Category: Some thoughts about my journey

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

Careful what you say…

Posted on by WeeGee

I haven’t really written a proper post for ages, and that’s no accident. There’s been an awful lot of nonsense in my head lately* and to counter it, I’ve stuck my head in the sand and gone about hiding in awards posts and games of tag. The thing is whilst it’s one thing to spend your time in the real world pretending that everything is okay, it’s just plain daft to attempt to hide the extent of your broken brain in a blog that you keep to document your journey with a broken brain. I suppose the only person I’m cheating is myself….

Something went wrong – somebody said something to me that they oughtn’t to have said. If they’d cared at all they wouldn’t have said it which means not only do I have to struggle with the fall out of what they said, but that I also have to contemplate the fact that they, along with (and, this is about my broken brain) everyone else I know simply doesn’t care.

So – you know I’m doing this 10,000 steps challenge? It was going really well and people were being incredibly generous** and I was just about proud of myself. And then Mrs Black and White popped up to say:

“And how did you get yourself involved with this? You’ll need to eat like a horse not to lose any weight”

Boom! End of feeling proud of myself.

I started to feel apologetic. Like I’d let her down because she clearly thought it was a bad idea and at the end of the day, I just want to please people and most of all her. Then I felt stupid…. what have I got myself involved with, what a ridiculous idea? Then I felt unloved because surely, for once in her life somebody who had seen EVERYTHING I’d been through could bite her tongue and say ‘good luck’ even if she thought it was a bad idea. And then, and this is the worst thing of all, I went a bit weird about food – as if to prove her right.

I am recovering from an eating disorder – which is to say that I have (more or less) maintained a healthy weight for EIGHT years having once almost starved myself to death. I don’t count calories, nor weigh myself. Heck I don’t even think about eating. I just do it when I’m hungry. But when it comes to food, I’m vulnerable. I guess I always will be and I hope I will always be brave enough to keep on doing the right thing however hard it gets: which is why the comment hurt so much.

My biggest fear in life is going back to where I was. I don’t need to think about it. I don’t need to remember. I need keep on keeping on. I don’t need the people who are supposed to care reminding me of who I used to be….. And this person really should have known better. It was just unkind to make something positive into a great big fear of being unwell.

From one little comment comes a spectacular unravelling. That’s the way things go around here. It doesn’t take much for me to unravel because I’m fragile. When you’re fragile people have to be very careful about what they say and do which in the end means that people don’t bother because it’s easier not to bother than to be careful.

I shouldn’t let it get to me. I know that, but it isn’t that simple in my head – I don’t get to decide what bothers me and what doesn’t; the way I feel just happens and most of the time I can’t cope with the outcome. WeeGee doesn’t do feelings well

*Yes – even more nonsense than normal

**I’ve raised £235 so far. £15 more and I get a certificate from Mind!

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

What if?

Posted on by WeeGee

My granny used to have a saying that went something like this: ‘if it’s for you, it won’t go past you’. It’s one of those things you seem to have say to people when they have a broken heart, as if words can really take that away and make it all better. Plenty more fish in the sea and all that….

I have a broken heart. My broken heart is a big part of my broken brain. When people say it’s all in my head, I can at least challenge them, because some of it is in my heart, rather than in my head.

I’m told I care too much. Does anybody know what that means? Is it even possible? I tend to look at things in opposites – so I care too much and the opposite is not caring enough. In light of that I don’t accept that I’m doing it wrong. I know where I want to be.

The what if is what if you had what was for you, and it went past you because you were mental?

What if you left behind who you were and the things you could be just because the person who made you all those things couldn’t live with the mental?

What if your brain went wrong and what was for you did go past you? What then?

A confused and unhappy WeeGee xx

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

Mixed up things

Posted on by WeeGee

If I knew where to start with this post it would probably have a better opening line. But I don’t know where to start, so that’s as good as it gets. Sorry.

Before I go any further, I should probably say (for the benefit of my British readers) the only thing that British people have said to one another for days now – WHAT IS IT WITH THIS WEATHER?* On reflection, that might have been a better opening line….

Before I go even further, I should definitely say that this is not going to be a nice organised, beginning middle and end kind of post. I’m just going to open up my brain and spill it out for your reading enjoyment. Who was it that said “you’ll like this but not a lot”? Oh yes, it was Phil Daniels (ageing magician not ageing mod). Anyway – what he said. Definitely not a better opening line.

