Living alone and remembering small achievements.

I’ve been slowly trying to think more positively* over the last week or so, and something struck me about being someone who lives alone.

A few years ago I realised the obvious: all the jobs in my house – washing up, laundry, vacuuming etc – if I don’t do them, they don’t get done.  On one hand, that’s clearly self-evident but, on the other hand, it’s not true for people who live with others.  For them, at some point, someone else will probably do at least one of the jobs, at least once.  In my house, that will never happen.

When I first thought like that, it was quite a depressing and tiresome thought.

But I realised the other day that, because I have to take care of everything in my house/life, I am able to take care of everything in my house/life.  Take yesterday: I had a flat tyre, which I had to change and get repaired.  I then had to cook a meal, and do some laundry and ironing.  Later on, I had a problem with my electrics: something blew and tripped the fuse-box.  So I figured out which appliance was faulty, and of course located the fuse-box to trip it back.  I also found time to pick up my guitar and play some tunes.

I’m not trying to make any of this sound more than it is; I realise none of these things are rocket science.  But, the point is, I suddenly became quite pleased to be someone who can do all those things.  Without meaning to be sexist or anything, I don’t think every man knows how to use a car-jack, play a musical instrument, and how to make a decent meal.  (I can even cook quite well when I put my mind to it or there’s someone to impress!)

One of the things I learned in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) a couple of years ago is not to downplay the positives in life.  Suffering with Depression usually means it’s easy to believe the victories in our own lives are in some way less than those of everyone else.  I have made progress over the last few weeks – I’m no longer sat in my GP’s office in tears for starters; I can do quite a lot of things, some of them even pretty well.  Sure, I’m not yet ‘happy’, or even ‘okay’, but it’s a start, and that’s worth recognising.

Stopping to remember the achievements or progress we have made – though they/it may be small – can be an important step on the long road to recovery.  It even starts to breed hope of further improvement/achievement in the future, and that really is something to feel better about.

*The small print for this post is that all this has coincided with the sort of time we’d expect my increased medication to have started having an effect ... It seems The Verve were wrong...

Hitting 'rock bottom'...

I haven’t posted for a while, because I haven’t known what to write.  I’ve written a couple of posts, but not uploaded them, mainly because I haven’t known how I would feel the following day and didn’t want to say anything I might not agree with later.

Life has been very hard lately, and I’ve been more ‘down’ than perhaps ever before.  One thing after another, after another hit me; just when I thought I’d hit the bottom it was as though another, unseen trapdoor opened up and I plummeted further down still. 

As Rachel said in Friends: ‘I really thought I just hit rock bottom.  But today, it's like there's rock bottom, then 50 feet of crap, then me.’ (Friends, Series 2, Warner Bros, 1995)

Suffering from Depression makes life’s difficulties that much harder.  Such a mind is weak to begin with so, when a trauma strikes – whether that’s something like my redundancy last year, or work-related stress, or the loss of a relationship – it hits all the harder.  And when more than one big event comes along at once, the mind cannot cope.

Which is how I find myself here.

I’ve investigated suicide sites; I’ve cried until I had no more tears, or gave myself a headache; I’ve slept (or tried to) for more time than is probably healthy.  But, somewhere along the line, I decided I wanted to finish my novel.  I’m taking little pleasure in it, and finishing it probably won’t make me happy either, but I do want to finish it.  So, word by word, sentence by sentence, I’m writing it.

The other thing I can say is that time does help.  I saw my GP today and we agreed that I am better than two weeks ago when I sat crying in her office, even though it might not feel like I’m better right now.  And I'm getting the help I need with increased medication and referrals for pretty much every talking-therapy there is.

Going right back to basics is the only way to survive, I think.  Basics such as: ‘What am I living for?’  Finding things to live for is easy: my writing, my music, things in the future I don’t yet know about.  Finding things I want to live for is harder.  But I’m trying to work on that part...and we’ll see what happens.

Thanks for reading.  It’s not my usual, positive, optimistic style, I know.  But then life doesn’t always have things to be positive and optimistic about...

Real miracles and doing something worthwhile...

One of my favourite movies is Bruce Almighty (Morgan Freeman as God – what’s not to like??). 

In it, there's a scene where ‘God’ (Morgan Freeman) is talking to Bruce (Jim Carrey).  He says: ‘Parting your soup is not a miracle Bruce, it’s a magic trick.  A single mum, who’s working two jobs and still finds time to take her kid to soccer practice, that’s a miracle.’ (Bruce Almighty, 2003, Universal)

I used to want to change the world.  I thought doing something ‘worthwhile’ was the greatest ambition to have.

When I classified myself as ‘Christian’, that meant ‘saving’ the world: helping as many people as possible to become Christians (and since that can mean a million different things to a million different people, I’m still not sure what I was trying to achieve).

