Tag: future

‘Freedom day’

Four face masks with cartoon animals on them
Four masks from Sugar and Sloth

Tomorrow is ‘freedom day’ when the final lockdown restrictions are lifted. What freedom people are currently lacking is unclear but some things I’ve seen are – having to wear a mask, having to check in at shops and restaurants and not being able to meet as many people as they like, apparently this is oppression and we can’t keep wearing masks forever because it’s not normal.

After the first date for ‘freedom day was delayed anti-lockdown and anti-mask (or pro death) protesters marched through London demanding everything be opened up again. They walked passed open pubs, open cafes and restaurants with indoor dining and into an open shopping centre which then had to close because of the disruption they caused (I bet Alanis Morissette didn’t see that one coming).

Cases are rising rapidly despite vaccines, younger people are contracting the virus, there’s another mutation that has been allowed to spread rapidly and again we’re told that more people will die.

Freedom for disabled and chronically ill people looks quite different, the office of national statistics says that 2.2 million clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV) people were advised to shield. This meant not leaving the house at all unless absolutely necessary, many relied on government food boxes or support from local charities and mutual aid groups that sprung up during the pandemic.

People who are CEV especially those who are immunocompromised are getting told to shield, some people haven’t been out since the start of 2020 and the vaccine may not even work for immunocompromised people or those taking immunosuppressants. Since the start of the pandemic there’s been this message that it only affects the elderly and vulnerable, aside from this not being true these people are not disposable because they’re older or disabled but they’ve been throw under a bus and allowed to die in order to give other people their ‘freedom’.

The other other used phrase (apart from wake up sheeple which makes me want to stab someone in the eye) is of you’re scared stay at home and let people who want to live go out. People who are shielding don’t want to have to stay in or have to avoid contact with their partners, they don’t want to go a year without seeing anyone or not getting the medical or social support they needed and they shouldn’t have to stay in forever because others are too selfish to wear a mask or any other minor sacrifices.

July is disability pride month and once again disabled people are being left to die or excluded from society this time to please the people that are tired of the pandemic. We have to learn to live with the virus, let the bodies pile up on the street and pretend to care with gesture politics like clapping because making sure people can go to the football and trade deals with India are more important than saving lives.

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Release

A countdown for the number of days I’ve been self harm free

I was trying to explain to someone recently the conflicting feelings that come into my head around self harm. I want to self harm but really I don’t, I keep thinking how much better it was to have an outlet for the way I feel but really I know that it wouldn’t help, it didn’t help, not really, not properly but that doesn’t stop my mind jumping to it when I’m stressed or anxious or overwhelmed.

I haven’t self harmed in 391 days but I self harmed from the age of 17 to 32 and intermittently before that, it’s not that I want to self harm it’s just that I want to breathe and not feel like I’m suffocating, I want to stop feeling like I’m dragging a weight around with me or wading through custards and when it’s been something I’ve done for so long it’s an immediate thought an ingrained reaction that my mind jumps to when I feel bad.

I’m not naive I know that just because or not self harmed in a long time it doesn’t mean I won’t ever do it again because I can’t say for sure that I know I’ll never self harm again and even now it’s not that I never do anything unhealthy/ potentially harmful or things that could be soon as negative ways of managing things they’re just less destructive and don’t involve me ending up in a&e. The longer time goes on the bigger the stakes, once I was past 6 months I’d beat my previous longest time, then it was 7 months, 9 months and finally a year.

Sometimes people say what can I do to help or make things easier but I don’t always want them to do anything other than listen or try and see things from my position, I know some people are more practical than others and their reaction is to look for a solution but sometimes the solution is just please listen to me and hear what I’m saying when I say how overwhelmed and stressed I feel, how I miss people I was close to, how alone I feel, how the light at the end of the tunnel feels very dim and distant right now that’s what can be done to help.

