Saying goodbye and the end of my totally emo existential crisis

This week has been big. Huge, in fact.

This week, I decided to stop having therapy. I didn't know until the day of my last session that I was ready to stop - it was one of those light bulb moments when suddenly you just know. I was driving away from an occupational health assessment, which I had found slightly insulting for reasons I won't bore you with, and it occurred to me that I was utterly sick of talking about my mental health.

During a friend's wedding last month I realised that I have accepted the fact that depression is a part of who I am. It's unlikely to go away, but it's manageable, and what's more, I no longer care about being judged. Because ultimately if someone thinks less of me because of my condition, it's symptomatic of their lack of education and understanding around mental health. It's their problem. In some ways my light bulb moment was the next logical step, but I wasn't expecting it to happen so soon.

muppet.wikia.com

Sat in my session that evening I felt like there was nothing left to say. Nothing to confess to, or to get off my chest. And so my therapist and I agreed it was time for us to part.

It's an odd feeling, saying goodbye to somebody who has basically steered you through the worst time in your life. She knows everything - everything - about me, yet I know nothing about her. I have been weak, vulnerable, ashamed, confused, hopeful and everything in between during our sessions, and together we have unpicked the tangle of thoughts, emotions and experiences that brought me to her in the first place. Saying goodbye was sad and joyful and melancholy and exciting all at once.

In case you're wondering, the part of me is being played by Miss Piggy in the above photo.

On, like, totally finding myself yeah?

www.superfunnyimages.com

It is a cliche, but for some of us there comes a point where we need to reassess who we are, because we need to challenge ourselves, or get a new perspective, or because the person we were just isn't working out for us anymore. There's this idea that to do so, it's necessary to spend a month in silence on an uninhabited island or spiritually connect with a Balinese wise man or something.


I am proof that this is a fallacy. I did not have to spend time in an ashram in India in order to find myself. I did not do it by seeking out a Tibetan fortune teller or a Kalahari shaman. I realised that I could be the person I want to be on a gently sagging sofa in a small room at the local community support centre. I did it by laying myself bare to a complete stranger and allowing her to help me sort through the broken pieces, remove the sharp bits and build something stronger from what was left.

The point, despite what gap year students might have you believe, is that accessing your inner strength and becoming someone you can accept and like is not about helping Cambodian orphans or taking some dubious substance and talking to God. It's about making sense of your past so that ultimately you can leave it behind and step confidently into your present.

And on a lighter note...

I have officially smashed my £1,000 target for the trek, and I still have 4 months to go!!!

sbr.ocsb.ca

The Little Book of Little Victories, and how I learned to do confrontation

Well hello there! It's been a while. Fundraising is currently taking a small hiatus while I figure out when to do my next event. In the meantime, life has delivered a good deal of excitement to my door.

The Little Book of Little Victories

When I first started my medication I decided to keep a 'victory' diary, which I affectionately call the Little Book of Little Victories, and still add entries to every so often. Depression, as I have explained, makes everything harder, from cooking dinner to socialising. So in order to get through, it helps to focus on the small things that have a positive impact; those things that mean, if only for a few moments, that you've beaten it.

In the beginning, the victories were simply things like, "Cleaned the kitchen and tidied my bedroom" and "Haven't cried today." Underneath these, I wrote how those actions make me feel. In mid September I recorded the first time that I had felt normal (for a given value of normal) in months. As the weeks and months have progressed, my little victories are growing, and recently I have been able to add two very significant ones to the list.

Last month I somehow managed to negotiate my way through a hefty interview process and find myself with a new job. Although my stress levels sky rocketed during this time, and I shed more than a few tears, I'm feeling pretty proud of myself for making such a step in such a short time. Once again I have to attribute some of this to the support of family and colleagues, but the fact that it's something I could never have done six months ago makes it all the more rewarding.

I've now been in my new role for almost a month, and have coped with the transition better than I imagined. For the record, I had imagined more than one meltdown by now. There have been none.

How I learned to do confrontation

I write this with some hesitancy, because I don't wish to claim that I have, by any means, nailed this particular issue of mine, but today, I had a conversation that required me to be somewhat confrontational, and I managed it without panicking, getting flustered, or feeling guilty.

