It's Been Emotional

I don’t know about you but I am all over the place at the moment;

Anxious and depressed one minute - weeping at memes and assailed by sudden whiplashes of loneliness and grief,  then on a more even keel the next.  blithely shaking cinnamon into a saucepan, laughing at things the kids say, getting excited about *Tom Hiddleston being cast in the adaptation The Essex Serpent.

*Ever since The Night Manager I’ve had a bit of a mild ‘thing’ for Tom Hiddleston. My husband berated me about it - how could I - a ‘born again Trotsky-ist’ (his words) have a thing for this product of the public school system? What can I say? Isn’t it as bad not to like somebody because they are not working class than to like somebody because they are?? Anyway, I loved the book The Essex Serpent and am fairly comfortable with the casting of Claire Danes in the lead role and positively delighted at the aforementioned Tom Hiddleston playing another part.

Claire and Tom

What is the cause of this turmoil? The after effect of a year of restrictions and uncertainty, fear about the future, boredom and loneliness - a feeling of stagnation. Recovering from the horror of homeschooling - I legit thought I was going to lose my mind! (Why would people voluntarily do this?) Anxiety about a return to normality?

It’s been a year

It’s been a year since the start of the first lockdown.

If we were two people in a film who were escaping from something unexpected and terrifying - a monster, a sudden storm or a psychopathic maniac. We would slam the door against the howling wind, look at each other and say something like:

“Wow, that was intense!”

Or

“What was that?”

A man on the telly was saying that just because we are all going through it, doesn’t mean we should diminish or underestimate the impact it’s having on all of us. He’s written a self help book but rather unhelpfully, I can’t remember what it’s called. I’ll tell you what has helped me slightly in recent weeks:

• Grayson Perry’s Art Club - a joy!
• Headspace meditations - on Netflix but they have an App.
• Erm…. Just Dance - always - feels good to move.
• Getting creative/doing artsy things.

Art

Let me give you a laugh, I did a 'Creative Wellbeing' course in January and have found painting to be enormously therapeutic, with one exception, when I try to capture myself. Below is my latest self portrait. 

Last seen fleeing the crime scene

I enjoyed painting it, initially, felt that I was really getting somewhere but then it went awry - it looks a bit like me but (I hope) not too much! A friend of mine asked me to send it to her and said - ‘don’t put it down, I like it’. At which I thought - shit! Does this mean that this is what I really look like!

This is the photo I tried to copy.

Roots

Mojo

Right so in the last few months I lost my writing mojo and it was horrible. I don’t think it was the pandemic, although maybe that played its part, but I felt totally flattened and without hope. Every time I saw a competition being advertised I’d snort and think - what’s the point? More depressingly, I didn’t want to write and writing is what I do, it’s how I make sense of the world and how I express myself and sometimes how I escape, but I just didn’t have the will to do it. What happened was that last year there were two competitions where I’d got through to the final stages - and one of them had made very encouraging noises all the way along, only to be told in a bald, impersonal way that they weren’t taking it any further, at the end. I realise that rejection is very much part of the process but I suppose I had built up this fantasy where everything else was shit but at least I had this. I was already planning the post lockdown celebration party. Hubris.

But anyway, I’m writing! I’m supposed to be working on a script but got distracted into writing this - shame on you! I’m 15% hopeful, which is better than 0% and it’s all good practice and also, one thing that the 'Creative Wellbeing' course did for me was made me realise that I don’t just write with a vain hope of publication, I write because that’s what I do!

Anyway, friends, Spring is in the air, people are being vaccinated and Chocolate Orange Easter Eggs are a thing (hint, hint). 

Other brands are available

Stay well, stay safe and stay sane.

xxxxxx

Sometimes it's not great

This won’t be a jaunty, upbeat post because I wasn’t really in a jaunty, upbeat place when I wrote it, more of a reflective one. I haven’t had a terrible week but there have been terrible moments within it. I’ve had moments where I feel like an utter failure - as a mother, as a worker and as a human being…. then my period arrived and the angst and self loathing shrank to a manageable size. 

