One of the factors that helped me recover was seeing a woman with my symptoms on TV explaining how you could overcome a variety of nervous illnesses with a programme called Recovery Inc. I immediately sent away for the books but could not read them until last night. Thankfully they have a website and wonderful online meetings so I learned the tools there. This morning I realised that for many people the training in recovery tools is something they don't need because their parents taught them those techniques as a matter of course as children. My parents did not know them and they did the best they could with what they had. I realised that I can now help my daughters since I have the tools. WOW finally I feel a good enough mother. I never realised I had so much doubt about being a parent but it is great to know no matter how old I get I can still learn and I can evolve.
So today acknowledge your successes, praise yourself and remember everything will be fine if you let it be.
I went for a wander around the shops this evening and came across the quote" live the life you love "
on a wooden heart in Next. I have just finished my weekly counselling session and am now moving to fortnightly sessions, yeah me, so I went for a quick wander around the shops before going home. I was reflecting on how far I have come in the last year. Today I set a meeting with for the 17th of November and it took me a few hours to realise the significance of the date. It was the official first day off work with my episode. Almost a year. I had a meeting with my work mentor, who is now training to be a life coach and I am his guinea pig so to speak. Generally I don't speak about my episode with my colleagues except in a very matter of fact way but today I shared my experience of memory loss with a few people.
My memory has almost fully returned. I have been able to think clearly and analyse data for the first time in ages this week. I really was having a reflective day when I saw the wall art (so named by Next). I keep phrases like that in my diary, they are cliche, but i love kitsch and cliches are my kind of philosophy. One I refer to all the time is:what would I do if I were really in control of my life. I add to it from time to time. so far I have all the usual stuff; work part time, move house, get a bike, play music, dance, save money, get a cleaner. loose weight, be happy. but tonight I added one more, Live the life I love, Love the life I live.
As I walked out of my councellers house into the pitch dark I saw the stars shining intensely. There is a new moon and a clear sky and tonight was the best stray night in ages. I am so happy that I can walk out into the lovely frosty night air and be happy to be alive and to love the life I live. It is around a year since I look down the other way; off the edge of a cliff not so far from there and wondered if I would die or just be injured if I jumped. The incessant worries and panicked thoughts were just spinning around in my brain until they took me over completely to the exclusion of everything else. I thought that my thoughts were reality. My life is not so different now but my attitude is and so is my confidence, self worth and self acceptance. I also know that my feeling are not reality, feelings are not facts as they say in recovery training and much of life is just trivialities. So much of how we feel is due to how we perceive things.
I never understood just how much we do create our own reality until I look a little step away from it, well maybe a medium sized step. Now instead of worrying if I am living up to other peoples standards I set my own. I have learned what it is to be average, and very nice it is too, I have learned how to listen and how to express myself. All in all I am giving myself a very well deserved pat on the back. We only get one life ( depending on you philosophy or religious views) we might as well decide to be happy as be miserable.
So give your self a pat on the back for just being you and love the life you live.
Today is one of those beautiful late autumn days. There was a fabulous sunset and the tide was so high it started to flood the road. This brings with it the most wonderful fresh air and smell of the sea. I finally got to go for a nice stroll along the sea shore tonight for the first time in a week. There is a new moon and it is a good time to renew and being.
I have been thinking about beginnings for the last few weeks. I got the opportunity to fully evaluate myself and my existence during my episode. Mostly I came to realise the importance of the small and beautiful things that were around me and how I loved nature, my family, and myself. My return to work made me realise that I love that too but perhaps I need to learn to balance things. As a mother I am learning more about my role and the fact that children, no matter what their age, need a mothers guidance through life. Part of my job as a mother is to help my children make sense of the world, not easy if you cant make sense of it yourself. This is perhaps the reason that I get such joy from the simple things now. I have given myself permission to be myself. Somehow I think I am entering another stage in my development as a person. So this week we have lived on pizza and thats ok as it was more important for me to de-stress and stay well than to be stressed trying to cook proper dinners. I have yet to order oil because the door to the back garden is stuck and needs to be fixed and that is ok because we can light a lovely fire and stay warm. The things that are important to me right now is that we made it through last week as a family unit, both daughters had medical appointments and we had a family event. We survived it all and even had some fun. Life is all about balance and this new beginning for me is not about trying to balance on a tight rope way up in the sky but to balance with my two feet firmly on the ground. Finally I am beginning to accept that life has ups and downs and balance is all about returning to a state of equilibrium when we get too far out of kilter.