Allow me to offer some background. Put simply, I hate confrontation of any kind. Historically I have found it sort of embarrassing and experienced feelings of guilt soon after expressing any sort of displeasure. At anything. I have talked, at some length, with my therapist about this, and when I happened to mention again that I don't like confrontation the other week in my session, she replied with a sly grin, "Don't you?!". You know you're getting better when your therapist starts getting sarky.

So the most recent victory for me was having that conversation, where I articulated my frustrations clearly, assertively and without embarrassment, and instead of feeling bad (which my brain tried a couple of times to make me do, resulting in an internal Smeagol/Gollum type scenario in which Smeagol ultimately won, getting Gollum to eff off) - I actually felt pretty good. Not, I'd like to point out, because I'm a heinous bitch who enjoys having a go, but because I had the courage to stand up and fight my corner. And that is a pretty big little victory.

Pics courtesy of http://imgarcade.com/ and http://www.quickmeme.com/

The Great Wine Tasting

Last Saturday was the evening of the Great Wine Tasting, during which I schooled my parents and a handful of their excellent friends in tasting wine like a boss, and somewhat surprised myself at the amount of information I was able to fish out of the dark recesses of my memory.

The evening was a great success - we explored the differences between old world & new world Sauvignons, Chardonnays from different climates and Pinot Noir vs Malbec. We sniffed, we tasted, we food matched (and if anyone can give me the Latin for that I will buy them a drink). We ate grapes and chewed stalks (one or two over enthusiastic tasters also swallowed said stalks) and finished with a blind tasting, by which time everyone present was a pro at tasting and managed to identify at least a couple of flavours in the wine.

Although spittoons were offered, they were roundly rejected and I'm told there was more than one aching head the following morning. Parents, eh?

At this point, I would like to say a very large, very warm and very fuzzy THANK YOU to Carrie & Keith Devonshire, who couldn't make the wine tasting in the end, but kindly donated £150 to the cause. This donation alone is enough to fund a local support group, enabling people with mental health difficulties to get their confidence and self esteem back. And believe you me, that's money very well spent.

In prep for high altitude

The very same day of the tasting, I obtained a training mask that simulates high altitude. This, when twinned with the aforementioned waterproof trousers, makes me so irresistible to the opposite sex that I've been banned by the authorities from wearing the two together. Behold:

My experience so far, aside from confirmation that it's really hard to breathe at high altitude, is that Darth Vader must've had it pretty rough, always having the noise of his own respiration in his ears. Seriously. I'm at the sitting-still-and-practising-breathing stage and I keep wondering why there's a Sith lord in everything I'm watching on TV.

Step two of my training has begun, with a program that requires me to make a concerted effort to be physically active on a more regular basis. The effort is largely home based, but I am also being good and parking a 10 minute walk away from my new office to build in a little daily walking. I'm hoping that at some point this year the weather might decide to, I don't know, warm up a little, and perhaps treat us to some sunshine and an absence of 70mph winds so that I can do a 1-2 hour ramble along the coast.

Donation total

Thanks to some ace baking by my mother and her buddy Mrs Ashley, I got a further £50 hit into the Just Giving account this week. Poppa C also managed to get some extra weight added to my Mind collection tin through selling cake and persuading people to give up their hard earned cash for a good cause. To my relief, I have not received any complaints about his methods of persuasion, which I'm assuming were above board.

So once again a big ol' happy thank you to those who have helped me reach an amazing £664 (+ what's in the tin). I'm genuinely bowled over by the support I'm receiving.

Things I have learned from depression

Depression, as you are probably aware by now, is awful. Dark, lonely, sad, desperate, awful.

But.

But it is also possibly the best thing that has happened to me. With the help of my fantastic therapist, and 50mg per day of SSRIs, I have learned more about myself in the past 8 months than I had since I left university. Here are some things that having depression has taught me:

1. Better understanding myself has meant I am able to understand others better. By being kind to myself, accepting who I am and how I am, it's so much easier to empathise with other people, to understand who they are and how they are.