It’s all got a bit mixed up in WeeGee land. Everything’s jumbled up and messy and I don’t know what to feel about anything. There’s probably going to be a me shaped explosion some time very soon** I suppose a mixed up exploding brain is the price I’m going to pay for all that thinking I was talking about in my last post. Note to self: do not think. Ever again.

For a start, my brain is a bit mixed up. It can’t seem to decide whether it’s flat and empty, a bit jittery, full of the horrors, or contemplating jumping my body off a tall building. If I knew which one it was going to do from day to day I could make a plan, but it’s a bit of a moveable feast right now and the plans aren’t working. It’s becoming a bit tedious to be honest.

Then there’s work which is possibly the most mixed up thing of all. Work is my refuge: it’s the only normal thing left, I swear to god. Except it’s not normal anymore – I’ve got three huge projects*** some particularly unhelpful colleagues and one specific senior colleague who is paid double what I am but appears to need me to do her job for her. I don’t say that in a big headed kind of way, but I can’t say too much more not least because I wrote the ‘Acceptable Use of Social Media Policy’ and it would therefore be a bit embarrassing if I was to fall foul of it.

Then there’s my heart which has gone massively wrong. I know that the heart is just a muscle, but I hope you will know what I mean and forgive the scientific inaccuracy. For ages I’ve been walking around with all the nonsense in my head and consoling myself with the part of my heart that had a little flag pinned to it which said ‘last hope for WeeGee’. Well now, my last hope ‘gone done’ a bunk. So now what? Is it just broken brain all the way?

Finally there’s the other part of my heart which ‘cares too much’, is ‘too kind’ and which ‘takes everything to heart’. As far as I can tell, these are the things that people say to you when they’ve been shitty to you but they want to make it your fault. Nevertheless apparently I’m doing it wrong again so I’ve got yet more stuff to figure out even though I was mixed up enough to start with….

In conclusion? Pfft.

WeeGee xx

*For those of you not in the UK – there’s some kind of apocalyptic rain thing going on. And I have to mention it because I’m British and talking about the weather is in my genes.

**When it comes I hope a)It doesn’t make a mess because I can’t stand a mess and b)that it doesn’t frighten the cat because he’s skittish at the best of times

***Three big projects being two too many even if you’re not mental.

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

Who is WeeGee?

Posted on by WeeGee

I’ve been in a thoughtful mood of late – the thing about being mental is that you’re not really supposed to ‘think’. When a thought comes in you have to decide what to do with it, and if you can’t figure that out you have to tell yourself its only a thought and then stick it on a shelf (or in a box) for another day. Sometimes I wonder if all that thinking about thinking is more exhausting than the thinking itself.

I’ve mostly been trying to figure out where crazy stops and WeeGee starts because so much of the worst of me is really just an extreme version of the best of me. I’m beginning to wonder if I would still be crazy even if I wasn’t crazy.

At the heart of all the thinking is this notion that I have – you can only be who you are. Sometimes, I withdraw from therapists because I start to get the distinct impression that what we are really working on is making me into a different person. Sure I want to get better, but I really don’t want to find yet another person that I have to somehow pretend to be. I want to work out who I was to start with and then get on with being me.

It’s a bit of a standing joke that, at thirty two years old, I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up. In some ways, it is kind of funny because I’m transient to say the least. I keep heading back to University to qualify myself for yet another profession that I won’t quite pursue in the end; I take up new hobbies as regularly as I give up on them; I would change my hair colour like the weather if I didn’t have the kind of proper job that ruled it out. In other ways, it isn’t funny at all, because I don’t think anybody realises that I’m still trying to work out who I am and the person that they know is mostly make believe. As an aside – growing up is over-rated, no?

This is a short post, and I’ve no idea whether it will make sense outside of my head. There are some things in life that you just assume everybody knows, until one day it becomes painfully obvious that isn’t the case and that you’ve been wrong all along. I suspect feeling like a make believe person is one of them, but then quite a few nutters read my blog, so you never can tell!

Love, WeeGee xx

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

A cunning plan

Posted on by WeeGee

I can be a bit flakey about keeping things up so today I’m feeling really rather pleased with myself because I’ve managed to keep writing my blog, reasonably regularly, for five whole weeks. Although five weeks isn’t the longest of times, it is definitely long enough to give me a little lift heading into the dreaded Bank Holiday weekend.

