Significant Safety

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. I have been struggling lately. It’s hard to get up, move my cinder blocks of feet and generally find a reason to get and stay up. I think that my blog has often been the space where I try and encourage you and me to be upbeat. Write and tell you all the sunshiney steps to take to happiness kingdom when I at best regularly feel like a deflating balloon. Although I believe it’s possible to obtain some level of stability, mental illness is cruel and whips the carpet out from underneath you when least expected. Often, these unexpected jerks are so fierce that the impact takes longer and longer to get up from.

When this happens the most significant “thing” that I feel is taken from me is the safety to be. I do not feel safe to be happy, safe to sleep or safe from the impending doom that’s probably just in my head. It’s so real in my experience, and the clenches regularly on my heart are truly gripping. It’s exhausting and sometimes I close my eyes just asking for reprieve, a full night’s sleep, a day without a yo-yo of emotions or brief reminders of things you no longer what to know. Life now is difficult enough already and much worse when your biggest challenge is within yourself.

I’ve tried so many ways to protect myself from feeling like this, adhere stringently, try to sit in the sun, go to bed at a good time regardless mental illness happened and it does end up in you literally feeling blue and downhearted. I know that this is not the destination. I know that I just have to keep trudging along. But I am tired now and feel battered after the last year. Maybe you do too. The last longest time. If it doesn’t improve, I will go and see my mental health team. It’s challenging and hard but I know that I will get to the end of the tunnel somehow. Stay blessed.

Learning to say no

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. Thank you to those who read my blog and a few new followers. It inspires me to write. It has been a difficult time for me and my writing voice felt blocked. I’ve recently become a proud grandmother but have found complications that come with mental illlness with this little blessing. This includes a granny who battles with sleep, not being able to sit still and wanting to buy groceries and nappies ceiling high to protect us from impending doom that I neither have the funds or storage for. The doom probably isn’t real, but it feels and frigthens my body and being like it really is, often waking me up at night.

As someone with Bipolar Type 2, I experience hypo-mania whether I like it or not. I often explain it as being akin to being eyeore on red bull. It’s tearfully terrific and turns the volume up on the impending doom track I already hate listening to. To quiet it and increasing anxiety, I cook for three days, I plan menus and busy myself with putting a preventative plaster on any area of my life I can at great personal cost. I’m always busy, I’m always catching up and apologizing for my very existence. I know very little rest, although I consistently adhere to my meds and pray for a quiet and peace that mental illness has never allowed me to know.

That’s a lot and all it makes me feel like doing is sighing even more. Instead, I need to learn a small way of addressing how I feel. From experience, blood, sweat, and tears, I have learned that you have to find and fight to chart a way of looking after yourself no matter how many times you fail in trying. Perhaps it could be in learning to say no which isn’t as easy as it sounds. To find ways to say no to the impending doom, the cleaning each room or the cooking of the contents of the fridge. Learn to say no I can’t to things and areas of your life as loudly as you can that it’s too much I tell myself. Perhaps you could try to. I’m trying to succesfully learn how..

Glitchy Grandma

Dear Friends and fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. Over the past few weeks our family came to learn that we were having a baby in a few days. To say I was shocked will have been and will always be an understatement. I looked at our eldest daughter and her swollen belly. We went from ward to ward and bench to bench to ensure that she and the baby were safe. My mind immediately cleared, and all I could see and think about was navigating through a public hospital, trying to stay warm in a really cold winter, and taking them home.

The hospital didn’t have water for over 6 days, intermittent service from much-needed doctors and several grounchy nurses. In the labour ward there are chairs where women are expected to sit in their third trimester for over 15 hours waiting for a bed and further treatment. Our daughter was one of them. After a few close calls which required much bench sitting and sleeping in a car in ice-cold parking lots, she finally went into labour. I went up to her and was not allowed to see them until she was ready to give birth.

I sat in the waiting room outside the ward and cried quietly. We’d confronted so much and I wondered if baby hadn’t also perhaps made a poor choice of grandma who does tend to glitch often. I always believe my mental illness when it proclaims that I am the worst version of myself which I’m mostly not. Mental illness unfortunately is seriously believable when you feel it inside and out. Finally, I was called into the labour room. My daughter looked at me and my tears flowed even more. When she was born my mother had been with me and the first person to hold her.

In what felt like so many loaded minutes, our beautiful grandson was born. I felt a warmness with her, with him, together in his first few moments in the world. Intertwined in the love we both felt for such a tiny little being. We cried as he exercised his little lungs for a blanket. I looked at him and her and thought to myself that if anything, they are living testimony of the good I have and can be. That new beginnings are possible even if you need to shed a tear. This is one happy glitchy grandma that will work through, about, and around her glitches for herself and hers, each and every day.

Humility

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. I read something a few days ago that said there was nothing better to teach than empty pockets and a broken heart. Although I mostly agree, I would include an important footnote that mental illness was probably the real number one and that the combination of the whole lot would probably be deeply instructive/lifelong. Whilst undergoing the teachable moment mental illness has become, there’s no insurance for your off kilter days and that leave days would probably end up not being sufficient depending on how you are and can be. In the centre of this mental illness instruction for me has turned out to be humility.

When you are ill, the best way for someone to help you is to practice humility and let them in. To tell the truth about how you have and are feeling despite how difficult it may feel to do that. I have felt soft, and hardened at the same time by the tarnishing effect mental illness has, especially when I really needed support and it made it confusing to be humble. How could I concede when fighting back was what I had learned and was told to do? You need to ask for help and not everybody knows how to do that. To keep on doing that. Asking for help requires an intimate honesty so that a way out can at least begin to be understood.

There is also a different kind of humility you will confront with mental illness. I have forgotten days, I have done things I didn’t mean to, and I’ve experienced symptoms actively and enacted them on those I love the most. It’s hard. The humility in understanding what the areas are that you struggle with so that you can try to remember to work on them for you. Then there is the most difficult one, which was the most challenging: the realization that you have changed and are becoming a different person with different abilities and sometimes disabilities. I am still stuggling to do that. To understand this partially broken me despite an extended period of diagnosis. It is humbling and ongoing as I’m sure you have experienced and know. I am trying to practice humility.

Waving the White Flag

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope you are as well as possible. My recent blog and writing have been somewhat fraught – a small demonstration of what I have been feeling and experiencing. It has been a lot to go through. Going through. But I stopped and experienced something important for the first time today. I waved a white flag and conceded defeat. I allowed myself to let go – where I am usually the smallest detail stickler and instead said that’s ok, let’s go the other way. It was uplifting. Freeing. A white flag that allowed me to win in so many ways.

In my recent experience, I responded with aggression, being defensive, and resisting anything I could in an attempt to try to control the unwieldy cycle my life had become. I thought hanging onto the completely unnecessary was necessary to take control of the helm. Then today. Then that one taste of you and me don’t have to do that or tolerate it or feel it. I don’t know about you but I epxerience enough everyday, I need not add dealing with difficult people or situations I couldn’t control with a stringest fist. No. I can wave a white flag and save myself significant energy and emotion that I too don’t really have that much of.

I have learned that letting go and figuring out what is the most important to hang onto, is more important. Let’s be honest – there’s just so much one person can deal with. So much one person can process and understand and I’m not going to use unrealistic standards to judge me. Ok, maybe I’ve started just by saying that. I do now that me is worth more, deserves to be beaten less, and can walk away from conflict and situations that don’t promote my wellness. Maybe you too.

Writing the book of Ruth

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers, I hope that you are as well as you can be. When I was little, I asked my mother why she had named me Ruth. Her answer was that I should read the book of Ruth in the bible as the staunch Anglican she was. I took to the bible and turned each page of the Book of Ruth with increasing dismay. It struck me that this Ruth had an ongoing life of distress and hard work, let alone a pesky mother in law that ended up trying to do the right thing for her. However, there was still all of that wheat hauling, been addressed by security and perfuming ones way into a new marriage. Sounded awfully hard.

I recently came out of a psych ward to adjust meds and meet with my mental health team more often. The pillar I was supposed to focus on when leaving the hospital was supposed to be about building boundaries. About looking after me, laying down the proverbial wheat, and realizing that I do not have children anymore. That I have adult kids all above the age of 16. That not every moment was was about catering, cleaning whilst trying to keep it together on repeat. That the next phase could be a differet time for me. I could spend more time with me. Find out who I am. I have been a mother since I’ve been sixteen and mentally ill since much more before then not unlike the undending challenges of Biblical Ruth.

I found out that I am going to be a grandmother in two months a few days ago. I am completely shaken by this. In my culture, the grandmother looks after the newborn and it’s never questioned. I feel guilty for wanting to breathe and have time just for myself and not to have to care for anyone else let alone my swirling mind and being that is a pleasant misery to be in each day. I don’t want to mother anyone else anymore. I want to spend more time actually getting better and being honest about disabling systems – like not sleeping – that affects each day. I am angry that never get to put the wheat down and it makes me really sad. Now should be a happy time when its just worrisome instead.

Instant Grandma

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. On Friday last week, my husband and I found out that we are definitely going to be grandparents in August, this year. Shock. People asked me how did I not know and well my answer is that we don’t as a practice, undertake body frisking/shake downs of our children/adults each day. What went through my mind was who would want a crazy grandma like me? Here I am dealing with trying to stay well and promote my mental health but here we are, baby on the way, pretty soon at that. I am also wondering if the big guy up there has a wicked sense of humour having me be star in an ever exciting, plot twisting, reality tv show.

Don’t be mistaken, I am excited for my daughter and I pray for the health and well-being of her and the baby. I was just and am just so far from being ready for this. I finally believed that I was going to lead my own life with our youngest being 16. I believed I would finally find a way of charting and living through this rollercoaster of a mental illness and find peace somehow. This seems a little less possible with a newborn and a mother that does not yet know how to look after a baby. You can tell me that she can learn, but that’s just not how we roll in my family. I’m not sure what to do and how to respond.