The grief from losing my father, just after Christmas, is still very much there. This is understandable, I guess, but maybe I’ve been trying to tidy it away for the lockdown period, to make coping with the restrictions that have been placed on us more bearable, but it usually grabs me just as I’m going to bed. I still can’t see photos of my Dad without crying and I feel guilty for not thinking about him more. This very unusual situation of collective crisis has created a general forum where people can share what they’re going through - the strictures, the frustrations and perhaps the unexpected benefits. Grief on the other hand, can be a very solitary experience. I can try and channel my sorrow into anger at people (joggers) selfishly veering towards me on the path and my family when we are having our daily walk or I could try to confront the real source of the feelings.

Traditionally I’ve always tried to deal with feelings by outrunning them. Not literally, otherwise I’d be more svelte, but figuratively, by being on the move all the time. The reason I feared that lockdown would feel like being buried alive was because ‘STAY AT HOME’ was the antithesis of what I felt like doing. Home was a place where thoughts became most intrusive, hectic and unhelpful - there was nowhere to hide. I wanted to be constantly on the move - I wanted to be at the pub, or a pub quiz, or the theatre, cinema, park, public gardens, swimming pool, even work - anywhere but home. It wasn’t that I wanted to be away from my family, I was happy to have them with me, wherever I went, I just didn’t want to be at home. And all the places that are shut off from us now, were all the places where I chose to hide. Of course, I’ve found a way of replicating the sensation of movement - the exercise, the dance, the daily walk (yes, actual movement, I know) and I’ve found an effective way of blocking things out and hiding in a bubble at home, thus creating the illusion of space around me, via some super expensive, noise cancelling headphones. Anti-social, maybe and not dealing with the underlying cause of the angst, the hyper-sensitivity to noise, but absolutely necessary, right now. Just as I couldn’t face up to the implications of the Coronavirus, when news of it was first broadcast, I can’t deal with any heavy soul searching as I deal with the enforced lockdown now.
As I’ve said before, one way or another, all of my energy is focused toward staying sane.

Are you looking for some light relief?
I've been reading and enjoying The Flat Share by Beth O'Leary.

I've been enjoying the plays broadcast on YouTube by the National Theatre.
I've made some green slodge aka watercress soup. 

Tasty!

I very much enjoyed Quiz - the TV program based on the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? coughing scandal. https://www.itv.com/hub/quiz/2a7854
I'd seen the play a couple of years ago when a friend won tickets - very appropriately as a prize for winning a quiz, and the play was fantastic! We got to vote on 'ask the audience' voting keypads, at the beginning and end of the play as to whether we thought the Ingrams were guilty or not. The audience were swayed by the play's argument and voted very differently at the end. I was worried that the TV program wouldn't measure up but it was very enjoyable and of course, Michael Sheen did his usual chameleon act when he morphed into Chris Tarrant.

Sian Clifford, Matthew Macfadyen and Michael Sheen as Diana and Charles Ingram and Chris Tarrant

So, light and shade, yeah, light and shade. 
I also attended a talk on the concept of ‘Wintering’ by the author Katherine May, who has written a book with the same name. The book describes Wintering as: 
 "a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider."

The talk was quite helpful and comforting. I’ve ordered the book from Hive books - a site where they support the local bookshops and source the stock from there. https://www.hive.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KEQiA-NqyBRC905irsrLr-LUBEiQAWJFYTs6sUijqVCt_gmRe2G6e87qBDqXpPuBMdsfoRjd7eS8aApLQ8P8HAQ 
I’ll let you know how I get on.

Take care. xx

The Missing Piece

I’ve been compelled to write about my experience of depression. Here it is below.

At the age of sixteen this thing crept up on me and it felt like someone had come along with an axe and chopped my feet away from beneath me. Then, with that same weapon, they had hacked a triangle out of my outline. That was exactly what it felt like; both that the whole world had shifted on its axis and that something vital was missing. And yet, nothing had happened - there was no *external reason for feeling like this, but I was simply floored by depression. This depression wasn’t just immense sadness, it also comprised almost constant panic, I feared that I was going mad. Nothing felt safe, the sky was going to fall in any minute, the ground was dissolving and I couldn’t get a toehold, I was slipping away with all the cascading debris.