I’ve spent a little bit of time trying to work out what I want my blog to be when it grows up. Sometimes I think I want to use it to record my progress, sometimes I think I want to use it to set out how I feel, and sometimes I think I want to use it to write down what’s been going in my world.

And then it occurred to me that it can be all of those things as well as anything else I decide I want it to be in the future – it is my blog after all!

If I’m going to be writing about the things that go on in my world, I’ll probably have to mention my friends and family from time to time and since I don’t even use my own name when blogging it didn’t feel right to be referring to those people by name. At the same time ‘my friend’ and ‘another friend’ and a ‘different friend’ might get a little tiresome and confusing in the fullness of time.

Anyway, I’d already written about a few of my nearest of dearest giving each one an alias along the lines of a Mr Men character so I thought I’d revive that naming convention just in case I wanted to distinguish between the people who are part of my story. What a cunning plan! I posted a list here, but if and when I use them I’ll give the person a suitable introduction the first time round*.

*Actually, it’ll be the next time round because I’m off to the pub with Mr Hungry, Mr Hilarious, Mr Brave, Mr Nice and Mrs Sparkle shortly and I haven’t got time to do the full into bit right now!

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

All shapes and sizes

Posted on by WeeGee

I’m not a very big person (I mean in stature, but sometimes I feel small in other ways too).

I’ve always been a not very big person – in part that’s just the way I’m built and in part that’s because I struggle with food.  I struggle with food because I spent a fair few years of my life on a starvation diet in the misguided belief that I rather wanted to disappear completely. Thankfully, I don’t struggle with food nearly as much as I used to and I nearly always eat enough of it every day. In essence I’ve come to an understanding with myself about food and about my weight which, for the most part, works pretty well. I say for the most part because my weight is still susceptible to go up and down a little. Right now I’m hovering around the ‘telling off mark’ which is the point at which my nearest and dearest step in and ask, in so many words, if I’m struggling more than I’m letting on. I can’t tell you how important it is to me that people are looking out for me in case I stop looking out for myself and I am incredibly grateful to have those kind of people in my life. The worst case scenario for me is going back to the dreaded days of the starvation diet – I think it scares me more than anything in the world*

One of my mantras is that being too thin is bad for you in much the same way that being too fat is bad for you. Which kinda brings me neatly on to the point of my ramblings today. When you’re thin people (and by ‘people’ I mean complete strangers) feel the need to tell you you’re thin. Quite aside from this being a major case of stating the bleeding obvious** it’s none of their business and is, in my outraged opinion, incredibly rude. I know beyond all shadow of a doubt that if I was overweight people at bus stops wouldn’t say “My god, you’re soooo fat”. Shop assistants wouldn’t say “Size 24 – that’s MASSIVE”. Waiters wouldn’t say “I’d skip the pudding if I were you”. Yet the opposite of all of these things in a great many variations have been said to me. And I really don’t think it’s okay – in fact, it’s one of my bug bears.

Sometimes, comments like that hit me at the wrong time and can make me ‘go a bit wobbly’ because I’m a bit sensitive about my weight. In some ways, the fact that I’m a bit sensitive about my weight is my problem – random strangers can’t be expected to know about it can they? Then again, even normal people (I use the phrase with my tongue firmly in cheek by the way) can be a bit sensitive about their weight and I think that might be the reason most people wouldn’t dream of pointing out to a stranger that they’re on the large side. We seem to recognise that when people are overweight there might be all kinds of reasons for that fact (illness, medication, eating distress, poor diet etc) and also make the (perhaps wrong***) assumption that they’re not over the moon about it. And so we generally don’t point out to people that we think they’re too large – It’s about knowing it’s none of your business, it’s about common courtesy and it’s about recognising that rightly or wrongly quite a lot of us are a bit sensitive about the size of our bodies.

My point? In a nutshell it’s that a bit of common courtesy for those people we think are too small wouldn’t go amiss either: manners, surely, are for people of all shapes and sizes.

Rant over. The end.

* It scares me even more than moths which, for the record, scare the absolute shit out of me.

**A bit like the famous “you’ve had your hair cut” Good spot Sherlock; I’d never have known ‘cos I wasn’t there at the time.

