Tag: Musings

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

Okay while it lasts

Posted on by WeeGee

I feel that I should blog. So here I am – blogging. It’s hard to blog about being mental when you’re not feeling especially mental…..

Whenever I start feeling okay I think “this is it; I’m finally okay” but I have to try to remember that it doesn’t really work like that.

Okay lasts as long as okay wants to and then it replaces itself with not okay again. Which is fine so long as I’m ready for not okay when it comes around. Trouble is it’s almost impossible to truly ready yourself for not okay when things are okay. If you see what I mean?

There are a few things coming up that I need to prepare myself for – anniversaries and such like. It’s daft because the only anniversaries that mean anything to me are the bad ones: it’s x amount of time since such and such a terrible thing happened. Why does that have to matter more than the fact that it’s x amount of time since something good happened? Broken brain is the answer I suppose.

Anyhoo. I’m not feeling particularly mental at the moment, but I’ve got this horrible feeling that the mentals are coming.

Why won’t they just leave me alone?

Lots of love from WeeGee

Posted in About today

Idiots beware

Posted on by WeeGee

I’m in a bad mood today. There’s nothing the matter with me – I think I must have got out the wrong side of the bed or something.

Just to be clear I’m not feeling especially mental, in fact what I appear to be experiencing is a plain old fashion bad mood. I’d be perfectly content if a) the world would shut its mouth, b) idiots would stay out of my way and c) I was left alone to sit in peace and quiet getting on with what I’m getting on with (without the world and idiots and stuff getting in the way).

Being in a bad mood when you’re mental leads to all kinds of interesting challenges. First up you have to decide whether you are in a mental bad mood (you think it would be a good idea to jump yourself off a tall building) or in a normal bad mood (you think it would be a good idea to push an idiot off a tall building). I’m definitely in the latter category of bad mood today.

The next challenge is to convince your nearest and dearest that you are not in a mental bad mood. This is a difficult one to achieve because when you are mental there is a tendency for people to assume that everything you do and feel is caused by your mentalness and to ask if you are mental. My ploy today has been to say ‘I’m not mental but if one more person asks me if I’m mental I will probably end up GOING TOTALLY MENTAL’

Finally you have to work very hard to make sure you don’t end up pushing any idiots off a tall building. This is the most difficult one of all to achieve – when you’re in a bad mood the idiots seem to multiply and then insist on speaking to you. I did wonder if I could at least poke one in the eye and plead diminished responsibility on account of my bad mood and my history of mentalness. It was a close call, but I thought better of it in the end.

So yeah, the long and the short of today is that WeeGee is in a bad mood.

But that’s okay.

Lots of love from a grumpy WeeGee xxx

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

Hope is important

Posted on by WeeGee

 

I woke up at a funny time this morning – too late to go back to sleep and too early to get up. I decided that if I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t want to get up I might as well stay in bed and have myself a nice little rest.

Of course, it wasn’t long before my nice little rest turned into a bit of a think. I was thinking about wills: specifically whether I should revisit mine, and whether, if I did, I would be considered to have been of sound mind at the time of writing.

This got me thinking about my granny. She died when I was fifteen leaving behind only a few words dictated to my dad quite literally on her death bed. After her death these few words caused more arguments, and ill feeling and general nastiness than you can ever imagine*. It was my first insight into what a death can bring out in people. It wasn’t pretty.

The thing is, my granny died after a very long illness and for the last few months of her life, her diagnosis was terminal. I’ll never forget the conversation that I had with my dad as he tried to explain that there was nothing more that could be done – it felt like someone had taken my heart in their hands and wrung all the good things out of it.

We knew she was dying and she knew she was dying and it has bothered me for a long time that, under those circumstances, she didn’t have a will. She was an organised careful person and I just couldn’t understand why she hadn’t been organised and careful in that regard.

As I was thinking this morning it occurred to me that perhaps, even in the face of what she was told was certain death, she believed she was going to live. Maybe it was hope, or determination, or the survival instinct that kept her from writing a will. And that notion felt like it meant something to me.

Does that make sense?