What this actually meant was I could be sitting at a table, talking to somebody but would then tune out and see myself, as if from above, looking down at this figure - who was she? (This, apparently is dissociation - I didn’t know the word then). I had a terrible world view: everything was shit; we were all doomed, there was no kindness anywhere.  (It didn’t help that we were covering the rise of Hitler in ‘A’ level history, at the time!). A sympathetic teacher put it succinctly - ‘You are seeing the world through shit-tinted glasses’. Yes, Mr. T, you will probably never read this but yes I was!

What made it worse was that I didn’t feel that I had a right to these feelings.! What right had I to feel depressed when I had a roof over my head, enough to eat, good friends, was lucky enough to be able to pursue my education? I wasn’t a displaced victim of war, I wasn’t being raped by soldiers, I lived in a country with a welfare state.  The knowledge of this compounded my depression - how much worse to feel that I was being self-indulgent, narcissistic, solipsistic (I feel all of those things in writing this post, actually!) The point was though, it wasn't a deliberate thing, I didn’t want to feel like this, I didn’t choose it - I couldn’t ‘pull myself together’, I was unravelling.

I searched for the missing piece constantly; I looked through old photos to see if I could find it there. I had my iron levels tested - perhaps there was a physical reason for this malaise? I had just turned vegetarian, maybe I just needed iron tablets.

Suicide seemed seductive - an end to the pain, if it got that bad then perhaps I could just check out? I sat in a travel agent with some family and friends and booked a holiday for seven months into the future; wondering if I’d still be around in seven months.

The only thing that helped at the time was that I had a group of amazing friends and we went out all the time. I know that this doesn’t fit with the traditional picture of the depressed teenager, sitting alone in their room all the time, but it was how I coped. I had to keep constantly busy, always doing something, always occupied; anything that would take me away from myself. And the great thing about these friends was; I didn’t have to pretend to be ‘normal’ with them and I didn’t have to pretend to be happy. It’s not that we didn’t have any laughs - we did! We went to gigs, we went to pubs, we went to seedy little house parties (I haven’t just stolen the plot of ‘The Perks of being a Wallflower’, this was what our lives were like too - only in much smaller houses!). We reeked of joss sticks and patchouli oil, we listened to great music and talked about how shit our home town was (again, seems like it was stolen from a film). I wonder now whether these friends saved my life. If nothing else, they certainly alleviated the feeling of acute isolation. But I still needed to talk to someone about the depression - I was still desperate to locate that missing piece; it’s absence was felt every time I was on my own. I went to the doctor, hoping that she would refer me for some counselling, I came away with a prescription for diazepam and anti-depressants. I didn’t realise that diazepam was the trade name for valium but I did know that it was addictive so I ended up flushing the tablets down the toilet. For someone who often dealt (deals) with things by eating too much, getting pissed and/or stoned, this was quite a wise move. I’d like to give my sixteen year old self - look at her there with her thick eyebrows, sullen expression and love-beads, a pat on the back for this. I was self-destructive, but this was an act of self-preservation. This is no judgement on anyone who has even taken valium and certainly not (a judgement) on someone who takes anti-depressants, but they weren’t the right thing for me. The right thing for me was therapy, I wanted to talk to someone, and I finally sought it out (and could afford it) eleven years later, aged 27.

*I said that there was no external reason/cause for my depression, I discovered that there actually was, but I’m not going to talk about it here.

What I am going to talk about is what therapy has done for me. If you are the sort of person who wants to see visible, tangible results then I will give you a concrete list of the benefits.

So, there I was, 27 years of age, not actually depressed anymore but in a state of arrested development:

1. I had a long term boyfriend but was still living at home with my Mum - lovely as she is, this was not a great situation for either of us. After less than a year of therapy, I finally moved out. (and lived happily ever after in a thatched cottage by the sea….ha, ha, ha.)
2. My first job after leaving university was a part-time position in a clothes shop! I constantly undersold myself, thought that I was crap at everything and took jobs that I was overqualified for. I let other people undervalue me too - the manager at the shop used to tell me that i was lazy-minded!

