Tag: loss

‘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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Bee for bee 🐝

In my last post I talked and Juliette and what a caring, fun, creative, loving, colourful person she was, when she died I said I’d get a bee tattoo not a worker bee I wasn’t looking to copy her but a bumble bee to remind me of her and our friendship which started from matching underwear, a reminder of the memes and pictures of bees with fuzzy butts we used share. On Monday I got my tattoo of my own fuzzy butt bumble bee with a purple watercolour background to match Juliette’s hair. I know she’d approve of this

A bumble bee tattoo on my wrist with a purple watercolour style background

Photo (and tattoo) by Sandro at Sacred Gold tattoo and piercing

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Suicide is pants

Long time no blog.

This post is about suicide though there is no mention of methods.

A bee on pink flowers at the station on the day of Juliette’s funeral

I’ve been wanting to write this for 6 months but it was too hard. A potentially creepy comment about owning the same underwear on a drunken toilet selfie did not get my blocked but instead was the start of our friendship. We met through an internet mental health “community” and there were many eye rolls about such places and some of the people in them (though we were aware that we were far from perfect ourselves).

I soon found that Juliette had a wicked sense of humour, she was attractive and creative and had various different hair colours in the time I knew her. She loved animals and owned four gorgeous rats, she had an accidental memorial leg of tattoos for people in life who’d died. Despite her intolerance to bullshit (and lactose) she was loyal and supportive to those she cared about. Hummus memes were frequently shared and still pop up on my Facebook notifications, some of the jokes we shared were truly terrible.

Living in Manchester she got a worker bee tattoo with ‘don’t look back in anger’ going around it after the Manchester bombing and bees became her ‘thing’ online. A gif of a cat dressed up at a bee (creatively dubbed beecat) falling slowly off a sofa became a of conveying frustration/ crap day/ crap mental health and often summed up how we felt, her mandala cat tattoo was also dubbed beecat.

We had a group chat with three of us in it which was 90% complaining about life, mental health and the internet and the rest was probably random memes and beecat gifs.

I knew Juliette had attempted suicide previously but part of you doesn’t want to accept that it could happen and when it did I didn’t want it to be real. It felt like someone had punched me in the chest; a feeling that’s come and gone for the last 6 months, I cried for hours and have cried for many more since.

Her funeral especially broke me, when many of the person who cared about her had mental health issues and were scattered around not only the country but also the world only a few of us were able to go but a request for people to change their profile pictures to bees spread and on the day of her funeral my social media was full of different types of bees. I’ve never been to a funeral full of people wearing cat ears before but as soon as we arrived we knew it was the right place.

People talk about grief and stages as if it’s linear and as if it doesn’t come out of nowhere and punch you in the stomach, it’s not that simple or straightforward. Oasis makes me cry, pictures of furry bumblebee butts hanging out of flowers make me smile and part of me still expects her to be online, sometimes I’ll make a really inappropriate joke and I know she’d have laughed and we’d both joke that we were the worst. I thought the 6 month anniversary of her death yesterday would be hard but instead I was caught out on Friday crying for several hours (the ugly snotty puffy face version).

Tomorrow I’m going for a consultation for a bee tattoo so I’ll always have a reminder of our friendship.

I miss you

Beecat loves you x

Helplines aren’t a replacement for proper mental health care but if you’re in distress and need someone to talk to you can contact the Samaritans or if you’re under 35 Papyrus. Text support is available from Shout.

If you’ve been bereaved by suicide SOBS can give you support and advice

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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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Stranger than fiction

I didn't have a picture of a tightrope, the treetop walk at Kew is the closest thing.
A large metal walk way amongst the treetops at Kew Gardens

I’m not a fiction writer, not that I consider myself a writer as such I enjoy blogging and writing workshops and training but I can’t write stories. I admire people who can write fiction, recently I’ve been reading quite a lot of fan fiction, now I know the reputation a lot of fanfic has and the sort of images it brings up in a lot of people’s minds – badly written sec stories often with interesting pairings and while there is plenty of that it’s not what I read.

I read a description recently where a character was described as “walking a tightrope across a canyon of pain, trying to keep his balance, occasionally swaying slightly“ although this was a metaphor for physical pain I think it’s also very accurate for mental health and the balancing act of trying not to over balance from one problem or another and stay on course. I’m struggling with anxiety and low motivation and the 8 -10 week wait for another CMHT appointment has now been 15 weeks with no appointment in sight.

My tightrope is currently swinging between work and benefits with a chasm of fuck knows what beneath me too deep to see the bottom but with nothing good down there.

I’m behind with work and struggling to talk to anyone about it, I’m frustrated at myself and I’ve come to such a roadblock with this that it’s making me feel stupid which is why I’m struggling to ask for help or admit that I’m having a complete mental block, I’ve always struggled to ask for help with things I don’t understand for fear of looking stupid (or being told I’m stupid). Other issues at work currently stressing me out are things beyond my control such as not enough volunteers and having to rush training new ones and now someone close to me is leaving. Have a mentioned before that I struggle with change? Especially changes with relationships? The last couple of weeks have been an emotional shit storm from hiding in the toilets crying because I’m actually devastated that they’re leaving to losing my temper and shouting at them due to a build up of stress and frustration.

