On me

I have been very sporadically present on this site.
As anyone who looks at it will most likely know me, there’s not much to tell that adds to that. Life has been very intense for the last few years. I lost my footing and fell. My mental health issues that I had no idea were issues came a calling. My marriage fell apart, I saw the woman I loved die a little day by day. I saw her become someone else. (I accept that I failed the marriage and her, but I won’t accept the totality of the blame of the situation. But all that is another bucket of thoughts I’m not getting into today.) My children suffered and needed more support, love and comfort than they were given. I was hit full on by the depth of my isolation and struggled to survive.
I followed my heart. I followed my head. I helped my children cope with their immediate grief. I was ostracised by those whose support I could have used. I’m not proud, but glad to have survived 3 attempted suicides. I found security and care and lost it again. I felt heartbreak and grief that overwhelmed, I almost lost the care of my children and was almost sectioned.
But I’m still here.

Why this post, why now? It’s not all been pain and clouds of sorrow. If you could see my thoughts as I type this. There is a side of me that yells how dare I. How dare I complain when others have suffered more and are suffering more. I accept that they have suffered more and are suffering more, but I’m not in a suffering competition. My experience is worthy as any others.
But I digress from my internal debate. I’m writing this for me and to me. It is the 14th of October 2024, and I am alive.

I want (no wishes - wishes are for the benefit of the world, if wishes exist I shall not waste them on personal whims.) I want to use this as a journal

. I have been struggling to find a format that works for me.

Throughout this whole life, I feel like literal chapters have been closed and opened. Along with the clouds and fogs in my head, I have experienced joys that I think few get to experience. I found the most intense love, I have been so deliriously happy. I have found all my senses overwhelmingly fulfilled. I have been moved to tears and ecstasy by trees in rainy sunlight. UI’m not a spiritual person. I was once, and I can see how some would view these moments as a lifting of the veil. I have experienced a depth of friendship that still seems s to grow. I have undergone therapy that has shaken the very foundations of who I thought I was.

Today? I’m growing. Since 2016 my life has been influx. Wall after wall of illusion and revelation have collapsed, and all the things I have done in the past now lie before me as actions. My therapy has allowed me to see the reasons for my choices and actions, and the thing I choose to do. Now I feel like I’m starting over. I try to picture myself younger, my internal vision of myself. It’s no longer there.

I am free to be me. However, I no longer have the full motivations for all the behaviours I want. My motivations in the past were never fully for me. They were to gain acceptance and to people please. To escape and not face who ever I am now. So I’m learning to do things again. But for me. And with that comes rebellion and fear. These actions like washing dishes, sweeping floors, self-care even my art, while part of these were completed for me. Overwhelmingly, they were completed for the benefit of others. The art is a different beast. I was away of shutting all of it out and dwelling with in.
I wanted love and acceptance. I wanted to feel worth. I was filled with self loathing and anger that I couldn’t love myself, that I was not worthy of that love.

So now I am learning how to be loving to myself and how to care for the human I am. I can forgive myself when I mess up as a parent. But I find it difficult to find that compassion for myself. I am full of what if, why can’t I, I should and other judgment thoughts.

So the why? I write this as an expression of the past and the current state. It’s not structured well. It’s a brain fart of a mind dump and that okay. It’s ambiguous, as I’m going to put it public. It’s for me, as I know where I have been and where I am. I think I know where I want to be. No, I don’t know where I’m going or how to get there, really. I just know those answers need to be found by doing in the here and now. The past only reveals to me patterns of behaviour that based on escape and giving up of responsibility.

Where I am now, is scary for different reasons. What if I die before I get to progress much further. What if I never love again. What if I’m wrong again. What if. What if. My choice is to be compassionate to myself. To take my internal voice and tell it how I want to be spoken to. Setting the boundaries I want. Stern enough to jolly myself along when I am capable of pushing more. Compassionate enough to know when I’m nearing my limit. Focused enough to help me cut the chaff from my behaviours.

I want this to be a daily practice and to see how I develop through the practice.

Just Random Thoughts

I don’t have a central theme to this post. It’s just a musing or a ramble. I like many others have been in lock down and suffering from mental helath issues. I have fourtunately had a good mental health team around me and they have ensured that I am getting medication. The difference a set of good eds makes is unbeliveable. This time last year I was struggling to get up in the morning and then spent the day struggling to think.The meds made me sluggish. The new meds have allowed me to be more motivated and helped to focus on getting stuff done. Like getting on with my coding learning. I had a hiccup with the meds last week and the difference is striking.

I have also cut a lot of social media out of my life as well. I still have profiles, but I have deleted the apps from my phone. This has resulted in me haveing no clue about whta is occuring outside of my curated instagram feed. I don’t get embroiled in any agrugemnets that my head can’t let lie. I feel a sense of guilt I guess because there are things occuring in the world stage which are huge like the ‘Black Live Matter’ demonstrations, the covid response , and lifting of the restrictions. I feel like I should be more vocal about these things and recognise thaat my ability to just turn off socail media, speaks volumes about the level of my ‘priviledges’. Lots of people don’t get to just ‘turn off’ these issues when it gets to be too much.

