Apparently you just have to complain on WordPress that you didn’t get one and then some kinda magic happens. Hurrah:
Love from WeeGee (What?! I was entitled to a badge so I’m bloomin’ well having it!)
Tag: Achievements
A WeeGee award ceremony
I’m in a funny old mood today, so rather than inflicting it on you lot, I thought I’d take my mind off it by writing an awards post. I like blogging awards – I think they’re a nice little token of mutual respect, and I enjoy answering the questions (and reading the answers) that come with them.
The Daisy Award
* Thank the person who nominated you
I was nominated by Angel Fractured so…. thank you very much Angel Fractured. Angel fractured keeps not just one, but two lovely blogs and you should probably visit them both if you’re not already familiar.
* Tell your readers 7 unusual things about yourself
- I have never seen any of the films from the Star Wars or Alien franchises and I have now reached a point in my life when I never will because saying I’ve never seen them is surely far more interesting than sitting and watching them?
- I experience mental health problems which is only a little bit unusual since such problems affect one on four of us. (Probably more if you are reading my blog!) The thing is, some people still seem to think that a mental health problem marks you out as different and weird, which clearly, it doesn’t.
- I suffer from psoriasis which in itself is only a bit rarer than being mental. However, the kind of psoriasis I have is an awful lot rarer than being mental – so much so that a dermatologist is writing a whole paper about the behaviour of my strange skin as we speak….. Fame at last.
- I speak with three distinct accents depending on who I’m talking to or on my mood:
- Plummy southern: It is allllriaght, isn’t it daarling?
- Midland: its awwwright, int’ it duck?
- Glaswegian: it’s awrit init pal?
- In my life I have never started reading a book and not finished it with only two notable exceptions:
- The Mill on the Floss
- The Shipping News
- I can’t do jigsaw puzzles. My brain just won’t work that way.
- I can do an uncanny impression of Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films…. it gives grown men the heebie-jeebies.
* Nominate some worthy bloggers
I’d like to nominate two bloggers who are both, like me, quite new to this whole blogging thing. Both blogs are interesting, engaging and (I hope they won’t mind me saying because I mean it in a kind way) are about being mental amongst other things:
And then I’d like to make a special Daisy award to Brandic at Nothinginmynoggin because I love her blog, because I want to and because I can:
“Dear Brandic, ‘Chin up chumley’ (ps that’s a very British saying), Love from WeeGee xx”
The Inspirational Blogger Award
The very inspirational and very lovely Roxy at AdverseUniverse put me forward for this one. If you don’t already follow Roxy – seriously, why not? She’s very lovely and very inspirational and she’s incredibly brave to boot. Thanks lovely (I promise not to swear in my acceptance speech)
The nice thing about the Inspirational Blogger Award is that there don’t seem to be any rules, so you can just make them up as you go along. I’m good at winging it so this one is right up my street 🙂
First up I’m going to nominate three inspirational blogs:
- The Quiet Borderline: The Quiet Borderline is amazing. It doesn’t seem to matter how difficult things get for her, she manages to write beautiful and insightful posts and she just seems to keep keeping on in the face of adversity. She truly is an inspiration.
- Magically Mad: Magically Mad is also amazing. She says the kindest things which help you through your bleakest of moments, even though things are pretty bleak for her. She’s one of life’s all round good eggs.
- Hello Sailor: It must get boring for Sailor getting nominated for so many awards, but I don’t think she realises just how special she is, so I’m chucking this one at her too in the hope she will eventually realise it. Her blog is absolutely beautiful and she is a huge source of inspiration for me, and I imagine, countless others.
In celebration of this award, I thought I’d post a couple of photos of my cat (the best cat in the world). Well you know? There are no rules and I am a mad cat lady when it comes down to it.
The best cat in the world (ps. sorry they’re all different sizes and rubbish quality, I’m not much of a photographer and they were all taken with differnt phones):
Goodreads book review – The Alchemist
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
It seems that everybody has read the Alchemist and it seems also, that everybody loves it. For my part, I can at least say that I have read it now.
When I started reading this book I thought I was going to love it. It seemed sweet and simple and quite enchanting but as I continued reading the sweetness became a bit sickly and the simplicity a bit insulting.