On the other side the benefits and money stress which is something that doesn’t just impact on me, my tax credits have been stopped in what I can only see as an hmrc cock up which has also had a knock on effect in stopping my housing benefit and having to repay the council what they’ve paid so far, I recently had to reapply for my PIP/ disability benefits and still haven’t heard back from that, the scary thing about this is if I lose it completely I won’t be eligible anymore for tax credits and my boyfriend will lose the carers allowance he gets for supporting me.

As I can’t currently see an end to the tightrope I just have to hope I can keep my balance and not fall over the edge like the character the quote was about.

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There’s nothing more to it, I just get through it

My motivational coaster at work

My motivational coaster at work
A brightly coloured coaster saying punch today in the face

I’m struggling. As a mental health blogger you’d think that would be easier to say than it is, it’s probably a combination of reducing my Quetiapine, a new job and being utterly exhausted but either way I’m not feeling great. I admitted I was struggling at work yesterday and told my manager that I spent last Friday crying at my desk because I felt so isolated being alone all day, i probably work in the most understanding organisation for someone with mental health problems and despite a fuckton of therapy I still find it hard to admit that and ask for help.

I don’t feel that I’m hard on myself I just think I should be able to manage though of course my brain is now telling me this was all a mistake and that I knew I’d fuck everything up it was inevitable that I wouldn’t be able to cope blah blah blah. It’s one thing when these thoughts are conscious because then I have some control over it but this is like a running commentary in the back of my mind it’s not me deliberately putting myself down but it won’t stop and I don’t know what to do to shut it up. I’m still working out boundaries and what is the right amount to share with people, I feel like I overshared yesterday to someone who isn’t my manage who doesn’t need to deal with my mental breakdowns and now I simultaneously want to crawl into a hole and die and also apologise repeatedly (not sure if this is a mental health issue or just being English).

I do have targets to meet I do have things I need to do and achieve but I’m not under pressure these are things I have a year to do and everyone keeps reminding me it’s only been three weeks so it’s not that. I have a psychiatrist appointment in just over a week and I’m hoping things have levelled out a bit by then, if I’d known it would take several years to come off this medication I might have thought twice about taking it though not everyone has such difficulty with medication adjustments so how would I even know this would be so hard.

Attachment issues are naturally coming out to play because I feel low and I want to cry constantly (which is actually really unlike me) so once again having thought I was feeling ok about someone I suddenly miss them again.

This was disjointed rambling but I wanted to actually start and finish a blog in one go rather then going back and making sure it was post worthy because my head is disjointed rambling right now and I need somewhere to dump it all, I guess one positive is I have no desire to self harm and I’m still over 5 months free.

I just keep on keeping on

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Ghosts of attachment past

PP hug tight
A rabbit hugging a hedgehog with the words “one day, someone is going to hug you so tight, all your broken pieces will go right back together” by paper panda

I was reading Amy’s mystery illness which prompted me to write this. A favorite person when you have a mental health problem like BPD isn’t always a friend, don’t get me wrong my best friend is the person I talk to daily, see as often as possible, share everything with (yes everything) she’s even been dubbed my wife but in the context of BPD and attachment she’s not my favorite person.

I know I’ve talked about attachment before and it’s likely I’ll talk about it again, it’s something I struggle with, being self aware isn’t enough to break the pattern it’s one thing knowing I have a type and knowing I get attached to certain people (mainly older women often those in the care profession) it’s another thing knowing how to manage those feelings especially when relationships end.

In MBT they encourage you to check things out to test your perceptions with reality, the black and white thinking that comes with BPD and the certainty that the way you think and feel is accurate often isn’t but the problem is sometimes it isn’t possible to check things out and test the feelings which leaves you questioning reality. There are 4 people in particular that I’ve had these strong attachments with, all of them were professionals and all of them left (I want to say left me even though I know that’s not true).

Building new relationships is hard it feels like a betrayal to get attached to someone else it’s also a challenge when dynamics and boundaries change and figuring out new relationships with different people especially people who aren’t my “type” it’s both refreshing and confusing. Changes in my life can be hard to when they affect relationships when moving from a volunteer to staff it changes the relationships with people around me.

People leaving is always hard and loss is painful but the difficulty I find is being left with questions or wondering whether they even cared at all, I don’t want to play the BPD or mental health card but it’s hard when you struggle with attachment issues and you feel led on that someone promised you something and made you feel as though you mattered but didn’t actually as ad they said they would. As I don’t know who reads this blog I am being intentionally vague here but the attachment to a favourite person someone you’ve relied on and told some of the most personal things about you and your life is to me something far more intense than a friendship even with someone close who is trusted completely where there is no risk in disclosing personal information. The loss is still there the right feeling in my chest, wishing for contact now joined but anger and frustration, I don’t want to miss them but I do.