2. Dreams are important and worth paying attention to. I take the time to think about my dreams now, and I am better able to analyse what they mean. Not with the use of a generic 'what does my dream mean?' app, because our dreams mean different things to each of us. They are entirely individual and reflect our specific state of mind and experience of the world. It turns out that for me, for example, my subconscious identifies aspects of my self as cats.

3. Other people are mirrors of ourselves. We like or dislike people because we see elements of ourselves that can or cannot accept in them.

4. I am all things. I cannot be good without also being bad, kind without being mean, selfless without being selfish. I am not complete without both light and dark, yin and yang. It is the choices I make that strengthen certain characteristics.

5. The little victories matter. It's the little ones that make the big ones possible.

6. Writing helps. Writing is a selfish act, one we depressives use to escape the burning catastrophe of our minds. Some of us write non-fiction, others creatively. But each word is written against the backdrop of depression and coloured with its echoes.

7. There is a way up. There is always someone who will help to lift the weight, even on the worst days. I may need meds and therapy, but I did not drink and I did not take drugs to blunt the pain. I felt it, I lived through it, I am facing it, and I am stronger.

The great charity cake extravaganza

There are very few people here in the west who readily turn down cake. Such people are often treated with either suspicion (if they say they simply don't like it) or sympathy (if they're on a diet). I don't believe in diets, but I do believe - heartily - in cake.

To this end, I spent last weekend baking a selection of treats for my colleagues and concocting 10 reasons why they should ignore any form of self deprivation in order to support a good cause. Consequently the large stack of cakes and biscuits I left in the orange room (a lunch room painted bright orange where cake is habitually left) disappeared fairly rapidly over the next couple of days.

Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures when the tins we full, however I did get some snaps before the contents vanished completely. Here's what I baked:

Lemon & poppy seed cakes. These went fastest of all.

Gingerbread men with varying chocolate trouser patterns. I even gave one Y-fronts. 

Coconut and choc chip cakes made with a little coconut oil for extra moistness.

Shortbread topped with cream (whipped by my own fair hand) and a raspberry.

Being totally clever and resourceful, I also supplied plastic bags so people could take goodies home to their families. I believe I was responsible for more than one hyperactive child on Monday night.

Kind-hearted bunch that they are, my colleagues ate their way to £35.69 (bear in mind we're a pretty small team), bringing my overall total to £350. Huzzah!!

The value of tears and why meditation is great

How I learnt the value of crying 

Not so long ago I thought that crying was a sign of weakness. I thought that because people saw me as a strong person, it meant tears were unacceptable, even behind closed doors. They make us vulnerable, they make us ugly.

During the summer I cried almost every day. I hated it. Crying solved nothing and it gave me a headache, but I couldn't make it stop. Tiny things would set me off: TV shows, light-hearted digs from colleagues that I'd normally take in my stride, people being nice to me, taking an extra 15 minutes to get home because of a diversion. Sometimes at work I'd hide in the toilets and cry several times a day, other times I'd manage to hold the mask in place till 5pm, at which point I'd get in my car and let go, and the tears would fall until long after I was home.

During my first few therapy sessions I cried from start to finish. I'd leave the building with red, puffy eyes feeling even more confused and overwhelmed than when I went in. But gradually, as the meds stabilised me and the therapy progressed, I began to appreciate the tears. I cried in a way I had not cried for ages - as a release. This kind follows a stressful event, unaccompanied by the self-blame and guilt I had grown used to experiencing. It's shorter, and the aftermath is a sense of relief rather than utter exhaustion.

Last Thursday I had a melt-down day, the type of day I had every day last summer. I took things to heart, became anxious, stressed and paranoid. I hid in the toilets and I cried. But instead of hating myself for being a feeble excuse for a human being, I was able to roll with it, to rationalise it and recognise that tomorrow would be better. And, of course, it was. Finally I can accept a few tears here and there when I need them.

Why meditation is great

After a long time getting passed off as something only hippies and Buddhist monks do, meditation is finally getting a bit more of the praise it deserves. As someone who struggles with their mental health, I think it's brilliant - not only because it is a chance to wind down and clear my mind for a few minutes, but also because it's a good way to reinforce the new ways of thinking and of looking at life that I am learning. It's what my therapist would call time to 'nurture' myself.

