Category: On the borderline

Only sometimes – on uncertainty and friendships

I don’t think I cope well with “sometimes”.

In general, I don’t cope well with lots of uncertainties, or at least, not the same as other people do. It can be to do with situations and actions, like places I don’t know, or not being sure when I can leave a situation if I need to, or competing demands that mean I can’t give everything or everyone 100%, that can be scary. It can be when I’m trying to plan or decide something. So many different possibilities crowd my head and swim round, pulling me down til I can’t breathe and have to just stop because it’s too much to cope with. People on the outside of this see it as me being lazy or lacking any drive when inside I’m fighting the drowning. Above all it can be interpersonal yet related to what I am (where ultimately I can never ever be certain so always fear) , if people misunderstand me, if people perceive me or my actions very differently from what is going on inside me; worst of all the times I start to doubt my motivations, or intentions, what is most deeply in me really after all – the times I can never be certain enough that I’m not evil if I don’t punish and hurt myself, because the voice of my abuser always seems stronger and truer…

Other uncertainties don’t seem to bother me as much as other people suggest they should. I don’t know, for instance, what my work situation will be in a year, or 5 years. I don’t have a career plan set out. I have quite a lot of instability in this area, largely because of my current physical health. People have told me that it is wrong for someone of my age not to have ambition; that I’m irresponsible and spoiled; or the phrase that irritates me so immensely at the moment, that I have to be “moving forwards”. These uncertainties actually don’t seem to bother me as much as they bother other people. I do not want to be a burden, or unable to take responsibility for myself. I strongly want to be able to give. Beyond that, I don’t seem to have the plan that seems to be expected. Perhaps it’s because I have to take things a day or an hour at a time. It’s the only way to deal with the experiences and emotions I have right now and I have seen by God’s grace it can actually be a fruitful way; maybe the only fruitful way just now in my circumstances. Perhaps it’s because for so long I was numbed to what I was experiencing and feeling, and/or in the isolated world of my abuser’s creation and under her control, that I need to take things this way now. Perhaps it’s because seeing beyond this day or this hour really can be too much and too scary on the worst days, even inconceivable when everything is that much too raw (though, mercifully, these times have not been so intense recently). Perhaps it’s because I am encouraged by Our Lord’s assurance that it is not the grandeur and status of what we do but the love with which we do each and every deed that matters.

Where it comes to friendships, I really struggle with uncertainties and “sometimes”. It’s really important to me to be there for the other person. If I don’t hear from them, I worry a lot. I don’t form relationships easily and don’t let many people in. The people I do, I become attached to deeply. Certain people, occasionally, I come to care for deeply very quickly and trust them deeply, maybe too much too fast. Once I care for someone, I really want to support them, and I also really need them. It’s not needing them to do things for me constantly. I do not want to make demands. That’s actually something I feel very guilty if I do. It’s just – needing them. I need them there. I need to be there for them. I need things to be shared between us.

Because of this, I particularly struggle in relationships where  we are only in touch sometimes, only see each other sometimes. I see this is much more of a problem for me than other people. It’s as if I can’t cope with a relationship with gaps and breaks in the sharing. At the moment, I’m very upset over a relationship with a close – well, we used to be close, anyway – friend. We live in the same town but now see each other a handful of times a year if that. I saw her at the funeral last week but the last time we’d actually met before that was Easter. We text sporadically and email even less. From her point of view according to what she’s told me, nothing has changed between us, she still cares about me and it’s just a normal part of life and getting older that you no longer see friends often, she is busy with her family, Church, groups, volunteer work and other commitments and she just doesn’t have time to meet especially as my health means I can’t easily get out, and when we do meet however rare it is our friendship is the same. For me, everything has changed and our loss of contact is a huge hurt. There is a void for me because we no longer communicate to share what is happening in our lives. For me you cannot share across texts or emails what you can face to face. It’s just impossible to say a lot of the most painful things. It’s upsetting when I do share something upsetting, important or personal and there is just no response.