One of my former favourite people a mental health professional said things that left me feel completely invalided and life my issues were insignificant, had it been someone else it may have been unpleasant but due to the relationship we’d had I felt as if I was losing my mind, again questioning whether they’d ever cared, I was angry and hurt and resented others for the reaction they got from this person. Leaving the service they work in and no longer attending the place I saw her has helped to an extent.

This post has been a bit disjointed and I’m not quite sure how to end it, It’s still hard to talk about attachment and feels very cliched to be attached to these older women, the mother figures, I find it embarrassing though writing it is less uncomfortable than saying it verbally. I hope that the more I talk about it or write about it the easier it will become and the less shame I feel and that in reading my posts other might feel less ashamed by their struggles too, writing about uncomfortable topics is a way of challenging myself and being open and vulnerable it’s also something very relevant at the moment struggling with letting my guard down and opening up, it would be nice if in time it wasn’t so hard to talk about and my attachments become less intense.

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In search of validation 

Cardboard letters B P and D painted black with splatters of colour across them

I rarely feel pleased with myself for the things I’ve done, I get pleasure from the work I do and feel proud of the things that have been achieved but I don’t feel proud of myself. I’m not writing this because I want compliments or want people to tell me I’m great I struggle with praise and don’t know how to respond to it, criticism or negative comments are more familiar to me.

I mentioned in a previous post that I have a type, the same type of person I get attached to, there have been a few notable ones. There’s an obvious pattern it’s something I’m very aware of and even embarrassed by I’m 32 I shouldn’t be looking for a replacement mother, I know I’m not alone but it’s still hard to talk about, just writing this makes me feel ashamed.
I don’t have any contact with my family, I haven’t spoken to my mother in over two years and even when I did she wouldn’t be someone I’d go to if I wanted validation or praise so I look to other people to be proud of me even though I don’t feel it myself. I know everyone is different and I’m often told I’m hard on myself but I don’t see it, to me I’m so far behind my peers and where I should be by now. I have a tendency to separate my life into different boxes and present different sides of myself to different people, at work I want to be seen for being capable and functioning I’ve found it hard to show the parts that don’t function well as if I’m different people when I’m at home, capable by day self destructive by night.

Recently two of the people I looked to for praise or validation, the people I wanted to be proud of me and see me achieve things have gone from my life and aside from feeling that a large part of my support system has gone I don’t have those people I wanted to be proud of me and I’ve gone back to separating myself. I know the obvious answer would be to feel pride in myself and not look to others to feel validated but I’ve never felt good enough or that I’ve achieved anything and the behaviour patterns and attachment issues are hard to break and just move on from. 

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Time to Talk Day 2017

ttd2

It’s time to talk it’s time to change. Today is Time to Talk Day an annual mental health awareness day as part of the Time to Change campaign encouraging people to have conversations about mental health. Talking about my mental health isn’t exactly something I really need encouraging to do, most of the work I do with volunteering for a mental health charity involves using my lived experience whether it’s running peer support groups for adults, youth wellbeing sessions for young people or co-delivering mental health awareness training I’ve spent the past four years talking about myself.

Today I’m writing about something more personal and less general than my overall mental health, I’ve written about my diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and one of the most difficult parts of having BPD is forming healthy relationships. Without going into the details of how and why this is such a problem early childhood experiences are usually one of the causes of BPD and shape future attachments and how we view people. Some people have described BPD as the emotional equivalent of having third degree burns, for people who know me well and know how cynical I am it’ll be no surprise to know that I hate that comparison it is true though that intense emotions and mood swings are certainly an issue and when it comes to relationships and attachment this can be a factor in the way someone with BPD views others.

For me that attachment is often transferred onto people who can’t be what I want or people I can’t have the type of relationship I want with. I guess I almost have a type and it’s always the same kind of people I get attached to, it’s something I find hard to admit to that I find embarrassing to talk about but this is Time to Talk Day so I’m going to talk about it. Inevitably people leave, they move on, find new jobs or retire it happens when the people you get attached to are mental health professionals or employers, people with their own lives and careers. That doesn’t stop it hurting, loss and endings are something I struggle a lot with. There are three people who have been there over the past few years the last five years in particular, two of them were my care coordinators/ individual therapists one left a couple of years ago and one retired in September.

The third is an employer who leaves in two weeks but she’s not just my manager she’s seen me from almost the day I started as a service user who barely spoke to anyone (oh how times change), when I started my training as a peer volunteer to now harassing anyone that will listen to let me have a few minutes to speak at events, she’s not only been a good project manager but supportive when I’ve been struggling or in crisis; on several occasions she’s stayed past her working hours to talk to me when I’ve felt unsafe of wanting to self harm. I’ve cried a few times and no doubt will a few more, it’s painful as endings often are especially when combined with mental health problems but the biggest thing I gained from 2 years of intensive treatment for BPD was being able to talk more about how I feel and today feels like a very fitting time to open up about something difficult and hopefully in time feel less shame around my feelings.

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