I don’t have much to add to any of the debates as I don’t know enough about the problems. So I’m reading and listening to podcasts, in order to better understand. I try to amke my kids aware of the inequalities in the world, but I worry that I’ll bog them down in the rot and not have anything positive to show them. I’ll bumble and ramble along I guess and make a mess of things here and there, but I hope I remeber to tidy upafter myself and that my actions cause more good in the world than harm. I want to do more than hope. I want to make the world around me, and that spreads out from me a better place. It’s overwhelming the amount to be done. But I will try to take it on piece by piece. I feel that my major contribution will be in how I bring my kids up, and how they then influence the world.

I’ve rambled enough here. I’ll shush and things.

something about logic and emotion Part 1

To write this safely, I have had to use a lot of my therapy tools and hand write it out, to slow and focus my mind. 

One of my core strengths is my ability to generate a zabilliion and 5 ideas and scenarios in my mind extremely quickly. I'm not saying I'm better at this than anyone else, its just one of the things I do well. My logic and creative mind kicks in and takes my mind whirling through thoughts at speed, its too much too quickly. So a technique I developed is to vocalise my ideas this forces my mind to slow down. It focuses my mind on 1 or 3 ideas which my mind will chase and flip between. Generally from talking to my therapist I think it's fair to say that ideas cause emotional responses. Like thinking about a bungee jump conjures feelings of fear, excitement and so on. These emotional responses cause physical responses. Fear can get the adrenaline pumping and so on. This all helps us identify and respond to risk levels. 

My mind is great at generating the ideas, but it a bit addicted to the rush of new ideas and chases each idea as far as it can before jumping to  another tangential idea and running with it. Its fun, honestly it is. (If you've spoken to me after I've been painting I'll complain of a head ache, being tired and yet I  will talk about lots of ideas that my work will lead on to and where that can lead and where that....... (yawn) but I'm also quite manic in my actions being a lot more active. 

Unfortunately my emotional mind is not as quick to keep up I think. All the emotions get pushed to one side and don't get dealt with. This would not be an issue, but for life and it's general demands; I have to react to events, and the emotions from the whirling mind don't get dealt with. (I should point out that my mind does this even when I'm not  painting). I guess I use to be able to just push these things away or down and deal with them somehow - I honestly have no idea how I did it. But since the start of 2016(?) 17(?)  something has given way. And the thing I did -what ever it was- no longer functions. So instead all the emotions sit there stewing unprocessed, unlabeled, unacknowledged until some stress or event triggers the dam to burst.

This next bit is hard to write. It's how my body reacts. I've had over the past few nights this happen hourly or so -  I was really grateful for sleep last night. I'm not sure if they are panic attacks, but that's what I'm going to call them. When it kicks in my right hand starts to shake and twitch. Then I start crying randomly. It stops and starts over the course of 30 minutes or so. Sometimes that's it just uncontrollable crying. Other times it gets more extreme. I curl in to a ball, my anxiety peaks and I lose the ability to form words, both in my mind and physically. In my mind it rages.
 I have no idea what it is but it causes at its worst my throat and chest and all muscles to tense. I make a horrible tortured noise and then it reaches its peak where I can't even breathe. I become a tensed up ball of bone and flesh. My thoughts are wordless and too, too fast.

Then my body releases itself and I hyperventilate to get air and the cycle repeats. This can go on for 10 minutes until my body is sore and exhausted. At it worst I was having these for 30 minutes with little break in  between( thank fully the rethink team were there for me). My body might be exhausted but the anxiety is still there. This is conjecture, but at this point my logic mind is broken and I'm just reacting, not thinking. Maybe I see my self as a threat I don't know, but it can lead to self harming. I'm impulsively hurting my self. The unwanted thoughts of suicide will crash in again and again. It seems to be the only solution to end the nameless and formless torment. If  I fight that urge off I can end up in the panic attack mode again. Then suddenly it stops. I might get lucky and that is it for the day. WOOO!
Mostly it cycles (i'm not sure of the timings) pretty much every hour for whatever length of time. 

This is about as much as I can handle right now. My hand is letting me know I need to ground myself.  In my next part I'll be using metaphor to get ideas across. 
 

Something about renewal and fresh starts

Blimey 2017 was a year! I've had mental health issues and the world seems to have not faired that well either. I have learnt a lot about myself this last year, but I'm not here to talk about that right now. I have neglected my website for too long so I'm going to redesign it and hopefully get a decent bit opf motivation to post here consistently. I do a lot from my  phone and the squarespace apps are not the best. I can never be certain that the post goes through. When it does images sometimes go missing.