Build a Ladder: How to Cope When You Feel Crummy
Or: How two Canadian YouTubers living in Japan taught me one of the best coping skills I’ve ever learned.
Anyone who follows me even a little knows that I have bipolar. I’ve been living with a mental illness diagnosis since I was 12, which was coincidentally the first time I wanted to kill myself. At this point, depression and suicidal thoughts are old friends.
Thankfully, I am medicated and largely stable now. That’s not to say I don’t have my down days. There are days that I feel like garbage, I’m not motivated to do anything, and I don’t want to take care of myself.
This happens to a lot of people, regardless of any illness. Sometimes, you just wake up on the wrong side of the bed. However, those of us with an invisible illness, such as mental illness or chronic pain, can experience this more frequently. Some days, it’s hard to get out of bed.
I like Japanese culture. I enjoy anime and Japanese video games and pop culture. I have been a bit of a Japanophile ever since middle school when I saw my first anime on Cartoon Network. I have carried this love of Japanese stuff into adulthood.
My wife, also a fellow fan of Japan, found a pair of YouTubers who live in Japan and post vlogs about what life there is like.
(To be fair, several couples do this, but bear with me.)
Their names are Simon and Martina, and they are a couple of Canadians who met in college, moved to Korea together to teach English, and then jumped over to Japan. They kept a video log of life in Korea and later Japan, which became quite popular on YouTube and led to them picking it up full time.
They go on a variety of adventures, eating local foods, visiting attractions, and just showing what day-to-day life in Japan is like. They are a goofy, irreverent, and mildly inappropriate couple who are obviously very much in love even after 12 years of marriage.
Martina, in particular, is a bubbly, upbeat person who always seems to be happy. That’s why it came as a shock in 2017 when she posted a very raw, honest video about her struggles with depression.
She lives with Ehlers-Danlo Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that caused her regular chronic pain and often resulted in joints popping out of place for no reason. It has no real treatment, so the pain can only really be managed. In spite of the sometimes constant pain, she continued shooting videos of Japan with her husband, maintaining the bubbly exterior that she had become known for.
Opening up about her depression, therefore, was a process that took time to get going but resulted in a coping skill (and hashtag) that would come to define much of their ongoing success.
#BuildALadder was born of a need to find something to feel good about on days where you feel worthless. It’s a simple process, and a lot of people probably do it without knowing that it floats around the nerdier areas of social media.
Figure out something you’ve accomplished today. It doesn’t have to be big — something like “I made the bed today” or “I washed my hair” or “I had something other than pop tarts for breakfast.” Keep doing this until you’ve started the first few rungs of your ladder.
Then, if you’re up to it, start setting slightly larger goals. “I’ll get some shopping done today” or “I’ll walk the dog all the way to the end of the block.” As you move through the day, you build your ladder with achievements and accomplishments, no matter how small.
My wife and I have applied this to our lives. On days where I feel like crud, she prompts me to find three things I’ve accomplished that day. It forces me to look at the things I’ve actually done that I could’ve skipped or put off and give myself credit for doing them.
Ultimately, it’s a little bit of a self-esteem boost, and it motivates me to build a few more rungs of my ladder for that day. “Today, I got out of bed on time, showered and shaved, ate a decent breakfast, and got to work on time. Later, I will send that email I’ve been putting off, eat a good lunch, get some writing done, and go to bed on time.”
As you build your ladder, you use it to climb out of the funk that you’re in. If things are bad for more than a day or two, you can build ladders on top of each other and use them to keep climbing out of the pit. It is a process more than anything, and by building your ladder you are lifting yourself up.
Using this technique can help you combat your worst feelings. The best part is that it’s usable by anyone who is having a bad day, not just people with chronic illnesses. We all have bad days, and we all need tools to help us feel better.
Unfortunately, if you have a mental illness, you may have to augment this with therapy and medication, but it can be one of many useful self-care tools used in conjunction with other things. If you have an invisible physical illness, such as chronic pain, it can help you feel a little better on the worst days.
If you have both, like Martina, it helps you create a viral hashtag on social media.
I am really big on self-care, and I write about it a lot. Self-care is such an important part of the lives of people with a chronic illness that I can’t ignore its impact. #BuildALadder is another tool for my arsenal that I pull out on days like today when I only slept for four hours last night and have been a little loopy all morning.
So far, my ladder today is as follows:
- Showered and shaved
- Ate a good breakfast
- Got to work really early and got going on a few small projects
- Engaged with some of my Medium friends
- Made several people laugh with a variety of comments and posts
- Talked to my mother-in-law a bit and sorted out a point of confusion
- Wrote about how much I love my wife
- Wrote this
- Lined up some work-related stuff to knock out this afternoon
For the rest of the day, I have a few work tasks to do this afternoon, and I have a good lunch that my wife packed for me that I plan to enjoy. My wife and I are hosting a friend for a casual dinner at home, so I will need to cook dinner tonight. I was planning on making pasta with red sauce, and because I got to work so early, I can leave work earlier than normal and start the sauce cooking so it has time to really come together over a few hours instead of just whipping it up quickly.
The simple act of writing out my ladder for today has already helped me feel better, and I’m re-energized for the rest of today. It’s going to be a relatively light day, all things considered, but I’ve accomplished a lot this morning and have enough doable tasks to feel good about the rest of the day.
I hope you go read some of my other articles about self-care, which I will link at the bottom of this article. I also hope you go watch some of Simon and Martina’s videos. They always cheer me up when I feel down — that’s some double self-care right there.
Always remember to take care of yourself. If the plane is going down, you can’t help other people put on their oxygen masks if you don’t put yours on first.
Be well, and build your ladders!
You can find Simon and Martina here:
You can find more on self-care here:
