Harder and Heavier

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. From many ends, this year has been largely challenging and continues to be. I’ve gone through it waking up each morning and asking whether it was really worth it. It hasn’t felt like it. Ongoing challenges and the bleugh, ongoing mental illness which is the only consistent thing I’ve ever known. It will come, it will push you down and affect your ability to carry on. I wonder if we can just digest for a minute that I (and your) experience my mental illness every day, in each issue, all the time? If I don’t feel depressed (and other lovely symptoms), I am second guessing my decisions due to that all encompassing phrase: likely to be psychotic at any given point. It’s peachy I tell you.

I don’t have bad days all the time, there are the infrequent days of sunshine which well, in a percentage comparison, don’t make up a whole lot. When I have the sunshine it’s almost as if I close the curtains too early on the rays that come in knowing that it’s not mine to have. No use becoming used to something that I’m not likely to have or will miss too greatly again. Eyeore much. What I find disappointing is that despite your best efforts, this terror, taunting illness will come and rip the normal carpet right out from beneath you. Mine even comes back for seconds if I haven’t fallen apart sufficiently. I always advocate that you should get back after being beaten down but anyone who’s anyone knows that gets harder and heavier.

There are a couple of suggestions: chug plenty of pills, exercise, drink water, eat, properly, get vitamin D, check in with your mental health team if you can afford it and importantly, don’t research climate change. Right now pills and climate change research are clearly not doing the most. The truth is that it is hard, chocolate is appealing, and lying like a sloth in the hope for motivation happens. Happens a lot. Sigh. I am still going to say as loudly as I can each day that in spite of the challenge, the hard and the heavy, open your curtains, dance, sing and do whatever you have too to fight for you. It may never truly feel like it is worth but it really, really is. I’m still practising saying that former sentence. Let me know what works for you despite the hard and heavy.