Sometimes I just want someone to take me down to the carpark and let me cry

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2018 a (brief) review of the year

Some naughty elves decorated the office
A collage of pictures of Christmas decorations in the office

Before the earth makes that turn moving the UK into 2019 I thought I’d do a 2018 roundup post because it’s been a pretty intense year. At Christmas 2017 I said my goal for 2018 was to become permanent staff even if it was still on reduced hours but to have the security of a proper contract not a zero hours one.

The year didn’t get off the best start with my first trip to a&e of the year on the 2nd of January this was also the only visit to a&e all year, just over two weeks after this I started a new medication Lamotragine a mood stabiliser. I’m sure that lamotragine has been the biggest reason that I haven’t self harmed its almost like it’s turned something off in my brain that’s made me not want to self harm anymore.

My main goal for the year came true in May when I became permanent staff and took over running the youth service, in November I passed my 6 month probation so now I’m officially permanent staff running a service, managing volunteers a year after I said I wanted to be permanent.

A picture of a letter confirming that I passed my 6 month probation

I’ve been under the mental health service again this year slowly adjusting my medication and I’ve now come off the antipsychotics, reduced one of the medications I was taking for anxiety and only taking the beta blockers as needed. I’ve gone from taking 5 different medications for my mental health to 3.

For someone who often struggles with change there have been so many this year, changes with my job, and the people I work with, two of the people I was closest with at work both left within a few weeks of each other which has been hard and still hasn’t fully sunk in. The office is definitely quieter and I’m missing my verbal sparring partner, I’ll also the person who will always find something positive in everything who took me outside to the carpark to cry because she knew I wouldn’t want anyone in the office to overhear me.

I’ve also become closer to other people at work including two who started at the same time as me, I’ve been out for various drinks and social events (enough to maybe get a reputation) and I’ve had some lovely feedback and support from my volunteers.

As an incredibly indecisive person who struggles to make a choice when there are too many desserts on the menu I bought myself an early Christmas present and got my first tattoo covering some of my self harm scars something very permanent but positive and I love it so much.

A collage of pictures of my new tattoo a caduceus with the words omnes te moriturum amant above it

So 2019 will be off to a busy start with work but also starting with a huge milestone of a year since the last time I self harmed. Of course my love for a certain tv show about a certain grumpy dr has been in full force in 2018 (is a tattoo taking the fandom too far?) and I’ve spent my time off over Christmas working my way through Sherlock, 2019 is looking like a busy year for my fandoms.

Happy new year or happy January or happy Tuesday whichever suits you

Georgiesaurus ☺️🦖

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Three hundred and sixty five days

Watching me decay

One year ago today I started working on the youth wellbeing service, initially to support the volunteers when they delivered workshops and helping with training while someone else did the main day to day running of the service. One the first day he threw me in at the deep end and got me to rewrite one of the workshops, despite not bringing my armbands I managed to avoid drowning and quickly decided I wanted more than just the odd hours supporting the volunteers partly because I liked the extra money but also because I was starting to want more than the things I was doing.

I guess I was lucky to have a manager that was happy to give me more responsibility and delegate more work to me plus he didn’t have the time to do the amount of work the youth service needed on top of running another service 3 days a week. I loved the things I did as a volunteer but I was starting to get bored and after years of stagnating I didn’t want to get stuck again so the more I was given the more I took.

This arrangement was meant to last a couple of months then until Christmas then April. On the 26th of April I had my interview for the service lead position and on April the 27th I was told I’d got the job.

Today I jumped ship and went to work in one of the other offices with a different team, since starting this job I’ve found it hard to be alone in the office all day so I tend to pop up in other places from time to time, I celebrated in a work appropriate was with a boiled sweet which my current manager laughed at me for when I sent her a text telling her (feeling the love) but I might go wild tonight and have something stronger, maybe a bag of haribo 😜

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Fake it till you make it

Tonight* my brain is spiralling down into doom and failure convincing me that I’m a fraud just waiting to be caught out and that I’ve someone convinced people into believing I’m something I’m not, that people will soon realise this and see right through me and that giving me a job, responsibility and letting me run a service is a mistake. I’ve had the talk about imposter syndrome with someone before, someone I respect who to most people would never appear to feel this way I even bought myself a print of the picture used in this blog to try and convince myself that actually I’m not the imposter I think I am.