It would be a bit different if we had moved a long way away from each other and we had therefore built our relationship on sharing things in writing. The way it is, it feels like a loss. I don’t like to admit to it but it does feel that I’ve been rejected. It feels as if I’m trying all I can to be there, but she does not want me or need me and I do not fit in her life. It hurts more because it’s a time I am already feeling isolated, raw and need not to be alone. But there’s more to it than that. I risk acting as though I think she has an obligation to me or think she has to be doing things to help me. She really doesn’t and that’s not what I want.

I can’t cope with contact and sharing being only sometimes. With such absence and silence between times, the relationship is by no means the same to me. It almost hurts all the more when the other person then acts as though nothing has happened and the absence was unimportant or non-existent. This comes up again and again in relationships. Then I get told I’m too much, or that I need too much or expect too much from friends, that they are not my family and that they just can’t make that kind of commitment. I end up hurting even more than if the relationship had gone completely and I’ve probably ruined a lot of relationships because of it. Either I can’t take the pain or they can’t stand me and contact ceases totally.

Does anyone else find these “sometimes” relationships difficult? Do you maintain friendships where the contact you have is few and far between? If so does that change the friendship for you? Do others need people as I do? Need things to be shared?

Ginny xxx

 

 

I can’t be loved

It hit me today. I can’t be loved. I am unable to receive love, most of all God’s love. I long for it in different ways. Crave not being alone or being understood. Crave protection. Crave being wanted. Being needed. Being any good (any good to anyone, and just simply any good). Not being rejected. But I’m totally unable to receive it, accept and believe.

A friend said to me a few months ago that I always put a barrier and was too angry to let God love me. I got very angry with this friend at the time and very afraid. I felt like he confirmed everything I always inescapably feared about being outside God’s grace, bad, too bad to save and it was my fault, that however much I thought I wanted good I was bad in the end. I spoke very angrily to my friend, accusing him of frightening and judging me. But really everything I attributed to him, was what I utterly feared because of what I’d learnt as a kid being abused. The only way to stop my abuser’s threats coming true, I believed, was to accept what she (my mother) was telling me about me. That meant admitting to my own pervasive, enduring, dangerous evil.

I’m only just now suddenly starting to see how strong her deception was and how it has made me unable to receive love, rather only to receive confirmation of her view of me (or at least the view she presented as an abuser). She talked a lot about love. I did not receive love in that relationship and as a kid that’s the relationship where love is most important. My father loved me but she so twisted things that my impression of him was that he believed the same about me as she did. The closest thing I experienced to safety and love was “admitting” under her violent coercion to how evil I was, accepting and desiring her total control over me and my total weakness.

Most of all I have been unable to accept the love of God. My abuser’s twisting of the meaning of what should be love has had a very direct impact that I wonder how I didn’t see til now.

More on this in coming posts. Right now I’m feeling like I just fell off a cliff or something.

Ginny xxxx

 

Horrible feelings I don’t understand

I’m feeling really bad tonight. My head hurts. My chest aches. I feel empty and hurting at the same time. I miss my friend; I miss a lot of people lost in different ways. I felt drained after therapy this morning, which isn’t unusual but it was intense today. Things are happening in therapy. It’s needed but I feel like I’m coming apart as well. I don’t really understand the pain. I’m sleeping so much at the moment but I’m back in bed now. I can’t concentrate on anything I’ve tried to do. I’m going to pray, offer it all to God and try to rest in prayer.

xxx

Jealous of the Angels tonight…

These past two months several good people at my former church have passed. This week, I heard that the mother of one of the Priests had passed. She had suffered with MS for many years and in the end she had pancreatic cancer as well. I would not say I knew her well but she made a great impression on me the times I met her. She was kind and had a lot of selfless energy. She was an artist and prayed through her painting too.

Today, I learnt that an elderly Priest with whom I was at one time in close contact, is right at the end of his life. He is in a coma and it is likely to be a matter of a day or hours now. I’m asking that I may be able to go to pray with him and say goodbye tomorrow morning, if he is still with us. He is a dear friend though circumstances have meant that we have not so often spoken in the last year or so. I am very upset with myself that a lot of these circumstances I should have changed and didn’t and in my illness and fear I allowed or even set distance from this dear friend. I really care for him and he has been so kind to me and led me on in my faith. I have been useless and I don’t know if he knows how much he means and did for me. But soon he will, in heaven.