Perhaps it’s me, but I can’t accept the idea that everybody has a destiny and that to achieve it all you need to do is listen to your heart. For a start, it’s all well and good if your destiny is love or happiness or untold treasures but what if your destiny is to be always hungry, or always in pain, or, for example, to be raped and murdered during a civil war or to be tortured to death by your government….. Should you also follow your heart towards these things? Or is the idea that terrible things only happen to people because they didn’t listen to their hearts? As far as I can see fate and destiny just don’t stack up when you start to think about them logically.
Aside from having a problem with the premise of the book, I also found the Alchemist a bit flat: the characters are flat, the scenery is flat and the narrative is flat; the ending is one of the flattest, laziest and most disappointing I’ve ever come across. I wanted to love this novel – I really did – but in the end it left me feeling a bit irritated and underwhelmed.
In conclusion, I suppose I’m just too cynical for fate, destiny and the Alchemist.
A novel way to spend your time
Once again I had challenged myself to simply spend time in my own company this weekend without leading myself to the dreaded cliff edge. This was my third attempt in three wobbly weeks so naturally I was hoping for third time lucky.
On Saturday I was as close to bright and breezy as I’m capable of being right now. Painting the smile on, getting out and about and going through the motions came quite naturally and I didn’t have to coax myself too hard to get going. I made it to the supermarket (via the Maple Road farmer’s market, where I couldn’t quite afford to buy anything, but didn’t get disheartened!), cleaned the flat, took a walk along the river and read my book. This is all good stuff, and, if I may say, is especially good for me. But it got better! I also got myself signed up for the 10,000 step challenge, ate four – yes four – square meals, took a long, hot bath and eventually headed for an early night feeling really rather pleased with myself.
And then my old friend insomnia turned up in an attempt to pull the rug from under my feet (Boo hiss). To be fair, I haven’t been sleeping terribly well since I started taking the Citalopram but on Saturday night I was chronically awake for the first time in weeks and it wasn’t long before I started getting frightened. The wee small hours can be a dangerous time for me – it’s the absence of distractions, the quietness, stillness and the dark that does for me. Above all else it’s the notion that I am completely alone and that not a soul on earth knows where I am or what I am doing…. If things are going to get really bad for me, it’ll be in the middle of the night. And if I find myself awake in the middle of the night things almost always get really bad.
Before I knew it, everything was crowding in and I started to feel defeated. I couldn’t sleep and I was in no fit state to be awake and “I couldn’t do this anymore”…. and then a revelation: I had a kettle, a good book, a cat who would be delighted to have my company over a brew and an emergency sleeping tablet that would take an hour to kick in. Low and behold* I had a plan!
An hour and a bit later I was fast asleep and full of Horlicks….. I also felt quite proud, no, I did – I felt quite proud that I had dispensed of the hopelessness, all by myself, at my most vulnerable of moments. Go me.
Today I was mostly tired and groggy! I caught up with a few work emails, pottered up to Canbury Gardens for a wander in the rain, faffed about online and ate three meals. Incidentally, I’ve managed to put a little weight on over the last few weeks, but I’m still hovering somewhere around the ‘telling off’ mark.
Over all I think this weekend has been third time almost lucky. I’m aware that eventually I’m going to have to start getting myself ‘out there’ again but for now taking care of myself (even when the chips are very down), getting things done and finding ways to relax are huge achievements for me and I’m not ready to rock the boat just yet. I’m going for third time completely lucky next week.
Do you know what though? I haven’t hated this weekend; in fact, I’ve spent this weekend feeling moslty calm, reasonably safe and fairly relaxed. What a novel way to spend your time!
*Or is it lo and behold?!
Goodreads book review – The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ*
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I came to The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ having read the His dark materials trilogy but found none of the withering and thought provoking criticism of the power afforded to organised religion in those works here. In fact, Pullman’s retelling of the story of Christ felt a little juvenile and little lazy. It added nothing salient to the weary debate about the value and nature of religion, and at times seemed like an unnecessary and cheap point scoring exercise.