***But that’s a whole other post.

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

After the storm

Posted on by WeeGee

I had a bit of a blip this week.Thankfully it didn’t last too long and with a little help along the way normal service was resumed sometime during Thursday morning. The ‘blip’ is done with, and I don’t want to spend too much time talking about it. That said, I should be honest and say that I hurt some people who care about me and I hurt myself too – whilst I’m trying very hard not to feel guilt, I certainly feel regret and it’s right and proper that I should.

When I have an episode like that it’s very loud and it’s very chaotic, and the period that follows tends to be very quiet and very still. That’s how things are now – quiet, still and mostly calm. I’m content with that.

The storm has passed – it’s safe to deal with some of the debris and important to remember that:

“Storms make oaks take root” George Herbert

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

Back to the drawing board

Posted on by WeeGee

I’ve spent a lot of time reading the blogs of other people who have similar difficulties and challenges to me and I’ve been amazed how many of them there are, and how many have struck a chord with me. People seem to blog for all kinds of reasons – for some it’s about therapy, for others it’s venting and for some it’s about reaching out for a little bit of old-fashioned human kindness. The obvious question to ask myself now is ‘why am I really blogging’?

When I started my blog a few weeks ago I decided I was going write about my attempts to live well and overcome depression. I knew I wanted to record my journey, and that I maybe wanted to share it if anyone was interested but above all else I was determined that the daily ins and outs of my mental health were going to be something of a side issue: I wanted to keep my writing upbeat and positive – this was going to be about progress and recovery and everything else was getting left out. I still think this was a noble aim, but after almost four weeks of writing I’m starting to wonder if my approach is a little too rigid and perhaps, unrealistic. My rules allow me to say I suffer from depression, that I had a bad day, that things aren’t going well, but they don’t allow me to spend any time explaining or analysing what any of that feels like or what it really means. And those things, are probably the biggest part of my story.

I live with the day to day impact of depression; It’s a big part of my life and in banning myself from writing the truth about it I’m leaving big parts of the story out. I don’t want to change tack completely, and it’s still really important for me to focus on achievements (one of my little aims in life is to make sure that the word ‘depression’ is never bigger than the word ‘achievement’ in my tag cloud!)  but I called this blog ‘how do you eat an elephant’, not ‘the elephant in the room’!

So I’ve decided that it’s important that I allow myself to recognise the reality of being me in my writing here. I don’t necessarily want to turn this into a mirror image of the depths of despair that my mind can come to, but I don’t want to pretend that stuff isn’t happening either. After all, the real achievement is that I carry on – getting little things done and getting slightly better every now and again – in spite of the reality of being me. What I think I’m saying is that ‘me’ is important even if ‘me’ isn’t always pretty.

As I’ve already said, nobody is ever going to want to shout about mental illness from the rooftops, but if someone like me (who has even gone to the lengths of setting up a blog just to write about depression) isn’t willing to acknowledge the truth of it then mental ill health seems destined to always have the quality of a dirty little secret.

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

If you’re happy and you know it….

Posted on by WeeGee

Chatting to a friend over lunch yesterday I became aware of a frustrating misconception about depression which hadn’t really occurred to me before – the notion that the opposite of depression is happiness and that depression is simply the experience of being very sad for a long time.

Sometimes I rather wish I had just been sad for a while. Sad, I think, I could have done. Sad doesn’t crowd in during the threadbare hours to chase you out of yourself; it doesn’t turn out the lights, one by one; it doesn’t steal the things you care about and taunt you because you can’t find their whereabouts. Sad isn’t a menace threatening to stay by your side for eternity; it doesn’t convince you to abandon all hope, love and laughter.  Sad doesn’t take your life away, incrementally, until the only thing left to do is jump off the cliff edge it has led you to.

It’s funny where a throw away comment can take you, isn’t it? My friend simply said ‘I’m really glad you are feeling happier’. It was meant as a kindness and an encouragement, and it was taken as one, but behind the scenes it got me thinking about what I’m really trying to achieve here. Is this a search for happiness? My conclusion, I think is ‘no’. For me, trying to recover from depression isn’t about trying to find happiness, it’s about trying to find health. It’s about getting myself on a mental and emotional even keel which allows me to experience a range of emotions safe from the harm that my dark passenger can and does inflict.

Sad is sad. It’s the opposite of happy. Depression is depression. It’s the opposite of well and the opposite of what I’m striving to be.