not asking for a diagnosis, i know that’s not how this works. genuinely asking how other people sort this out for themselves. so the losses are real and specific. i had a job i liked.
i could stand in the stacks for an hour reshelving without thinking about it. i used to walk to the farmer’s market on saturdays without doing math first. that stuff is gone and grieving it makes sense to me, it’s not a symptom, it’s just true. what i can’t sort out is where that ends and something else starts.
some weeks it’s constant and heavy in a way that feels bigger than “i miss my old life,” it feels more like the crash itself, low, flat, can’t get words out, and i genuinely can’t tell if that’s grief doing what grief does or if it’s baseline depression riding along with the illness, or if it’s literally post-crash brain fog wearing a sad-feeling costume. those three things do not feel the same from the inside but i can’t always name which one i’m in until days later. my neuro doesn’t ask about mood unless i bring it up, and when i do it gets filed under “understandable given your situation” and that’s the end of the conversation. for people further into this than me, did the grief part ever get quieter, or did it just become one more thing you learned to log and separate from the physical crash so you could tell your doctor which one you were actually asking about help for?
Flare patterns can be really tough to unpack. You said “it feels more like the crash itself, low, flat, can’t get words out” and that resonates with me, I’ve had similar experiences with mast cell flares. I’ve found that logging my symptoms, like urticaria and flushing, helps me identify triggers and patterns, but it’s not always easy to distinguish between grief and depression.
grief does weird things to your head, “low, flat, can’t get words out” sounds like a mix of crash and depression to me, did you notice any patterns or triggers that made it worse or better?
grief does linger on for me it’s been about recognizing patterns “it feels more like the crash itself” that’s a really tough distinction to make i’ve had to learn to log my symptoms and look for correlations between my physical crashes and my emotional state it’s not always easy to separate but it’s helped me to identify when i’m experiencing grief versus when i’m experiencing something else entirely i’ve found that my grief tends to be more emotional and less physical whereas my crashes are often more physical and exhausting i’m not saying it’s the same for everyone but for me that’s been a helpful distinction to make
i know exactly what you mean about the “sad-feeling costume” and trying to sort it out. that feeling of losing the job you liked, or not being able to just walk to the farmer’s market without doing the math first, that’s just grief, and it sits there. it’s a constant ache for what’s gone,
Sorting out grief from depression is tough, “low, flat, can’t get words out” sounds like a mix to me. I’ve noticed that tracking my mood and physical symptoms separately helps, like when I had a bad mast cell reaction and my histamine levels spiked, it felt similar to a depressive episode but was actually something else entirely.
it’s a familiar bind when your internal experience feels distinct, but the external response collapses it all into one category. When your neuro dismisses it as “understandable given your situation,” that’s the doctor conflating grief, depression, and brain fog, not you. The whole point of rigorous tracking is to separate those signals so you can tell
grief is messy, and “it’s not a symptom, it’s just true” resonates, but for me, the crash itself is what feels like the baseline, not the grief, and that’s what i’m trying to separate from the physical stuff.
Sorting out grief from depression is tough when they can feel so similar. you said “those three things do not feel the same from the inside but i can’t always name which one i’m in until days later” and that really resonates with me, i’ve had the same issue with distinguishing between fibromyalgia flares and just being really down.