Stars

Last week lessons are hardly eventful. Most of the time I found myself nearly awake. On Sunday, I was utterly disappointed with my lecturer. As a teaching professional with Masters in Communication Studies and 10 years of lecturing under his belt, my lecturer surprised me by having the projector projecting images on a wall perpendicular to the class. That made the text displayed invisible to 50% of the students. What made me wonder more was, noone actually pointed it out to him until I did. And I missed Saturday class so that means some classmates went through 8 hours without seeing anything.

The only one thing that got me thinking during the Sunday lesson was one tool used by psychotherapists. It is one of the several components in Cognitive Theory and known as Mood Monitor. In this, the client used the chart to record their happiest and saddest part of a day. And then note at the time when they think it is the saddest. The primary aim is to debunk a depressed client's constant idea that they are a sad person all the time. Changing that mindset can help a client to challenge their own thinking and bring about the desired changes in their mental condition.

As a child, there was a long period that things were going very wrong in the family and my life. I am not sure that can be termed as a depression but I know I was constantly sad and moody. At some point, I always stay in my bed and sleep my weekends away. I was constantly tired and nothing else is really important that need my attention. Of course, most of the factors, I figured out in those days were external factors and that as a child, I really cannot do anything. Later, I started to develop this system of monitoring my daily mood.

In a small black diary, I would draw stars to represent how I felt at the end of the day. It ranged from saddest (one star) to very happy (five stars). At a certain period, when I realised I am very happy, I kept telling myself that it is short lived and I would fall back into the one star phase soon. So, strangely, I kept insisting that I should not be too happy. Yet, when I saw the one stars coming... I was determined to pull myself together and not let myself stay there for too long.

This lasted for about one year and towards the end, most of the pages are filled with three stars (moderate or neutral), I then decided that there is no more need to continue monitoring my mood. Eventually, this part of my life went into my pre subconscious and only surfaces twice since my 21 year old birthday. As I narrated this part to my support group two years ago, I realised this was part of my coping mechanism.