After that, it became my ambition to make the world a better place, to improve the lives of as many human beings as possible.  Perhaps classifying me as ‘Humanist’.*

Now, I'm starting to wonder if the best thing we can do with our lives is to do our best at the things we have to do.

I realise that’s one of those trite statements that probably doesn’t really mean anything, but hear me out...

The word ‘have’ in that statement isn’t meant to refer to things we must do, like chores.  I mean it as the things we have to do, in an ‘owning’ sense.  (Although that can mean chores sometimes...)

For example, some people are extremely talented musicians.  They can sing, or play an instrument, or write a musical in a way that other people never could.  They have abilities different to those around them.  The thing they ‘have’ to do is create music.

Other people can only dream of pursuing such ambitions.  Their lives are too busy, too hectic, too stressful and they just don’t have the time.  I know some people like this and I am humbled by their motivation, their tenacity, their selflessness.  In their lives, they ‘have’ things to do, and they are devoting themselves wholly to doing them, in spite of, often considerable, personal cost.

Someone like me trying to be a writer, often complaining about what ‘hard work’ it is and struggling for the motivation to even open the necessary file could learn a lot from them.

If you’re like me, and lucky enough to have the time to pursue...whatever goal it is you want, then do it.  Chase it.  And may we remember what a privilege that is.

If you’re like those people I know, living a life filled with things you so often feel you have to do, perhaps like the single mother Morgan Freeman’s character mentions, then remember what a miracle you are.  The lives of the people you touch will be all the better for your sacrificial efforts.  And surely that is truly something ‘worthwhile'.

*I’m not big on classifying people; I believe we’re all too individual to fit into tidy boxes. 

Taking advice and being who we really are.

Normally in life, when I have a problem, I talk to all my friends and family about it and end up with lots of voices in my head (theirs, rather than ones relating to any sort of insanity – I learned to tune those out years ago, after that second murder...) each giving me advice on what I should do.

I don’t mind that; I like knowing what other people think I ought to do (if only because it provides food for my innate desire to do the opposite of what people say).  The downside is that sometimes it’s hard to know what to do because there are so many pieces of advice floating around.  It can get a bit confusing.

Recently I’ve had a bit of space from my usual confidants for one reason and another and it’s been interesting.  I’ve found my own ‘voice’ in my mind is clearer and I can better understand what I want, how I feel, what I think I should do.  It’s been affirming to realise the course of action I’ve taken/am taking is the one I think is right.

I’m not about to change my usual way of dealing with things, and will no doubt be chewing my friends’ ears off again in the near future.  But sometimes we can get so caught up in what everyone else thinks, in the way other people believe we should live our lives, that we forget what it means to be ‘us’.  It’s easy to think other people know better how to live – a symptom of low self-esteem if ever there was one – and to try and emulate, or even please, them.  But who says they’re right?

Someone I know on Facebook posted the picture I’ve included on this post yesterday and it really struck me.  More than anyone else in my life, I am the one who makes me feel inferior, or ‘worthless’.  And I suspect I’m not the only one.

But we’re not worthless.  No one else is ‘better’ than us at living this life; we’re all just making it up as we go along.  And whilst it’s good to take advice and listen to trusted people, it’s just that – advice.  Our own choices/feelings/beliefs are equally valid.

And sometimes it’s those we need to trust.

Facing the demons...again...

Doing the right thing...

It’s been a difficult time for me recently, which has today ended with me off work with stress/depression.  Yep, the positive, optimistic author of this blog has succumbed once again to those demons that will seemingly just not lie down and die.

The one difference this time is it's definitely stress-induced.  Which is new.

Some may ask why I am writing about this in such a public forum.  It’s a fair question, and the answer is that I’ve always tried to be honest on these pages – I said at the start I would write about the struggles as well as the victories.

And, also, there is one positive insight to offer. 

At about 2am this morning, having awoken from another fitful sleep, I realised that, no matter how hard it was for me to ring my GP and to take time away from my employment, it was the right thing to do.  I didn’t want to do it, because it ‘lets people down’ at work, because it perhaps means I’m not as reliable an employee as I’d like to be, and it means I’m officially ‘not well’ and so have to try and figure out what in hell is going to make me better this time.

But I knew I couldn’t go on like I was.

So, at 8am this morning, I picked up my phone, almost against my will, and rang to make an appointment. 

Naturally, this being the British NHS, I couldn’t get an appointment until Monday.  (‘Is it an emergency?’ I was asked.  I would like to know what the definition of an emergency is.  If it were an ‘emergency’, would I not be attending my local A&E?)