Of course Philip Pullman is no stranger to religious controversy and perhaps, given a certain inclination of faith The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ is a deeply controversial work. For my part – not being of that particular inclination – I can only set aside the apparent controversy and conclude that without it this is little more than a story about the nature of stories. I’ve read plenty of stories about stories before; the blurred lines between fact, fiction, truth, history and memory have been explored time and again elsewhere and sadly this book didn’t feel anything like a stand out example of an over familiar post-modern genre.
It’s disappointing not to find something positive to say about a novel, so I suppose it’s fair to say that there is some charm in the fable like nature of this one – although perhaps this owes more to the gospels themselves than to Pullman’s rendering of them.
Goodreads book review – Death at intervals
Death at Intervals by José Saramago
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The central premise of José Saramago’s Death at intervals is simple, if impossible – one day, without warning, people stop dying…. And so ensures a fascinating exploration of some fundamental and enduring human concerns –our relationship with mortality, our reliance on governance, the morality of euthanasia, the roles of state and religion, and (not least) the nature of love and the meaning of life.
I loved this book in so many ways and the story itself is mischievous, thought provoking and challenging. Whilst Saramago’s rendering of the conventional sentence feels a little meandering and difficult at first it is well worth the effort and perseverance, particularly when it comes to the perfectly drawn plot twist – the anticipation of which runs to more than ten pages and feels like a sentence spilled into a paragraph spilled into a chapter. (Incidentally, if you want to get the full effect of this book I’d recommend reading it without first reading the publisher’s blurb on the back cover). For me, the stand out thing about Death at intervals is the ambiguity of the narrative voice – at times it is difficult to determine where speech ends and the narrative voice resumes. Unreliable narrators are something of a favourite of mine, because, as Saramago himself puts it ‘one cannot be too careful with words. Words change their minds just as people do’.
In summary I think this is a brilliant novel by a brilliant writer and I’m looking forward to reading more of his work.
Not drowning but waving*
It’s been four weeks since I hit rock bottom and started making my way back up to the surface again and four weeks seemed as good a time as any to step back and review how things have been going so far.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, my last episode involved a rather spectacular unravelling of the practical and the ordinary. I wasn’t just an emotional wreck (which is bad enough) I was also a practical wreck and for a person who is usually Mrs Organised** this felt doubly distressing. Still, if I’ve learned only one thing recently it’s that the only way to deal with practical problems is to take practical steps. Dealing with this side of the chaos was about rolling my sleeves up and digging deep (there’s a line in a Maximo Park song which sums this up quite neatly (to me anyway) “what happens when you lose everything? You start over again’). And so ensued an impressively thorough spring clean of the flat, a session of opening three months worth of post, a trip to the supermarket, a meeting at the bank and some robust financial planning. I’ve definitely had some notable successes in putting the practical aspects of my life back together, and this is definitely helping with the anxiety and (utterly terrifying) panic attacks that had been creeping in.
On a daily basis I’ve been splitting my tasks up into the things I need to do, the things I should do and the things that I want to do and in following these lists I feel I am achieving a good balance of sorting things out and taking care of my interests. The last part, taking care of my interests, has already started to have a positive impact. We’re not talking major things here – just a bit of reading (I finished Death at intervals and commend it to anyone and everyone and have now stated reading Philip Pullman’s The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ), plenty of music in the background (thank you Radio Six Music) and a spot of exercise (this week wii fit, maybe even running in the outside world next week!). All of these things seem to be coming together as a useful reminder that I am a proper person who cares about and has an interest in things – I’m sure also sure that the exercise has an impact on my mood day to day. There’s also been this blog which has been a welcome distraction and a good way of refocusing the mind away from the darkness that threatens to consume me.
As has been mentioned elsewhere I’ve spoken to colleagues about my difficulties and am definitely feeling a bit more like myself at work. I’ve had my first psych appointment so have a really good crisis plan in place. I also had my initial CBT assessment this morning – I think it went quite well and I’m interested to find out what the next steps will be. This type of contact is important to me. If nothing else it serves as a check and balance preventing me from withdrawing from the strategies that have been serving me well in recent weeks. It will also be good, in the fullness of time, to get different perspectives and different ideas about managing the symptoms right out of my life.