I don’t want to be alive, but that really isn’t the same thing as wanting to die** and I often think about the survival instinct. My thinking goes something like this: If I found myself in a lift*** that was plummeting to the ground from twenty stories up, I imagine that for the whole of the descent I’d be thinking that something would happen that would make it okay. I don’t suppose it would occur to me that I was actually going to die until the very moment of impact (at which point it wouldn’t matter, because I’d be dead).  Human beings are going to die, but we also seem to be programmed to believe that we’re not going to die at any given moment. Again, that seems to mean something to me.

Why do I mention any of this? I’m not entirely sure, other than what it seems to say to me is something about hope. Hope is important.

Love from a hopeful WeeGee xx

PS – I read somewhere that if you find yourself in a plummeting lift your best bet is to lie on top of someone larger than yourself. It seems a bit mean, but I do find myself taking note of the physical stature of my companions when I get into lifts. Just in case, you know.

 

 

*Shortly before she became ill my granny had remarried, so we ended up with two feuding families. I hated it.

**You will either understand that or you won’t. I can’t put it any better than that

***Or an elevator if you are across the Pond

 

 

Posted in Welcome to my world

Living?

Posted on by WeeGee

I’m in a bleak and vulnerable place. I don’t want that to rub off on anybody so skip over this one if you see fit….

I haven’t managed to blog for a couple of days because I haven’t had the mental capacity for it and, if I’m perfectly honest, I’m not altogether sure that I have the mental capacity for it now. Still, on account of the fact that no-one has invented a clever device that transfers my thoughts into a nice neat blog post yet I’m going to have to give it a go for myself.

Where to start? Hmm…. well, I suppose I could start with a confession.

I’m not being entirely honest with people about the place I’m in. I know that breaks so many of the ‘rules’, but I don’t really know what else to do apart from stick a smile on my face and say “I’m fine”. The alternative is saying “I’m hollow, and empty and I wish I wasn’t alive and there is nothing that can happen, or that you can say that will ever change any of that” Nobody wants to hear that, do they?

I know what people would say to me. They’d say that was ‘broken brain’ speaking’ and that you HAVE to ask for help. Here’s the thing – my brain doesn’t work properly – everyone knows that but IT DOESN’T MAKE ME AN IDIOT. So I ask for ‘help’. What is it that is going to help? More pills? A stay in hospital where I can feel exactly the way that I do now only in sterile surroundings? Talking about things that there is no answer to? It doesn’t help. I’ve been around the block enough times to know that. I don’t mean to be unkind or ungrateful to the people in my life who want to help, I really don’t. I just want them to understand that there is no help.

The people I know in real life are good and kind people and they are forever saying ‘just let me know if there’s anything I can do to help’. But I can’t tell them what they could do help, because it’s not the way the world works. What would really help right now is somebody gathering me up, staying by my side and showing me how it is that you go about doing this thing called living. Nobody wants to do that – it’s too much to ask.

So instead, I’ll do what I always do. I’ll smile. I’ll say ‘I’m fine’, ‘work’s great’, ‘Yeah I’m really busy’ and I’ll continue to curl up into a ball whilst staring into the mid distance and listening to all that living going on around about me.
Love from WeeGee (misery guts)

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

I am therefore I am: a conundrum

Posted on by WeeGee

WARNING: This post contains armchair philosophy and thoughts and ideas that might make your head explode or something.

Here’s a question for you: if you spend fifty percent of you time thinking that yesterday was better, and the other fifty percent thinking that tomorrow will be better – what does that make today? I think that’s my way of trying to understand time and existence. I’ve a feeling I’m biting off more than I can chew here, but I’m going to give it a go….

If you’ve ever had any kind of counselling or therapy ‘mindfulness’ will be a familiar concept to you. It seems that if you want to be normal rather than mental you have to keep your thoughts in the here and now: no past, no future, just the moment you’re in.

Mindfulness is something I struggle with in part because it’s only a few steps shy of meditation and meditation makes me giggle because it’s not the kind of thing I can take seriously. At all. Ever. The end.

Maybe I’m just too cynical for all this mindfulness stuff?

I’m also not entirely convinced that human beings can ever ‘exist’ in one moment alone. I understand the arguments, but I wonder whether we’re really wired that way. Everything that I am now is surely a culmination of everywhere I’ve ever been? Everything that I do now is surely a small contribution to who I’m going to be in the future. If all there is is now then who was I, and who will I be? Those things are important, no?

