The certainty of uncertainty

This may seem an odd title for my new addition to this blog.  But since I last blogged the only certainty I have is uncertainty.  I do not know when I will have to leave my present employment or under what terms and conditions.  I have learned that many people I thought were my friends have used my present difficulties to turn away and in some cases speak untruthfully about me.  I am hurt by this but gradually have come to the conclusion that it says a lot about them and not much about me.  It's difficult to understand how people can appear to enjoy kicking a man when he's down.

However, I have discovered who my true friends are - they say a real friend walks in when the world walks out.  I have found this to be true and I am grateful for it.  People of whom I am very fond still believe in me.   My employers still seek to discredit me and have used my mental health issues as a tool to make this worse.  This is discrimination and I am challenging it.

I have formally complained about much of this and to my astonishement this has generated some immediate change.  Perhaps this will prevent my experiences happening to someone else - I do hope so.


Oddly enough I am learning to live with the certainty of uncertainty and remind myself of Mother Julian of Norwich's seminal words 'all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well'.  Put more simply by my closest friend , 'it will all work out - eventually'.

Best of all my two gorgeous, faithful, loyal and loving spaniels are by my side day and night - perfect!

Helping others

Helping others and putting other people first is rather unfashionable these days, sadly.  But it is also true to say that when you have a mental health problem, especially depression, it makes you less able to 'look out' and see the needs of others.  This is not because you don't want to it's because you can't.

An anonymous poster has asked to link into my blog as s/he feels it may help others who read their posts.  I hope so too.

Life is very tough and uncertain right now for me, and that is putting it mildly.  However, if this is of some help to others I would be delighted and would welcome comments and feedback - it helps one to feel less alone.

Despite how I feel, which is probably less than 1 out of 10 right now, I would like to help others.  And to be quite honest I'd like others to help me too.

Losing it all

There has been a long gap since my last blog.  The reason is simple.  I am ill again, have been readmitted to a psychiatric hospital, my career and whole family life is in jeopardy because of something someone has said about me and therefore, in simple terms, life as I knew it has gone.

To lose one's health is one thing, to lose family, job, housing and future as well is beyond crushing.  Right now I have my dogs for company - that is it.

Will this ever improve?  Right now I think it will only get worse and for complicated reasons I cannot ask for more support.

I hope that if anyone reads this they will spare a thought and a prayer for me - I thought my life was gradually improving.  In fact it could not have gone more profoundly in the opposite direction.

Notice, label, leave.

Blogger dashboard has changed again and I am a little confused - a reminder that I've left this too long again.  I will keep writing and hope someone is still reading and that it is of some help to them as well as cathartic for me!

It's been 'mixed bag' again.  Mixed news about the economy (followers know only too well this is the most prominent and persistent trigger for my anxiety attacks) has produced mixed psychological results for me, perhaps, not surprisingly.

This continues to irritate me as well as producing some shame.  It irritates me because, as usual, the media headlines the bad news and fails to balance this with the good news.  For example, Mervyn King's pronouncement that the UK economy may grow even less than predicted (if at all) is not balanced out by with a reminder that unemployment has continued to steadily fall and that inflation has also dropped a little.  I feel rather ashamed because I continue to interpret any such headlines as a direct threat to me and my family when this is unlikely to be true.  I am not an intentionally selfish person but understand it may come across this way.

To add some balance of my own, yesterday I scored 82% on Moodscope, my highest ever score, so good days do occur when I get back on the 'perspective train' and file the irrelevant rubbish exactly where it should go - in the 'Bollocks Box'!  Pardon my language if you will?

I still, for the most part, avoid the news.  First because it seems unbalanced as I have already mentioned and second, to try and avoid the triggers.  Is this running away?  Perhaps, a little.  But if some things which are largely irrelevant causes a panic attack why go there?  The fears still lurk underneath that they are highly relevant and I am burying my head in the proverbial sand.  But I needs must trust my therapist that these things need to be noticed for what they are, labelled and left alone.  Notice, label, leave.

Easy to say very hard to do.  Some bad days have highlighted this again but tomorrow, fellow travellers, is another day.

A final point which may help those of a more spiritual disposition.  On the bad days I am returning more and more to the 14th Century Divine, Mother Julian of Norwich, whose most often quoted saying is simply this: 'all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well'. Amen to that on many levels but we all know how difficult it is to trust others, even those who are divinely inspired, when we are anxious and afraid.