O.K. so these days I am overqualified for the job that I am doing but the difference is that now I recognise this and it is actually a deliberate choice. (believe it or not, dear reader, I wanted to free up more time and headspace to write - and look at how well that turned out…)

3) When people said negative things to me, I believed them wholeheartedly.

Now, most of us get shit thrown at us in our lives and are perhaps told that we are: fat, ugly, weird, lazy-minded, useless, stupid!  The difference is that if you are coming from the point of extreme low self-esteem, perhaps even self-loathing, you are less able to shrug it off, see it for it is (THEIR problem and NOT yours; they are probably projecting their own issues onto you and lack the self-awareness to see it). If you don’t have a core feeling of self-belief or even a zen like absence of ego then you tend to internalise all the negativity. If you have good self-esteem then you can mostly just ignore it and move one.

Post therapy - I’m working on it!

4) I thought of marriage as a kind of a death!

Now my life is like living in a puffy, marshmallow cloud of a Mills n Boon novel… ;)

5) I never wanted to have kids because I thought that I would make the worst mother in the world.

Hmmm - still struggle with this a bit and feel like the worst mother but sometimes look at the children, acknowledge that perhaps it’s not all down to their brilliant Dad and maybe am not doing such a bad job after all. The point is that, as someone who is still going to counselling, at least I have someone (non-judgemental, qualified, unrelated) to talk to about it.

The sort of therapy that I go in for is long term, psychodynamic. My counsellor is a Freudian practitioner. I found her by writing to the British Association of Counselling: http://www.bacp.co.uk/

Therapy/counselling is expensive but most practitioners work on a sliding scale; where they take your salary into account and charge you accordingly. You might be able to get a referral from a sympathetic G.P. for some free counselling. This will mainly be for short term counselling, possibly for C.B.T. (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - works for some, not all).

You also have to be receptive to it, to work at it and be prepared to feel like an open wound sometimes - buy a pair of sunglasses.

Of course there are the Samaritans:

http://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help-you?gclid=CjwKEAiAo7C2BRDgqODGq5r38DsSJAAv7dTPOajMafInRaHvlWBTXoUCalAlRQdFiwXMq7sFxosrYhoCCnHw_wcB

There is NO SHAME in seeking out counselling - if you had a sports injury, you wouldn’t see anything amiss in seeing a physiotherapist so why not see a therapist if you are feeling consistently unhappy.

Why am I writing this now? Dunno really, maybe I am feeling a bit down - I still do feel like that from time to time but it’s never as bad or as long lasting as that first time (which lasted for about a year and gradually lifted). Perhaps I just needed to see how far I had come. Publishing this does feel like an exposure but, as I writer, I think that you owe it to yourself and to your imaginary reader to be honest.

This post is kind of a paen to therapy but please don’t think that I look askance at anyone for coping by using medication - whatever works best for you! I’ve become a bit of an armchair psychologist over the years and have read that if you are an introvert (like me) then you are more likely to suffer from depression (if you suffer with anything psychological) and be more comfortable with examining your feelings. If you are an extrovert, then you may be more likely to suffer from panic attacks, be less comfortable with discussing feelings and seek an external solution.

In no particular order, here are some good books, T.V and films on the subject:

Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married by Marian Keyes - yes, a chick-lit book but with the most accurate description/depiction of depression (my experience of it, anyway!) that I have ever read.

My Mad, Fat Diary - book and T.V series, both are ace. A young woman who has spent some time in a psychiatric ward; dealing with body issues, mental illness and family strife.

Inside Out  - yes, I do mean the Disney Pixar film! How do Pixar do it? They deal with heavyweight themes with more sensitivity and alacrity than most adult films.

How to be Happy: Lessons from Making Slough Happy By Liz Hoggard. It only really scratches the surface but it’s a start.

Families and how to survive them - by John Cleese and Robin Skynner

Anyway, I don’t know about you but I’m exhausted now! Well done if you persevered with this until the bitter end. Go away and reward yourself with a hot drink, give yourself a hug and be reassured that you are not alone.