I suppose it comes down to what ‘existing’ is and whether you believe (is it a belief, I don’t know?) that the verb exist has a legitimate past and future tense. Existing isn’t just being alive. I’m sure about that because, for example, I’m sitting on a chair at the moment and the chair definitely exists and is definitely not alive* Some things ‘existed’ thousands of years ago but people argue that they only exist now in this moment. You are reading this in a different moment from the one I wrote it in. When does it exist?

I exist now and I’m fairly confident of that. And I know I existed yesterday because I can REMEMBER yesterday. That’s quite straightforward in a way, but tomorrow only ‘exists’ in so far as I can imagine it. Does that mean it exists or not…. I’ve never been to Madagascar but I know it exists, or does it – maybe it only exists in this moment if you are actually there? Do bears shit in the woods?

……. Dear oh dear. Is your head hurting yet?

I think I’ll have a nice musical interlude at this point to get my hurting head off the hook….. Here’s a (very) handsome man with a gruff and gravelly voice singing about tomorrow. It’s nice. It’ll make your head all better:

I got lost in existence for a while there. Sorry. But I think you have probably got the gist of the difficulty that I have with mindfulness?

The past matters to human beings. It forms a large part of our collective identity, and, I think of our individual identities too. The past is important and I don’t think you should wipe it away and I don’t think you really can – no matter how you train your brain. That’s why we have Armistice Day (as an example) because what people did in the past matters a great deal to who people are today, and for that matter, how they live today.

As for the future, I can’t imagine what humans would be without it. Would we ever have done anything? What happens to progress if there is no future? What happens to hope?

Living in the moment is all very well. But what if the moment you are in is terrible? I don’t really mean broken brain terrible (although that is quite terrible enough) but what if, for arguments sake you are being held in a Syrian jail and tortured within an inch of your life IN THIS MOMENT? I can’t see how you find happiness in that moment under those circumstances…..

I’m over thinking it aren’t I?

Here are my final thoughts on mindfulness…..

Google ‘mindfulness’ or ‘living in the moment’ or whatever variation on the theme you can think of and you’ll find people who have found ‘happiness’ by simply ‘living in the moment’. I think that’s fantastic for them, I really do, but what they never say is HOW they do it. Do they just wake up one morning and find themselves in the moment? If the only problem that I have is that I can’t live in the here and now, why can’t someone just give me a step by step guide to living in the here and now?

I don’t get it.

Finally – in my mind there is a very practical problem with ‘living in the moment’. Okay, so here I am today. I’m typing up a blog post and watching Olympic Volleyball. That’s all that matters because that’s now. It’s all I should be thinking about.

But here’s the thing. There isn’t a lot of food in my flat and one of my friends has a birthday coming up. That means I need to think about buying groceries and gifts and I will do both of those things in the future but I will plan for them now. If I stuck with the moment I’d just head out into the world to forage for food when I was hungry and I’d never get a gift to anyone in time. Sometimes you have to plan but if you ever say that to someone who is trying to teach you mindfulness they will say  ‘ah, but that’s different – it’s a different kind of thinking, a different thought process’.

To me, that says that mindfulness is an intuitive thing and I end up back at wondering where my step by step guide to mindfulness is because I quite clearly don’t get it. As usual.

What a long post to say nothing more than ‘I’m confused and I don’t get it’!!

Lots of love from a philosophical WeeGee xx

*Unless I have well and truly taken leave of my senses once and for all!

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

Olympian

Posted on by WeeGee

Don’t worry – this isn’t another one of my gushing posts about the Olympic Games. It’s a post about this song:

Or at least it’s a post about a couple of lines in this song:

“I wanted to be there with you / For I can only be normal with you / I’ve given my all for you”

Twice in my life I’ve managed to find another human being that I wanted to be with. Twice in my life I’ve managed to find another human being that made me feel ‘normal’. Twice in my life I’ve managed to lose the most special person on earth.

My conclusion to all this is that I must not be supposed to be with anybody and that certainly I’m not capable of being normal by myself. I don’t cut the mustard when it comes to all that belonging and normal stuff. You get what’s coming your way. What’s for you doesn’t go past you. If you get nothing and it all goes past you – that’s what was yours.

Everything I do is with reference to other people. That’s just the way my brain works and all the counselling and therapy in the world isn’t going to change that.

I am who I am.