Back to notice, label and leave it in the bollocks box.  And try again tomorrow.  Stay strong fellow travellers.

Back to basics

'Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through'.  So said Joseph Conrad who's life was beset by immense and challenging difficulties.  I have been trying to do this very thing as well as holding onto what I wrote about the sun still being behind the clouds when I last blogged a couple of days ago.  Mind you, there's been no sunshine today although the ground appears to be thankfully soaking up the water!

Back to basics for me then.  Sensible balanced diet (plenty of food rich in tryptophans, that amino acid so essential to enable the body to produce serotonin, the feel good chemical), plenty of exercise and plenty of regular sleep.

To anyone who is reading this who fears losing the momentum of an ongoing, but sometimes halting, recovery, may I recommend this 'back to basics' model.  Put it another way - KISS.  That is to say, Keep It Simple Stupid'!

Don't be afraid that a bad spell is indicative of a return to emotional free fall and a decline in health from which one cannot recovery.  The 'dips' are frightening because there is always a real and honest desire not to return to where one has come from.  However, as I am trying to teach myself a dip is only a dip unless we let it become more.

I've been for a run, I've eaten a balanced diet all day (apart from the chocolate and Pinot Grigio, obviously!) and I am looking forward to my duvet.  Stay positive fellow travellers!

The sun is still behind the clouds

It's been a little while but not so long as last time - the gap between posts I mean.  I sit here feeling rather disappointed to be honest.  I have a bad week or so..  All the usual anxieties have returned and they seem to feed off each other as well as being fueled by the excessive and negative media sound bites which seem intent on scaring or exciting to encourage sales and thus generate additional advertising revenue - I know this is how it works because a journalist interviewed me for a project on challenging the stigma associated with mental health issues and I asked her!

For the time being I am going to read back over my last blog and tell myself that for the most part it's sunshine now, emotionally speaking.  Even though the clouds still get in the way sometimes it definitely does not mean the sun has gone again.  Like any long term recovery one has to embrace the odd bad spell with good humour and positivity and try hard to remind oneself that it's distressing not because it is symptomatic of a declining and re-emerging negative pattern but quite the reverse - it is now relatively unusual thus does it feel rather uncomfortable.  My prayer is that some unhelpful recurring symptoms reflect only the inevitability of injury scar tissue not a decline back into poor health.  I am going to try hard not to let that happen!

No fear of falling

This is, I think, the longest gap in my blog.  Each time there is a long break I come back and promise to try harder - it's a good personal discipline and it's just possible, I imagine, that some people may be reading and finding the odd snippet helpful.  For this reason I begin, once again, with an apology, an apology for being what, as I now consider myself, as a 'slack blogger'.  Don't try saying that after too many drinks!

Rather amusingly it's been so long since I did blog the format here has changed and I am having trouble navigating it!

I am happy to come back to this though because what I have to add at this point is essentially all very positive.  I say 'all', perhaps I should more accurately say 'almost all'.

Despite being badly treated by the next most senior people in my 'chain of command', and to be truthful, I mean appallingly treated, I am feeling good, more positive, more in control of my own health, and less likely to seize on a media soundbite and turn it into a future crisis for me and those whom I love, my two sons especially.  In other words, at least in this particular respect, I am being more consistently rational and find myself, as a result, more often climbing out into brighter light than descending into emotional darkness.  I do have dips along the way, I suspect I always will, but the 'line of best fit - which is, I am told the best mathematical description for a graph that varies but heads, despite the peaks and troughs, in one direction - is upward.

I have, without a shadow of a doubt, been discriminated against outrageously.  But such is my new found strength I am able to say it says more about them than it does about me; far more actually.  More importantly, I feel more and more confident that despite a few bad days, they are rare and, to quote the I Am Kloot song (much beloved of Gavin and Stacey fans) I have 'No fear of falling'.

My new spaniels are a constant source of fun and joy.  My family life is much improved.  I feel better about myself.  I am physically fit again.  It is two and a half years since I took any mental health medication.

My final words of this offering are simply this - if you are one of the faithful souls who do return here from time to time in the hope that maybe I will offer to it, I thank you.  If you find some words here that help and encourage every word is worthwhile.  If you are still struggling - keep the faith, I am beginning to feel I have emerged into the light and whilst the clouds do still, occasionally, catch me up again I am living proof that it does and will improve and the sunlight does eventually burn the cloud cover off.