*clears out the tumbleweed*
Long time no blog, I’ve had a few semi written posts on the go but most of them seemed to get stuck half way.
There are lots of changes going on around me and in general this year has been full of them, I’m not normally a fan of change and prefer to keep a tight grip on familiarity instead yet it seems to keep happening despite my complaints. I don’t like uncertainty yet I’m bored; as ever my brain is a contradiction, I often feel as though I’m stagnating seeing people move on around me people I was in the same position as a couple of years ago have bypassed me it’s no coincidence that as I write this young people across the U.K. will be getting exam results and finding out where their future path lies thinking about my own education and career tends to leave me teetering on the edge of an existential crisis.
I’ve develop a habit of doing all the things I feel like I need to make up for lost time and lost years to catch up with all those ahead of me. Since joining Mind there have been many staffing changes and several younger members of staff have joined, people younger than me which as well as the problems with attachments to people who have left has brought some resentment and shame at being a volunteer managed by people younger than me; there are volunteers older than me but most of them have had lives already and at 32 I’m only just at the start of any kind of career.
One thing I’ve been trying hard to do is be honest and open more, in some respects I guess I’ve had to as I no longer have one person I can go to and no mental health support has probably forced me to do this. One thing they don’t tell you in therapy is how long things take to have an effect I finished the main MBT treatment in 2013 and sometimes it feels like my brain is only starting to process it, I’ve said since it finished that the ways it helped me aren’t so obvious as the main issues I have such as self harm haven’t gone away but expressing my feelings and telling people how I feel about them is something that although still a work in progress is probably the biggest change and recently I’ve surprised myself with these changes by telling people that I feel I’m trying to make up for lost time and compensate for the years of not doing anything.
The downside to doing all the things is I’m currently lacking direction, life doesn’t come with a map it’s more like a badly programmed sat nav that has you going all the way across the country for a pint of milk instead of 5 minutes up the road and right now I feel like I’m sitting trying to find the right direction but I’m not sure exactly where I’m going and I’m not sure the address is right but I sort of know where it is just not exactly. What I know is I want to work in mental health in a way I can use my lives experience, I know I enjoy working directly with people (oh how 16 year old me would have laughed at that) I also enjoy delivering training but I don’t know whether I want to work with adults or young people or what sort of project or service I’d like to work on. Sometimes I think life was easier when I was catatonically depressed, if anyone knows how I can resign from adulting please let me know until then I’ll be building myself a pillow fort.
The perks of being a dinosaur 
Leave a Reply