I’m lost. I’m lonely. I’m mental. I’m not normal. This is what is mine. I wish I could make something matter, I really do.

Boo hoo. Woe is me. I hate myself and I want a pie.

Lots of mixed up miserable love (once more) from WeeGee xx

Posted in Welcome to my world

Where my head is at

Posted on by WeeGee

It gets tiring sometimes, doesn’t it? Being alive, and being mental, and having ‘things on your mind’. I feel like I’m unravelling. I want to gather myself up but somehow, I just can’t seem to manage it. I can’t make it stop. I can’t make it go away.

Do you know what I wish? I wish there was a way that I could just let people look in to my head so that they could see it all without me having to say it all. I don’t know how to say it, I really don’t. I like words and I know a lot of them but when it comes to what’s in my head I struggle to find the right ones.

Do you know what else I wish? I wish there was somebody out there who knew the answer to what’s in my head. I know that there isn’t an answer but I wish there was and I wish I could find the person who knows it. I suppose I’m still looking for somebody to save me with the answer. It’s stupid because I have no idea what the question is so how can I expect somebody to answer it for me?

I’m telling myself to ‘keep my head’ and that it will be ‘okay’. I’m trying not to think what ‘okay’ means. Does being okay mean that I stay alive or does it mean something different? I hope it means something different but I suspect it doesn’t. Is the point of being alive really nothing more than that you manage to stay alive? I don’t get it.

I’m sorry that I can’t find better words than that.

I’m sorry I’ve written a pointless post. I felt like I wanted to get something out, and I did – although I’m not entirely sure what I have achieved in the end. I suppose I wrote about nothing and nowhere. That’s where my head is at.

What can I say? Stay tuned for more pointless posts!

Lots of love from WeeGee xx

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

Doing it right?

Posted on by WeeGee

I’ve decided that it’s about time I attempted something approaching coherent – I’ve been meaning to write about all kinds of things but thoughts keep getting in the way.

The first thing to say is that over the weekend I reached the rather dizzying heights of…. One hundred* followers here on WordPress. Wow! I thought it was particularly exciting to reach one hundred, because, you know, what’s not to like about a nice neat hundred? The only thing is I thought I got a  a badge or something from WordPress but I didn’t. Poor me. Anyway, I can’t quite believe that one hundred human beings have stopped by my blog and decided they had a little bit of interest in reading the nonsense that comes out of my head. Like I said… wow!

The next thing to say is that despite my recent rocky patch I am still ‘functioning well’. Those were my GP’s*** words and I guess I agree insofar as that I continue to cling on and make a reasonable fist of dragging myself through things. I’m not sure that making a reasonable fist of dragging yourself through things ought to be seen as functioning well – it’s more a case of functioning in spite of things surely? Anyhow, I didn’t want to get into another argument with her so I let her have that one. I also didn’t bother respond to the ‘I’m not as discouraged as you are’ comment because I was too busy trying not to poke her in the eye for saying such a ridiculous thing. So I’m depressed and I’m discouraged and you’re not depressed** and you’re not discouraged? Who’d have thunk it? (By the way, I went to see my GP yesterday when I was very angry. About everything. And everybody….)

Needless to say the argument with my GP wasn’t really an argument at all because WeeGee doesn’t do confrontation in the real world**** it was more of a difference of opinion. The GPs opinion was that because I can ‘afford’ to pay for private counselling I should perhaps come off the NHS waiting list for CBT which, by the way, I have been on for twenty weeks now. WeeGee’s opinion was that it wasn’t so much a case of being able to ‘afford’ it as being so terrified of myself that I couldn’t ‘afford’ not to find a way to ‘afford’ it. WeeGee was also of the opinion that the GP seemed to have missed the whole point of the NHS which, as I’ve always understood it, is essentially free treatment at the point of need regardless of your ability to pay (Mini rant about the NHS and how we’re all going to hell in a hand cart what with the Tories and all officially over).

More than anything, I think I’ve hit a wall of frustration. I’m doing everything right, I really am. I’m taking my medication, I’m mindful, I’m eating, I’m exercising and above all else I’m trying very (very) hard. I keep my appointments with my GP, Mr Clever the psychiatrist and my own lovely counsellor Mrs Mountain and I take everything that they say on board*****. I’ve got mood charts, progress charts, lists and self help resources coming out of my ears. I haven’t topped myself yet. I’m doing everything right but none of it is getting any better. Actually it feels like it gets a little worse with every day that passes.