Perhaps it is not my responsibility and she and her partner need to look after the baby but I know that they can’t. I know they don’t have the faintest clue what it takes to raise a baby, to go through a series of late nights, let alone the finances it takes to raise a little being that is pretty expensive to look after. I’m confused, happy, and committed but sad for me. I had thought that me and my mental illness would finally have a chance to live in peace. To sit in the sun and not have responsibility for other beings that need two hourly feeds. So today I am seriously happy and sad and not so sure what to do. I hope you have an awesome day.

Mental Illness Tea

Dear Fellow Bloggers and Readers- I hope that you are as well as you can be. I’ve said before that I always thought my blog would be a space for spice and all things nice, that would radiate positive vibes/tips and suggestions for the mentally ill or those otherwise devoid of happiness. For a while I would avoid writing which usually helps me because I didn’t want to ink the bad things. They are enough already. It was because I knew no matter what you do, mental illness and promoting mental health ain’t no walk in the park. It’s more like an extreme support, where you best don a helmet/knee pads and any pre-protection you can strap on.

With that awesome outlook, and any amount of synthetic sunshine, for me the foreverness of the diagnosis/ongoing symptoms are significantly underwhelming and there’s nothing good to say about that. However, it’s important that we and me need to spill the mental illness tea. We need to vocalize what we experience. Only in ways that are good for everyone involved but there is a truth of mental illness which is not spoken about and perhaps areas when talking, that we could heal from. I think it would be good for people with mental illness and their families. We need a common vocublarly where no, I don’t enjoy it, sleeping the day away and crying incessantly aren’t my favourite go to hobbies.

Mental illness is humbling. It takes away things that were important to you. I can’t remember a lot. I’m clumsy and irrationally paranoid. I’m usually sedated but don’t sleep. I’m irritable with the people I love the most when I tend to and find it close to impossible to sit still. I find being with other people overwhelming and experience anxiety regualrly. There are some things that help, others not. But I know despite of that, we need to be spilling the tea on mental illness more regularly and in so doing possibly help one another cope more ably. Stay blessed.

When Skies are Grey

Hi Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. When I first started my blog, I thought it would be a place where I could be happy, motivated, inspirational even to keep the grim lot of you going. Then life and mental illness happened and I realized despite trying to spread the sunshine, there were times, too many times, when my experience that the skies were grey. I thought it would be best to not write. There were times I couldn’t or found that the lack of me really had nothing to say. Perhaps however, that is the best time to talk and tell others what’s going on.

Perhaps there are others who can relate feeling like cinder blocks tied to their bodies in bed regardless of the time of the day or perhaps not wanting to talk or see anyone. I have hypo-mania which I best describe as depression on red bull/energy drinks, where despite what you’re feeling which is awfully convenient because I can’t sit still for my family who receive several meals per day. On top of all this great stuff there are handfuls for pills that must be taken each day at the right time and a run around a block if you can manage to because well mental health and vitamin. Difficult stuff.

Perhaps what we are supposed to do is reach out, to talk about cinder blocks, to talk about how we are feeling, the good, the bad, and the ugly because I don’t think that anyone who doesn’t experience these days, moods, feelings and pretty much anything mental illness can truly understand. About being clumsy, the incessant reminders that you aren’t enough and that anxiety will take you out because this does happen particularly when you’re out, and it’s tremendously terrible. I want my blog and the engagement with it to be real. So I am saying that sometimes skies are grey.

Glimmer of Hope

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. Each morning after enough coffee, I open the windows of our house and quietly ask that my children/husband/home be kept safe. It’s an important ritual for me that reminds me that the sun rises each day, that there’s prayers following my loved ones about and that should be enough to ensure I have a little bit of hope. Recently I haven’t felt it. I have instead ate, slept and experienced overwhelming bleugh/sigh/exhaustion etc which unfortunately wins above anything else. It’s because feeling like that always wins over everything else whether you like it or not. There’s also that uncharming let’s here we go again feeling that is bitterly boring.

I’ve been home for a few days from a psych ward still playing with pills and dosages to see which works which is fun and rather interesting when trying to keep your job, be a mom and wife all of a sudden and quickly. I’ve tried to keep my wits about me but the truth is I don’t have many spare wits at the moment. I’d rather be gardening on my own. Reading and resting to give a weary soul/ piece of person that honestly after living a life of running for too long trying to hide my crazy which I am finding just isn’t going to work anymore.

Whilst a one-woman protest may be what’s in order, it’s not going to help things much, and as I’ve said life and other leading financial institutions do not offer all comprehensive insurance packages for chronic mental illness. So even when you are feeling grim you have to go about it. Mine starts with opening the curtains. With intentionally believing that despite so much I am going to have an ok day. That my loved ones will be ok. All of this happens I believe with even the smallest glimmer of hope. I am going to try to grow mine.