The cotton wool days

I’ve been thinking about the days I stayed in bed. Not the depression days. The other ones.

The ones that looked identical from outside but felt different inside. Not sad. Not heavy with feeling. Grey and thick and slow, like the air had more resistance. I’d lie there waiting for it to pass, and it always passed when the day was over and there was nowhere to be. The obligations ended. And then it would lift.

I thought: depression but minor. Depression but manageable. Depression that responds to rest.

I was wrong about the last part especially.

What I know now — two years into having a word for my brain — is that those days were understimulation. My nervous system hitting a particular kind of low-input state and going somewhere between on and off. Not sad. Not processing anything, exactly. Just absent. The cotton wool between me and whatever was supposed to happen next.

The reason they passed when the day ended wasn’t because I’d rested. It was because when the obligation pressure lifted, I could actually choose what to do. Put on something loud. Eat something with real texture. Small specific things my nervous system apparently needed and wasn’t getting while I lay there doing nothing.

Twelve years between my first “I think something is wrong” conversation with a doctor and my AuDHD realization. Three antidepressants. CBT. Two therapists. A psychiatrist who was confident in her diagnosis. None of it explained why the feeling came on a Tuesday and was gone by Wednesday, with nothing changing in between. Why it didn’t correlate with anything bad happening. Why lying down made it worse most of the time, not better.

Because it wasn’t depression. It was my brain at the bottom of its stimulation range, waiting.

I’ve been doing the count, lately. Going back through the years and flagging the days that were probably this and not that. It’s a lot of days. A lot of Saturday afternoons I wrote off as just one of those times. A lot of Monday mornings I called a rough patch and powered through anyway. A lot of wrong answers.

The cotton wool days still happen. But I know what they are now, and I get up and do something with sound and texture, and usually the grey starts to lift. Not always. But usually. That’s something the antidepressants never managed.

The anger about the wrong years is there too. I’m trying not to let it take up too much room. It takes up some room.