I don't go in for humming, or chanting, it's not my thing. But there are some really effective techniques that enable you to calm your mind and focus on the here and now instead of worrying about the ironing, or that report that's due in the morning. One of my preferred exercises is to focus on my breath. I sit cross-legged, hands in my lap or resting on my knees and close my eyes. With every breath in I feel my body expanding like a balloon, and with every breath out I imagine my muscles relaxing. I start with my neck and work all the way down to my legs, feeling the tension fall away from each part of my body as I focus on it.

Recently my trainer recommended a book called Synchrodestiny to me. Now there are plenty of medics and scientists out there who turn their noses up at Deepak Chopra and dismiss his books - it's true, some of his ideas are a bit random to say the least - but I'll say this for Synochrodestiny, it made a rough patch a little less bad. He sets out 7 'sutras', one for each day of the week that focuses on a different concept. These reinforce the positive mindset that my therapist has been encouraging me to adopt, enabling me to imagine myself as part of something bigger as opposed to totally isolated, to see aspects of myself in others, which helps me connect and empathise with them, to remind myself that I am a worthwhile person with something to offer the world.


I have not meditated for 2 weeks due to other commitments, and I have noticed it. My self esteem has ebbed a little, my sense of connection has subsided, I doubt myself more. Recent events have left me very tired, but the moment I regain some energy I plan to begin again.

Maybe you're inclined to think I'm talking rubbish, but if you get some time alone, I'd encourage you to give it a try. You may be surprised at how good it feels.

Becoming a fashion icon

It's been a few weeks since I last posted, but don't despair dear reader, for I have not been idle.

The truth is things have been fairly hectic one way or another, but somehow between doing my day job, celebrating my dad's 60th (happy birthday Poppa C!) and having some very important team building exercises (pub lunches), I have managed to obtain new gear and more donations, and begin my training for the trek.

There comes a time in every girl's life when she
has to decide whether or not to join that hip hop
dance troupe. I reckon I'm in.

Waterproof trousers should be S/S 2015's must-have

Last week my job took me to the Caravan, Camping & Motorhome Show. After a long Monday building up our exhibition stand (and those of 20 odd attending campsites - yes, my guns are now rock hard(!)), I decided to have a snoop about on the Tuesday for some kit for the trek. Half an hour on the outdoor clothing stand and some advice from a very helpful chap later, I was the proud owner of 2 pairs of hiking socks, a pair of lightweight trekking trousers and - get this - some waterproof trousers.

I don't know if you've ever seen a pair of these badboys, but women of Britain, I can tell you now that these are a fashion essential with their total lack of shape, tasteful elastic ankle cuffs and rustling anorak material. Still not convinced? What if I told you the pockets are so large that I can basically fit a zebra in each one. HOT.





The sun is always over the yardarm somewhere

Luckily something a bit more exciting turned up today - a T-shirt from Mind (which I will be wearing at every possible opportunity so be warned) and my collection tin (which I will be shaking irritatingly in people's faces for the next 6 months). They arrived in good time for a wine tasting that I shall be holding at my long suffering parents' house at the end of March.

I decided to capitalise on my Majestic training and teach a few old dogs (they're going to kill me) some new tricks - namely how to tell the difference between a Marlborough Sauvignon and a Loire one, and that not all Chardonnay is oaked to within an inch of its life. If all goes well the plan is to repeat said tasting with other groups. Wish me luck.



Getting in step

On Monday I donned my hiking boots and headed out into the Kent countryside for a sunny lunchtime ramble. When I say sunny, what I mean is it was sunny when I left the office. The first half of the route is almost entirely uphill, and just as I got to the mid-point, by the field where the spring lambs will be frolicking in less than a month, over rolled the clouds and down came the rain. And hail. It's worth mentioning at this point that the only waterproof item on my body was my footwear.

I arrived back in the office 20 minutes later looking like I had possibly washed up somewhere inconvenient and had to scramble through hostile undergrowth to get back. Like a pro though, still cheerful. Take that, depression.