These two people both particularly affected me through their calm hope and the way they truly lived, really present and  experiencing the joys, costs, pains, losses, weaknesses, hopes and needs of every day. The experience was raw and awful and scary sometimes, especially in their illness. They didn’t stop being present or deny the feeling. They didn’t deny or worry about their imperfections or give up because of them.  They accepted their need for help, mercy and love. They gave it abundantly to others around them. Their feelings and their reality, and others’, was all part of what I’d describe as their constant prayer and thanksgiving. They didn’t deny or push down others’ feelings or tell them to think positive or that they should feel another way instead or that certain feelings are sinful or have to be overcome. They showed me that God is right here, right now. Not when we’re pure or perfect or when we’ve mastered and suppressed everything we fear about ourselves or when we’ve assured ourselves we’ve punished ourselves enough or atoned enough. God is here, with us and within us, in this scary, hurting, angry, overwhelming feeling, in our error, even in our failing and sin, just as much as in our joy, success and delight. I still get scared very often and still take the instinctive way of running, hiding, hurting myself. I still spiral down in very dark places. But what these two friends taught me is one of the very few things I can cling onto.

I miss them very much already. Part of it It feels like this.

Losing them has hit hard. Also, some conversations I’ve had this week, have hit me with some things I have to change. I can’t stop crying tonight. Therapy tomorrow will be…unstable I think. The very vulnerable child part of me is integrating with me and her emotions are coming out as mine, not just in the escape world. This will be scary in therapy group but I know it needs to be.

Ginny xxx

“Jealous of the Angels”, by Jenn Bostic. With thanks to Lite Brite for the video.

Getting stuck on a loop

I’m gradually coming to notice when I re-experience feelings associated to long past experiences of abuse. I’ve described this as emotional flashbacks. They can include re-experiencing physical sensations of events, but also and often more overwhelmingly, emotional experiences. This often leads to certain thoughts being triggered and impulsive, uncontrollable actions that aren’t necessarily helpful for me or others. (I say uncontrollable. I must still take responsibility for them though I do not yet manage successfully control them and the impact the feelings have on me.)

I’m also noticing that I re-experience feelings and thoughts associated to more recent events; events which are not nearly as damaging as the abuse and trauma I experienced as a child. Sometimes, I can identify that the event triggered a deeper memory, which to some extent explains my reaction. But frequently, I can’t identify this. It is like feeling stuck on a loop. It causes me a lot of guilt and anger at myself. I feel I am being childish and self-centred because I should just get over it. I feel guilty, especially when it leads me to think over and over a time when somebody upset or hurt me, because I ought to be forgiving them. If I am repeatedly thinking of the hurt and wrong caused to me, I am holding it against them, not truly forgiving and I am keeping a barrier between them and me. God forgives us fully and it is as though our offences are blotted out. When we receive his forgiveness, we are washed “whiter than snow” and He does not look any more on our transgressions. Who am I to think I’m so important that things that hurt me play over and over in my mind? I’m reminded of someone close to me telling me “nobody else is responsible for making you feel better” “I’m going to be completely straight with you and I don’t have to think about what you’re feeling”. Am I making other people responsible for my feelings by my inability to move on? Am I making everything about me? I really fear that.

An example of such an event and consequentially getting “stuck in a loop” occurred this weekend. It’s a fairly low intensity example. Yesterday, I was in the street when I was stopped by a charity fundraiser – there are many of these people in shopping streets in my city, stopping people and wanting to take their personal details and sign them up to make regular donations. This person both irritated and intimidated me immediately. I watched him approach a lady who was a little way in front of me and follow her up the street. He then came up to me, coming uncomfortably close and half-blocking my path. I think this kind of approach is particularly intimidating to me since I’m disabled, unsteady on my feet and walk with a stick (and in my mind it is insensitive and inappropriate to approach in this way someone who you do not know, especially someone who is clearly physically vulnerable). He started to ask me questions and I simply replied “no thank you,” and carried on walking as best I could. I am in no position to give money at the moment and do not want to be signed up to anything, and think the best approach is to firmly but politely refuse to engage with this kind of approach. He then continued to follow me up the street, very close, muttering behind me sarcastically “oh, well that’s just charming” and so on. I was at once frightened and suddenly angry. I turned round and by no means shouting, but firmly, told him “Would you please stop following me. I am not obliged to give you my details. I do not want you to follow me.” “Well that’s incredibly [*&$% expletive deleted] rude of you” he retorted. I told him this was highly inappropriate and asked for the details of the organisation he was working for as I would be making a complaint. Fortunately, I was able to get sight of the ID badge he was wearing as he told me “Good, I hope that you do, because you’re incredibly unpleasant!” and noted the details.