The feelings of responsibility and expectation are once again terrifying me, for a long time I’ve believed that if I never try I can’t fail and I can’t screw things up but I’m restless and wasn’t feeling stretched anymore by the things I’ve been doing. I’ve spent a large amount of this evening crying as my thoughts continue to spiral and snowball collecting more and more until it becomes and avalanche (sorry for the naff metaphor) anxiety has been creeping in recently and I’m trying to tell myself that it’s normal to feel some anxiety about a new job.

It doesn’t really matter what people say because my brain won’t listen, I know I’m not the only one that feels this way and I also know that I did well in my interview but facts and emotions don’t mix and the fear is strong. I wanted this job so much and I still do but the loss of security and increased responsibility and the worry of everything going wrong is very much on my mind (and in my dreams).

Today I have my induction with two other new members of staff and I’m hoping that I’ll just be treated like any other member of staff and not have to hear everyone say I know everything and that I’ve been here forever because this is still new to me and there’s a lot I’m going to have to learn.

*I started writing this last night

Image credit to People I Loved screenshoot from Blurt Foundation on instagram

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This indecision’s bugging me

One day I’m going to be sued for my constant use of song lyrics

 

AGM
2015 Georgiesaurus speaking about being a Youth Wellbeing volunteer

Recently things have been relatively OK I’m not saying it’s all wonderful but mentally I’ve been reasonably stable; I’ve had my first medication increase of Lamotragine and it’s hard to know whether it’s helping or not as this is probably the first time I’ve not been in crisis or extremely depressed when changing or adjusting medication, to add to this today I got a letter from the mental health team offering me an appointment in March with the recovery and support team presumably following on from the referral the psychiatrist I saw in December made. Yesterday I saw a friend I haven’t seen in a while and was telling her that I’d stopped going to the group I’d been attending due to it being a toxic and unsupportive environment that made me feel worse not better so with the recent mental stability getting the letter about the mental health appointment has just added another decision the think about, if I’m offered more treatment will it make things worse? Do I want it? Is it suitable or would I be better off considering something else I’ve been looking into?.

Life doesn’t come with a manual, I’m still trying to find out who I can complain to but for now I have to try and work things out myself and try and decide what the right thing to do in certain circumstances or what decisions to make when opportunities come along. One of the problems is that opportunities don’t always come along at the right time and that’s without the complication of not knowing when the right time is. For 7 months I’ve been working and earning on top of my benefits (all legit please don’t report me for benefit fraud) and it’s been the best, most intense, stressful, exhausting and rewarding 7 months, it certainly hasn’t all be smooth sailing with days where I was going solo bobbing up and down desperately trying to stay afloat and times when I was drowning and having 4:30 Friday meltdowns which involved texting my manager and almost quitting.

But 7 months in the grand scheme of things isn’t that long and in a perfect world I’d have more time to prepare and put myself in the best position to take on more not just skills wise but mentally too and feel as stable and secure as I can and ready to take the next step in moving off benefits another struggle here is my chronic illness I cannot manage full time and even if I was in perfect mental health I couldn’t physically cope on full time hours. I feel that so much of my self worth recently has been tied up in this job I’m told a lot how good it is that I’m working and being payed but as much as I’m enjoying having more money it’s more the feeling of being an equal on the same level as staff and things that come with it such as socials or attending the staff away day.

TTD18
2017 Georgiesaurus running a Youth information stand for Time to Talk Day

Sometimes I think I do too good a job at treating my mental health as something separate that I’m almost lulled into a false sense of security that comes with stability when realistically I still have to fight the urge to tell my manager everything I’ve done each day if he’s not in, let him know I’ve uploaded it onto the shared drive and where so he knows I’ve been working, of course I know that not only does he trust me to work alone but he doesn’t want to know every email I’ve sent or every webpage I’ve read for the workshop I’m writing. I’ve had a few relationship anxieties too despite MBT helping me with this it’s hard to explain to someone without mental health issues that people I’ve been close to or very attached to weren’t just people I worked with and that although they have moved on it’s still at times a struggle for me.