This meant I then had to do another ‘right’ thing: go to work, and speak to my boss.  I really didn’t want to do this.  But it had to be done, again, if I was ever going to make any progress from this place I’m in.  She was understanding and supportive; I guess that’s one of the perks of working for an organisation with extensive experience of helping vulnerable people, including many with mental health issues.  And together we came up with a way forward in the medium term, and an agreement that, in the short term, I needed to be at home.

So here I am.

Doing the right thing is not always easy.  Sometimes we might want to bury our head in the sand, keep on running, hide away from the problems we are facing, perhaps even distract ourselves with other skirmishes, rather than fight the true problem.  And maybe I’ve done that for a while.  But, in the long run, it’s not going to benefit anyone – least of all ourselves – to keep doing that.

Far better to stop, turn around if necessary, and face the real battle.  In this case, for me, it’s the battle within...

Which is possibly the hardest one of all.

Yes, it's Switchfoot again...'The War Inside'

What to do when things don't go to plan...

One foot in front of the other
(And a good excuse to show off my
awesome shoes again... ;) )

Things don’t always go to plan in life, that much we all probably know.  Sometimes, despite our best efforts, things just don’t work out how we hoped or expected. 

In other words, ‘Shit happens.’

I’m a big fan of something I heard Tim Minchin, the comedian, say once.  He was talking about the times things go wrong in life, when stuff happens we don’t want.  He said the temptation is to always ask why: ‘Why me?  What have I done to deserve this?  Why has this happened?’

But he said: ‘When bad stuff happens, the right question is never “why?”.  The right question is almost always, “What now?”’

It’s a phrase that stuck with me and I find myself asking the question often: what now?  What am I going to do now this has happened? 

Sometimes I don’t have any answers, at least not immediately, and I scrabble around feeling a little lost, to say the least.  But as I think about it, I usually come up with some possibilities, some way of moving forward.  They might not be complete ideas, they might not solve the problem immediately, but it’s about beginning to plot a new course, a new way through the quagmire this life can sometimes feel like.

It’s about finding a way to take the next step.  You can’t finish a race, a marathon, without putting one foot in front of the other.

I’ve not quoted this song for a while, but it struck me again yesterday.  Unfortunately the band has removed their video from YouTube (Why?!!  Or should I say: ‘Okay, what now??’) but Flight Brigade’s song A Girl Who Loves Her Smoke and Wine has the lyric: ‘Even though it’s a long, long way from Hollywood, at least it’s a start, it’s a start.  And you can end up places you never thought you could, if you make a start, so just make a start.’

(Found it here. If you’ve not heard it, it’s well worth at least one listen...)

When life gets you down and things don’t go to plan, and you can’t see a way to get to where you want to be, maybe the answer lies in just making a start.  Plan one step, take that step, and then you can think about the next one. 

In doing so, you may yet end up places you never thought you could.

Love Does.

I’ve raved about this book for a while now, and I finished it this week.  Love Does, by Bob Goff (2012, Thomas Nelson), is incredible.  It’s filled with stories of how Bob has spent his life loving people – and I mean really loving them. 

There are few tales of hearts, flowers, or poetry, but many of him taking off on flights to Uganda to help free imprisoned children.  Or of him letting people into his life in whatever way they need.  Or of refusing to give up on a dream because he knows it’s what he would love to do.

Even the one chapter on the pursuit of his now-wife is a tale of unrelenting hope, of choosing to keep on loving ‘Sweet Maria’, in spite of her apparent disinterest.  He tells the story of being ‘trigger-locked (on her) while she treated me with a polite distance’. 

In the end though, he says: ‘Fortunately, Maria understood that for some of us – most of us – the language of love is laced with whimsy.  It sometimes borders on the irrational.  Like I’ve been saying, though, love is a do thing.  It’s an energy that has to be dissipated.’  ((I would say love almost always borders on the irrational, but there you go.)

Bob is a Christian and writes as such, including many references to how he believes his faith impacts on his chosen path.  But it’s not a cringe-inducing faith, or even a faith particularly recognisable as being the same as is often seen in ‘the Church’.  So please don’t be put off by it!

Why am I telling you about this book?  Because as I’ve read it, it kept resonating with me, with who I am trying to be.  I, too, believe that ‘love does’ – love is above all else a verb, and the only way to show it is to do something with it. 

That can mean being there at 3am for someone when everyone’s had enough.  Or it can mean taking the hit when they need to rant at ... someone.  Or it can mean ignoring how much something is hurting, because the person needs you to be strong for them.

It can even mean turning up and doing a job we really don’t feel like doing today, because it will benefit someone else in need.

Most of this is pretty contrary to popular opinion.  Many people counsel to ‘look after yourself’, to make sure we’re not going to get hurt.  And whilst that might seem like wisdom, it isn’t the way of love as I understand it.

Love puts the other person first, regardless of cost.  And sometimes the cost is high but, even so, I believe love goes right ahead and does it anyway.

Love Does is available from Amazon here.