I honestly don’t know what to do next. Is it really just a case of waiting it out? Will it pass in time? Or is the problem that I’m maybe throwing too much at it? Or do I just think I’m doing it right when actually I’m doing it wrong?

Who knows? Answers on the back of a postcard.

 

Meanwhile in other news I have continued to keep up with the 10,000 step challenge even though I’ve been a bit mental and the Olympic torch passed through Kingston today. I was a little bit underwhelmed by the whole thing but I did enjoy listening to the couple next to me arguing about who was responsible for forgetting to put batteries in the camera. Nothing else to report today save that the sun is shining upon the UK which means I have a sunburnt nose****** and the Breaking Bad obsession in coming along quite nicely thank you very much.

Cheerio, WeeGee xx

 

 

 

 

*Then it went up to 101, which is less neat but does allow me to say that I have more than 100 followers

**To my knowledge. Perhaps I shouldn’t make assumptions like that – a lot of people probably don’t think I’m depressed either

***AKA Mrs Helpful, but I couldn’t bring myself to call her that today

****I do okay at it when I’m at work but I’m just acting

*****Unless it’s stupid

******When will I learn!

Posted in Some thoughts about my journey

The long and the short of it

Posted on by WeeGee

I’ve had to write two versions of today’s post – a long version and a short version.

I wrote the long version first and then I thought ‘Crikey*, what a jolly* miserable post that is, it’ll probably bore the arse** off everyone’ so I wrote the short version too so you could still get the gist even if the long one bored the arse off you and you had to stop reading it in order to work out how to re-attach your (probably lovely) arse to your (definitely lovely) self…

The short version

The short version starts with this video:

And then goes something like this:

Boo hoo. Woe is me. Boo-bloody-hoo. I hate myself and I want a pie. Sob sob. The end. Sob.

The long version

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin….

I thought I’d start at the end today, just for a bit of a change. I know that it’s conventional to do the beginning, followed by the middle, followed by the end but this is a blog about my broken brain and today it’s the end that is at the front of the thought queue so that’s where I’m starting.

The end is this: None of this was supposed to happen. My life has taken me to the point at which I can only decide that this is all wrong, that this isn’t what I wanted and that this can’t possibly be what was supposed to happen even though it did. Now what?

Let’s have a song while I make my mind up:

I haven’t made my mind up yet. Oh bums.

One of the things I tell myself, over and over again is that the fact that I’m mental is the least interesting thing about me. Sure it means that from time to time I do some interesting things, but aside from all the mental madness stuff I’m essentially a proper person who cares about stuff.

Except I’m not; it’s a lie –  I’m not real or proper and if you could look into my heart the only thing you would see would be more nothing that you ever thought imaginable. Nothing is probably the only thing on earth that you can’t bring yourself to care about***.

If I’m not a proper person, the only things that are left are the impressive**** collection of ‘disorders’ I have managed to collect over the years. That’s all I am now, disordered and broken and that’s all I can be, because it is all there is to me. Boo hoo, sob sob, boo-bloody-hoo, poor me.

It’ll probably come to no surprise to you that I live alone. It certainly comes as no surprise to me. I don’t want to live alone, in fact I mostly hate it but how can you be so broken and share it with someone? Some things are better done in private, especially being mental. The thing is I’m always going to be mental. There isn’t a magic wand or a make-it-all better pill so I know that I’ll always be mental and it follows that I’ll always be alone. But I don’t want to be alone. Cards on the table? I just want somebody to save me. I can’t care about myself and I can’t take care of myself – I only really work in relation to other people. I wasn’t built to be alone, even though being alone is the only logical outcome of my condition.

Nobody is coming to save me. I don’t know how to save myself. This wasn’t what I wanted to happen.

Boo hoo, sob sob.

Love from WeeGee (once again hoping tomorrow is better) xx

*Yes. That’s actually how I talk. You know I’m British right?!

**In America I believe you say ‘ass’ which is fine by me even if it does make me think of a donkey and cause impossible and disturbing images to form in my head

***Except for Margaret Thatcher and possibly, the Eurovision Song Contest

****I don’t really think of it as impressive, but you know what I mean

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!