Of course the dark passenger is ever present and I’d be lying if I said there hadn’t been some tough times. On the upside, the tough times have felt a little shorter lived and a little less severe of late – there was a time when I wasn’t able to contemplate getting through the next few minutes, now, if I’m struggling at all, I’m struggling to think about getting through the next few hours. I’m taking this as a big positive because whilst you can do quite a lot of harm to yourself in a few impulsive, wrong-headed minutes, a few hours has (so far) been long enough for me to take a few deep breaths and reach for the crisis plan.
Insofar as that the last few weeks have been about me managing better rather than me being completely better I think it’s fair to say that things are working out okay at the moment. I’m almost looking forward to what the next four weeks might bring.
* With apologies to Stevie Smith for indulging in a small spot of kind-of-plagiarism.
** It took me ages to decide to capitalise both Mrs and Organised and fear I may still have got it wrong.
That sinking feeling (post script)
I neglected to mention in my last post that I cancelled my plans to meet up with a friend on Saturday because of my ‘down day’. This was a bit of a shame, because it would have been another thing ticked off on the small things lists. Nevertheless, thinking about it now, I feel that I made the right decision in postponing the visit. I wasn’t at all at my best on Saturday – notwithstanding the hangover I felt small, quiet and insignificant. Rather than forcing myself through the stressful and unpleasant experience of trying to pretend that everything was okay, I think it was better to take a little time to get myself back on track.
It’s far nicer spending time with people when the fog isn’t crowding in and I think I’ve decided that a better experience is available if you are honest and realistic about what you can and can’t do on any given day. With this in mind I’m looking forward to catching up with my friend when I’m more myself instead of (as would normally be the case) beating myself up about past failures.
That sinking feeling
Weekend number two and a weekend of rather mixed fortunes from a mental well-being point of view.
It started badly – I was suffering from my first hangover in ages, so not only did I have the usual residual feeling of self-loathing to deal with I had post alcohol self-loathing to throw into the mix. I woke late, and spent the first few hours of Saturday pacing around with that familiar sinking feeling persisting in bringing itself to my attention.
Thankfully, the memory of my achievement last weekend (I seem to recall saying I enjoyed it) was a potent one and I became quite determined that a repeat of that success was within my grasp. I left the flat and took a walk down by the river – one of the best things about my flat is that it’s a stone’s throw away from a particularly pleasant part of the Thames – in attempt to clear my head.
When I returned I donned my trusty elastic band. I wear it around my wrist when the thoughts are coming thick and fast and I don’t have the capacity to deal with them. Every time a thought comes in I snap the band (gently) to banish it. There is something about the action and noise combined that I find useful. The point is that whilst I can’t stop the thoughts from coming, I can choose what to do with them and when I’m feeling overwhelmed the best thing for it is to send them away for a little while.
With a strategy in place for dealing with the thoughts I felt able to tackle the challenges I had diligently listed out for myself. As I’ve already said, it’s not about big things at the moment, but about building up layers of small things until I’m ready to move on to some of the bigger challenges ahead. On balance, and looking at the lists, this weekend has been another success, despite the shaky start:
The process of splitting up my tasks in to the categories of need, should and could has been positive one for me. In the past, after I’ve unravelled, I’ve always tried to put things back together starting with the easiest and building up to the most difficult. Whilst this has worked, to some extent, it has always left the worry and guilt associated with past ‘failings’ hanging over me. Tackling things this way allows me to get into routines, whilst also dealing with the anxieties.
So after weekend number two, I’m pleased to say that things are still getting ticked off, one by one, day by day, and in dealing with the practical and habitual I feel much better able to hold on to myself. Long may it continue…
Sing when you’re winning
In celebration of finding myself singing along to the radio earlier today* I have finally completed my sparkly new Spotify playlist. This is an important step forwards because, although I am usually passionate about music, I felt like I’d lost my enthusiasm in recent months. Making a new playlist is something that appears on one of the small things lists, and this is the first one that I’ve been able to cross off completely. I think that’s what you call progress!
Anyhow, here’s a link to the playlist, just in case you’re interested:
Enjoy!
*The song was A girl like you by Edwyn Collins (and no, I can’t explain why I would sing along to this song in particular).
How do you eat an elephant? 