Although I’m handling it better I’m still not a fan of change and if anyone knows where I can hand in my resignation of adulthood please let me know until then I’ll be building a pillow fort.

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New year same old Dino

new year
An illustration of a man with a purple background with the words I can’t believe it’s a year since I didn’t become a better person.

Today the perks of being a dinosaur turns one, my little blog is growing up fast *wipes a tear from my eye* it’s also the first blog post of the new year, I don’t really go in for the whole new year new me thing, sure 2018 will bring new experiences and changes just as every day, week, month does no matter where in the year it is and 2017 also brought some big changes with being discharged from all mental health services for the first time in about 8 years, important people no longer in my life, leaving behind toxic environments that were detrimental to my mental health and not staying because it was the only option of support and probably the biggest of all was having my training recognized as not just good but worthy of actual money and being paid for and getting a job closely followed a second one.

None of these things have been without challenges and people who know me well will know I’ve had times where I’ve felt overwhelmed by the changes, I’m now pulling back a bit and slowing things down I’m recognizing that is all new and that I don’t need to try so hard to prove myself. This blog was another new thing for 2017 and it’s still going and people read it which is still a surprise to me, I find writing helpful often during the writing process of creating a blog post it starts to unravel things in my brain a bit and the connections seem to form better even though people say I’m articulate I still find writing easier than speaking though talking and opening up is less of a struggle than it was, I certainly never thought at the beginning of 2017 that I’d not only get on well with someone I’ve only been working with for 6 months but also disclosing things about really difficult points in my life.

When I was writing training at work I wrote long notes almost scripts to go with the slides, when it came to delivering the training I didn’t use the notes as much as I’d anticipated and on some days not at all however writing those detailed notes really helped to get all the information together in my brain from whatever dark and dusty corner it was hiding in and blogging is like that for me. I’m quite a hands on person and enjoy the interaction with volunteers and service users I tend to write these posts on my phone then email it to myself and upload it from my laptop although my hands would prefer it if I used speech to text my brain finds the physical action of writing (or typing better).

So for 2018 I hope to write more, get better at and feel more confident in promoting the blog and sharing it, I want to work on turning myself into a brand and personal development and utilizing my social media better. So happy first birthday blog and thank you to those who’ve been reading since the start and those who’ve joined along the way I hope there are even more people reading this time next year.

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5 years time 

I’ve recently had a couple of meetings looking at my personal and professional development, it’s been refreshing to work with someone who’s never met me before who just sees me for what I am now not what I was 5 years ago, 3 years ago, 6 months ago, sometimes it’s helpful to see how far you’ve come but sometimes it can be hard to move away from that image of me from the past especially as I talk about my lived experiences of mental health problems and how I was in the past in my job.

I’ve never really considered myself to be ambitious partly because I’ve always assumed I’ll fail, something that has been repeatedly instilled in me over the years and left me feeling that ivt’s best not to set goals because if I have no goals I can’t fail. The bar is set so low that it’s almost on the ground there’s no where to fall nothing to achieve or succeed at, no one to see me fail which also means I don’t talk about any ambitions I do have and keep things to myself partly out of fear of failure but also the fear that people will think it’s ridiculous that I even consider having goals in life especially any that may be related to employment or education. 

Being in a position where people expect things of me is scary it’s not something I normally let happen and has at times increased the anxiety and the panic within me yet on the other hand I’ve been pushing for more responsibility feeling restless and wanting more, it’s not that I’m bored but for once I don’t want to settle and I want to move forward and do more, move to a bigger pond and try and find a place in it.

I never want to go back to the nothingness and the isolation but along with the push for more responsibility and more experience is the push to change people’s view of me I may have worked hard to get to the point I’m at now and while it’s still not where I want to be I want people to see me for what I am and what I do now without the comparison to how I used to be.

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Coping admirably

The back of one of my pink smart crutches with a sticker saying coping admirably

*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.

Coping admirably sticker from hand over your fairy cakes

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