Now, this event should probably no longer be in my mind. I was not hurt. I was probably not in any danger despite his intimidating and verbally aggressive behaviour. Likely as not I will never see him again. I have never heard of the organisation he was working for and have no dealings with them. It was nasty but probably not personally directed at me. It is an unpleasant way for anyone to behave, and all the more inappropriate on the part of someone representing a charity. I felt strongly about that. But it isn’t really an important event. The damage caused to me wasn’t major or worth thinking about (beyond that tomorrow I may make a complaint to the charity as I don’t think he should carry on representing them so poorly or treating other passers-by in the way he treated me and the lady in front of me).

The intensity of the fear and anger I felt at the time was much more than it should have been. It flicked me to come very close to an outburst of upset and anger that wouldn’t have helped anyone. I was able to stop that by the grace of God. I went some way into dissociating, hurting, being out of it but thoughts spiralling in a way too much to catch, being on the edge of going into a nearby shop and impulsively spending, which is one of the responses I’m most at risk of when I’m suddenly angry or upset. Again, I was able to stop myself. Mixed into this was the thought, what if someone was watching me, what would they think of what I had done? Was it my fault and was I wrong? I went home. I felt very low and was starting to shut down and everything I’d planned to do that evening was too much. I’m ashamed to admit this.

I’m more worried right now though, that instead of this whole minor incident now being over, it has come back on this loop in my mind today, several times. My mind has compulsively played over the incident many times, very vividly, but until this has been going on for a period of time, I’ve been unable to acknowledge what’s happening, whilst also being detached from what’s occurring in the present (for instance, no longer hearing the TV that was on, no longer doing the task I was doing). The way my mind has been playing this experience over has been similar to the way obsessional OCD thoughts about bad things I’ve done or am going to do, take hold of my mind. All the emotions I experienced at the time of the incident have come back again. With each obsessional repetition in this loop, my doubt of myself and my own actions in the situation increases, so that I am more convinced that I did wrong, that it must have been my fault, that people were watching me and now know how nasty I am.

Why am I unable to move on from even such an unimportant event? Why are my feelings so extreme at the time and no lower some time after? Why am I so unable to limit the impact of the emotion and the memory of the emotion and event? Does it in some way I do not yet understand, send me back to memory of a more damaging experience? That would give some explanation at least. Or is my experience just totally out of proportion, making me self-centred, self-obsessed, childish?

This event wasn’t particularly emotive in comparison to events that take place with people I know and care about. When upsetting interactions with friends and family get stuck on a loop in this way, it can completely affect and impede my future interactions with them and feelings towards them. I feel this is all my fault through my faulty reactions, emotions and thinking. Ultimately I end up self-punishing and self-harming as the only possible escape and a desperate attempt to punish myself enough for my failure to be an adult and my failure to forgive.

Writing this, it occurs to me that this feeling of being stuck in a loop does not only apply to things done against me. It applies equally to hurt I have caused or fear I have caused others, and other mistakes I have made. Wrong things and stupid things I have done play over and over in my head. The intense feelings of guilt, shame, horror, pain, etc, play over in my head and diminish little in intensity over the years. I regularly have vivid memories of, for example, things said during an argument with my dad and step-mum 3 years ago, or something wrong I did in my work that I worried endangered a patient 5 years ago, a time I stepped out of line with something I said to my boss in a meeting 8 or more years ago… I re-experience all the feelings and they can really shake me. I become afraid of any situations similar to those in which these events occurred, maybe because I believe I’ll do the same wrong again.

