Things that have helped me out of a hole

I was a hole-dweller for the last few months, here’s how I clawed my way free

If you are in a hole, of despair or upset or depression or brain fog or whatever decor your hole is adorned with, I’m here to make some hopefully helpful suggestions as to how to extricate yourself.

Look, truthfully The Hole is still where I’m spending a lot of my downtime, but – mercifully – significantly less time now as we enter February than I was from mid-November onwards.

After having the carpet well and truly yoinked from under me by sudden job loss and subsequent squeaky-bum–time surprise pre-Christmas unemployment, I didn’t exactly enter the festive season full of good cheer. ‘Ho-ho-holy sh*t, I have lost my job’ was the ticker tape on repeat in my mind. With my job I also lost a significant part of my identity, a significant part of my family’s income and a huge part of what I (naively) thought would be my future. So fa-la-la-la-la so terrible.

My self-perception was in the gutter, my motivation was perilously low, my routine was gone in a blink. Everything I’d gotten used to doing each day for a full year, a year in which I was arguably the happiest I’d been in years, was *poof* – no longer there.

I said Merry! Chriiiiistmasss! to people, of course. I didn’t assume the Grinch position in public. Privately though, I was doing a worrying amount of sitting-and-staring-into-space, and a concerning amount of comfort eating. I was internalising – as is my wont – in a big way. But that didn’t do a damn thing to help. Shocker. So instead, I decided in late December, to make some attempts at getting my shit (back) together.

The catalyst, if you could call it that, was not something inspirational worthy like a motivational quote or a life-altering meme. It wasn’t something sewn into a pillow. It was pure and simple: The wolf at the door. The financial wolf, who reminded me that our household requires two steady incomes. And as my daughter is only three and a half, it is illegal and somewhat immoral to compel her to enter the labour force. Alas, I was the only person capable of providing that much-needed second salary.

Here’s how I began the climb:

1. Structure (with the help of tech)

This one that might sound obvious, but I did something incredibly specific that I’m going to share with you here that REALLY helped. I heard about an app. Someone I love on Instagram posted about it. I took a chance and downloaded it (for like, €10 for full use forever, which felt like and has proved to be good value) and honestly, I’ve found it to be legitimately game-changing, and that is something I say very infrequently.