a very strange analogy to start off a blog about returning to health from Depression, but it is actually the way to make small steps in your journey to wellness.
At times I have felt that tasks in my life were a bit like an elephant – gigantic and overwhelming when seen up close. How on earth was I going to make it till lunch time let alone make any decisions or achieve anything during the day.
This is when the elephant idea has come to the fore.
What it equates to is breaking it down to small bites.

Most people who I have met who live with depression and other associated mental illnesses tend to be ALL or Nothing people. We are the ones who take on the burdens of others, need to fix everything, and do it all yesterday. Then it starts to come crashing down and we cannot function properly and become completely overwhelmed – walking to the letterbox seems an impossible task let alone making a phone call or other monumental tasks. In some ways it is as if the elephant has sat on top of us. I would make lists of things I wanted to do during the day. It was as if it was on a list then it would get done. My lists would be very long and consist of complex and varied tasks. I would sit there and contemplate my list – then go back to bed. It was a self defeating exercise. I couldn’t do the list so I must be a failure and therefore would need to make more lists to try again the next day and on it would go.
It wasn’t until I stopped making the lists and just wrote down one thing to achieve for the day that things began to get done. It didn’t matter how small the task was it was just important that I had achieved something.

I had taken a bite of my elephant.

But you know what – as I started to bite the elephant a funny thing happened – some days I would even achieve 2 things. Don’t get me wrong there were many days when the couch beckoned and my family would come home and ask me what I had done and I would reply “nothing much” but these days are getting further apart.
A few days ago much to my surprise I even finished quite a few things and looked around and realised that I had completed my list and the elephant was looking very small.