Again I wonder if all the feelings I have, whether it be a situation of wrong done by me to others, or a situation of wrong done by others to me and consequential hurt, in some way are (a lesser intensity of) feelings that were overwhelming and terrifying during the years of my abuse.

I also know that in personality disorders, emotions usually reach a higher intensity more quickly, and stay at the higher intensity for longer, than in people without personality disorder. I guess that explains to some extent why the feeling hangs around for longer, though not the vivid mental replaying of inconsequential events.

I desperately want an answer and I think I’ll talk about this in my 1:1 therapy tomorrow.

***

I wonder have you had similar experiences? Have you felt stuck on a loop remembering experiences or having thoughts and emotions you want to let go, but can’t?

Ginny xxx

Self-care

Yesterday I put on makeup for the first time for a long time. It was an ordinary day. I used to always wear a lot of makeup and coordinate some of the colours to my outfit. Then I stopped. I was exhausted and down and couldn’t find any will to take care what I looked like. The emotions that would surface when I looked at myself in a mirror for any length of time were unbearable. I felt revulsion. I’d start scratching at my skin, the emotion seeming to creep there and take hold like a rotten, evil force that I wanted to cut away.

Yesterday I was motivated to begin to take better care of myself. I got out the mirror and for the first time in as long as I can remember, the hatred and revulsion didn’t come overwhelmingly to the fore. I started to put on makeup and actually once I’d got through starting, I enjoyed it. Somehow, I began to feel a bit better, more prepared and lifted from the pervading exhaustion.

I carried on. Later in the day I painted my nails red. I used some nice moisturiser. I began to try to think caring thoughts towards my body and come up with caring replies to counteract the shouting voice in my head telling me I’m disgusting.

It’s a tiny couple of steps but it’s a start and each time I can do something caring to myself, it reminds me and strengthens my resolve to come up with new images of myself and new answers to the voices.

Ginny xxx

A closing drawbridge and a silent cry: when it’s less safe

A closing drawbridge and a silent cry

Eating disorders and personality disorder

When it’s less safe, but I am no longer my abuser’s child

WARNING: this post contains mention of childhood abuse, discussion of my experience of anorexia and disordered eating and the purpose it served for me in my eating disordered thought processes.

When I started drafting this post, I didn’t actually intend it to form part of this series on eating disorders and personality disorder. I didn’t realise that it would be so much about my eating disorders, but it turns out that it is. I started writing tonight in preparation for my therapy group tomorrow. Last week, we were talking about feeling safe. In the discussion, I said that at some points during therapy (around the past 14 months so far), I’ve actually been less safe than when I was not in therapy. In hindsight, perhaps I should say, felt less safe. It has felt less safe. Despite this, I still feel therapy is a process I need and want to go through. Someone asked me a question about that, to which I struggled to verbalise the answer. I’ve thought on her question during the week. I’m not going to write what she said because I don’t want to break her confidentiality, but I wanted to share the reflection she has led me to about becoming more or less safe during therapy.

As soon as I tried to explain, the familiar eating disorder thought came into my mind – when I was anorexic it was safe. I know how sick and dangerous that thought is and how illogical, the physical destruction of my body having been so clear. Yet, there was a point not very long ago in therapy where I so desperately wanted my anorexia back, because it would have been safe, and not so much too much. With anorexia, I wasn’t too much and nothing was too much. (Except food, of course!) I was encased in a safe, protected place, and I felt nothing but its power, voice and drive. My emotions and my body made no more demands.

With anorexia I could be certain in the knowledge I was starving, punishing, weakening, enough to atone for what my abuser told me I was, enough to avoid the damnation I thought I otherwise deserved, enough to ensure I was not a threat. Enough to satisfy my abuser.  And even years after I had got away from her, I thought perhaps anorexia could take me back to that one time where it had seemed she wanted me, seemed through a child’s eyes that perhaps she loved me, the one time I wasn’t bad, where I was so weakened she took total control. That would be totally safe.

I was never cared for by her. Total control stood in for care instead. The closest thing to care and safety for me was my total self-destruction, total physical weakness, allowing her to take total control of me. My BMI was about 13. I was in unbearable pain in my back and legs. I could just barely walk with crutches and had to spend a lot of time in bed. She took control literally of my movements, my food, my use of the bathroom and toilet, my washing, my dressing and undressing, my weighing (any action that could have and should have been private, she invaded) my contact with other people (even the doctors who wanted to help me, whom she prevented me seeing most of the time). Telling me what I was thinking, telling me what I was doing to the family, telling me what to say, total control – but this total control was the only time that the terrible powers and terrible intentions she told me I had, seemed to cease. My body and my mind ceased to make demands and I succumbed to her totally. This was the only safe place. The rest of the time I lived in fear of what I would do to her or the family and of her terrible threats coming true.

Paradoxically, at other times my anorexia gave me something that was nevertheless mine. It was my anorexia and my body. I think I’ve written before how when she had me strip in front of the mirror, a fierce voice in my head said, this is my body and you will never touch me again, and I resolved to lose as much more weight as I could.

That determination and angry strength was unusual. It was more about cutting off. Later, I stayed as numbed and weakened as I could. Long after I was out of the anorexic weight range, physically safe, I continued to punish myself. Starving. Vomiting. Cutting. Overdose. On the outside, I could do what was required and expected. I achieved. I was together, doing what they required in terms of education and work. Again, that was safe, because I was doing what was required, my dangerous emotions were numbed, my atonement continued. Until I imploded. Everything went to pieces.

As everything fragmented, numb was no longer sure and safe. I desired the end and wanted to end my life. At the same time, my child voice that I had suppressed so successfully for so long, was screaming and desperately needed to be cared for. This was explosively dangerous. My abuser’s threats about what I was would come true; they’d be proved to be true for all to see. The evil in me would explode out of control, if I could no longer punish and weaken myself. I would cause unlimited hurt to others without even seeing it myself, but everyone else knowing the evil I was. I would never be cared for (ie in someone’s total control).

Straight away, the rejections began. (Again. Just as I’d been rejected when I had needs and sought help as a child – terrified what my abuser’s reaction would be; my father not knowing what was going on, so not protecting me.) I was not under my abuser’s control any more, but there was no care for me, no one to protect me, and the few people I trusted were not there for me. The pressures – I don’t know if consciously or not – piled on me made it very clear I am a disappointment, not good enough, not what they need me to be, that they will only accept me as long as I am moving in the direction they think I should be at the pace they have dictated.

I cannot silence the needs any more. Anger boiled out of control, hurt screamed. Going through therapy, the feelings intensified. There was no way back to the protection my eating disorder had given me. Now, when I write about how it worked and why I wanted my eating disorder back, I am horrified. I am horrified at the power my abuser had over me and how I allowed her to have it and how that made me feel safe.

I will never receive now the care I did not receive when I was a child being abused. I will never receive again the closest thing I knew to care, the total submission to another person and control by them. Terrible as that was, I feel as though I will never be sure, as I could for a brief time be then when I was totally dependent on her, that I am not the bad, evil thing I had been taught that I am.

With the loss of all my coping mechanisms, including stopping self-harming and stopping overdosing, as I have somehow by the grace of God managed not to do in the past few weeks, it does feel more dangerous. I don’t know how to find any reassurance, internal or external. My feelings, my emotions, experiences, feel so out of control and dangerous. I am no longer my abuser’s child. I am no longer what my family requires. I will never have the care and security I did not have as a child, nor will I have the safety unconditional acceptance would give, because I do not have that now that I’m no longer what they require. I don’t yet know how to exist without these things.

Part of me grieves for the loss of the eating disorder and mechanisms that kept me safe, because stupid and twisted as it sounds, they did at least protect me; despite the harm they caused, they protected me from ending my life, and though it was fairly illusory, they gave me the closest thing I had experienced to being cared for.

****

I should say that I think that another important part of the safety issue in therapy is coping between sessions with the emotions that have come up in sessions. Also, the impact that this disorder and the recovery process has across your life. Until very recently having the help of my support worker, I struggled badly with the social isolation that followed the loss of many important relationships, and the “domino effect” of all the material stability in my life falling away because of the financial problems caused by losing job after job and my erratic spending when I was out of control. Struggling with this at the same time as my emotions were going out of control anyway, my desperation for help increasing but being unheard by everyone I tried to get help from and had been led to believe I could trust, brought me very much too close to the edge. My support worker has greatly contributed to my safety now.

Ginny xxx

World Mental Health Day – and guinea pigs

Today 10 October is World Mental Health Day. (For another hour and a half at least – erm, better late than never!) This year the theme is “psychological first aid”, which you can read more about on the World Health Organisation (WHO) website here .

When I worked at a hospital I took a course in “mental health first aid” and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve used the skills and understanding it gave me, across the board in work, social and family situations. It covered everything from gaining a basic insight into various mental health diagnoses, to how to be there for someone who is suffering distress or overwhelming emotions, to how to build psychological wellbeing and recognise the impact of both day to day and unusual events.

Today we marked World Mental Health Day at the community centre I go to for volunteering, creative groups and support. Visitors were encouraged to the centre, we had tea and cakes, discussion and some interesting videos made through the Time to Change campaign (http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/).

I also received a gift from a friend – a lovely book on guinea pigs and a piggie snack for my hopefully-future-guinea-piggies! I don’t know the lady who gave it to me very well and I was touched that she’d be so kind to me.

rspca book.jpg

It’s an RSPCA guide and it has some sweet photos as well as lots of information on how to make them a good living environment.

rspca book inside.jpg

I’ve been reading up on piggies and I’m hoping to be able to get some, possibly by Christmas. I both want to and am nervous about doing it – I’d love to have something to care for but will I be able to look after them well enough? Another friend knows of a guinea pig which may need a new home, though things aren’t certain (guinea pigs prefer to live in pairs, otherwise they can get lonely, and we are not sure how this may work out as this piggie is very nervous and a previous homing did not work out). It was really nice to receive this book today. Not only was it a thoughtful gift, it has encouraged me to have confidence to go through with this and that my friend thinks I’d be able to look after them.

I hope something good happened for you today too.

Ginny xxx

World Mental Health Day – William, Kate & Harry

World Mental Health Day – William, Kate & Harry

I’ve been impressed by the work the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry are doing to de-stigmatise mental health conditions and raise awareness of the importance of being able to access the help we need. You can read about what they have been doing today here.

To my recollection their work and their discussion of their own personal experiences (for example, following Princess Diana’s death) is the first time I’ve heard  a member of the Royal Family openly discussing mental health and wellbeing and the importance of responding with compassion not judgement and stigma. It’s encouraging to me to see this change. Recently, many friends of mine have met with really painful and dangerous discrimination and absence of help when they were really in need (as I have I too in the past).

I’m putting in an application for an opportunity through a service user involvement network to speak, from a service user / patient’s perspective, to medical students about mental health, discrimination and support. I’m happy students recognise the need to learn about it. I don’t know quite how this will progress or if I’ll be chosen but I’ll let you know.

Ginny xxx

Image thanks to http://www.aol.co.uk

Total emotion

I want to write but I can’t. Everything I feel is so much right now. I’m very lonely and I really wish someone would be here and keep me safe. I’m lonely despite all the good I have and I feel so stupid for it. I’m hurting a lot for someone else. My emotions are still hitting me out of nowhere. They well up inside and I keep crying. Sadness. Fear. It feels like I can’t breathe and a weight is pressing me down. In prayer I scream silently and God is good and for a few moments some kind of peace warms me. That grounds me and I cling to it.

I’m trying to sit with the emotions. acknowledge them and feel them and let them be. Somehow, I’m not cutting or overdosing. Somehow, I’m not thinking of ending my life at the moment.

I am doing things. It’s not that I sit paralysed by the emotions all the day. I have done quite a lot in terms of cleaning and clearing my flat, shocked at the state I’d left it to and how I’d been living, making changes that I wonder why I did not do months ago. I do things, push myself to physical pain and exhaustion til I’m shaking and can’t stand anymore (I’m quickly exhausted with the fibromyalgia). Sometimes I’m driven to get things done; sometimes I’m trying to deal with the emotion; sometimes trying not to shut down totally.

The emotion is total. I feel it everywhere in my body. I feel so guilty for feeling this and thinking so much of myself, all the more when the emotions are to do with anger towards my family.

Ginny xxx