It is never too late to begin again, whether it is a diet, a career, a family, a hobby - whatever you want. We can always start again and learn to balance by taking those wobbly but determined baby steps.
I am fortunate to have a lovely job (well most of the time). There are some very good bits to my job and one of them is that I get to wander off around the county and while doing that I get to see lots of places and meet people with interesting stories. I was on a bit of a fact finding mission today and ended up at the end of a pier, it was hard to describe the unreal odour that greeted us. I looked over the edge to see where it was coming from and saw many parts of fish, but very strangely the huge grinning heads of many monkfish. Weirdly enough the pictures do not adequately capture the eerie creepy look of the disembodied heads of a monkfish which I decided to photograph as the eerie photo for this months scavenger hunt. The local fishermen use fish offal for bait for the lobsterpots but clearly lobsters are not attracted by large grinning disembodied heads. I have included the view to the left of the pier for balance.
not so sure why he is grinning
The view towards ferry point waterford
I am sure I will find something eerier during the course of the month perhaps this is just too gruesome for inclusion in the final one. Looking at monkfish and other weird and wonderful things in the english market in cork was a very cheap day out for my eldest daughter when she was young, and when the Queen visited Cork last May she was just as entertained by the wonderful Pat O' Connell in the English market .
I suppose today's words of wisdom are look over the edge, you never know what you will find.
I have been mostly feeling abandonment over the last week. Today I made a major connection with my feelings of abandonment, I had no clue of course as usual where this is comming from, until I heard this song on the radio. Revival struck a chord with me. We all experience loss in out lives. When I was very young my father lost a close member of his family. I was in awe of Eddie a little as he told hilarious stories. He was an archelogist who embroidered his tales of how he discovered many things, including the elk in the local museum. I never realised that I also experienced the loss too until today. Something was missing in my life as a result of his passing. Since I have been searcing for the cause of my feeling of abandonment loads of losses came up for me, my father , my grandfather , my aunt, my cousin, and my toy duck. As a child I lost my toy duck and eventually found out that my mother gave it away in a big clearout of toys, That was strange as she never realised how much I loved it. I suppose it is more a sense of incompleteness rather than loss. Something missing in my life. Recently I was identifying with stories of people realeaseing losses from childhood when much older adults. My grandfather, my dads favourite cousin and my duck were all lost around the same time. When we loose things it is only natural that we search for them. Maybe it is when we accept that they are gone that we can move on.
I have also been feeling that awful post shock weakness recently. I have been looking at ways of reviving myself, nothing seemed to be working until last night. I realised that one of my sofas was never used and puzzeled over this for a while. I decided thast it was because it was too high. So I decided to saw an inch off the legs, the children were out, my visitor was gone and I was alone to saw away to my hearts content. While doing this one of my daughters friends walked in looking for her, and saw me sawing the legs off the upturned sofa. I got a fit of the giggles as I realised how odd I looked. The sofa legs are a bit crooked but the sentiment was correct almost comfy sofa now. This morning I realised that what revives me is being myself, accepting that I matter and that even young children feel loss, as I did.
Just as we loose others and things so too do we loose ourselves. We become ghosts of our dreams and ambitions wraiths, insubstantial beings, drudges and depressed because we loose ourselves. For a few weeks I was trying to fit into the mold again of the woman who does not cry at funerals (my mothers belief that showing emotion in public is undignified), the child who does not ask akward questions or any questions( my teachers belief that I must not question the priests opinions as he is an important man whose views should not be questioned) , the child who is seem and not heard, the engineer who is expected to do six months work in six weeks because she always tries to do the impossible, the mother who is expected not to react to her teenage daughters behavior( good advise but emotioanlly draining) , the friend who asserts her own needs,For once putting myself first with someone who expects me to put way down on the list of priorities ) and the mother who needs is expected to be like other mothers and act less weird.
Its small wonder I need reviving.
The dictionary tells me that revive means to live again. So often we loose ourselves and go through the motions. It is so important for our well-being that we take heed of this behavior and remember that we are the most important people in our lives. Our life is a gift for us to enjoy and perhaps it is time for me to take my own advice and live my life for me.
I am off to paint the pourch instead of doing the washing because I know that it will help revive me.
Happy Monday, so off you go today and do some fun thing that will remind you how much fun there is to be had in the world.
This morning I was getting the familiar feeling of fluffiness and confusion that follows or precedes a difficult time. I am learning to be aware of myself and my environment and this seems to be what I need to work on right now. This song has been roaming around in my head for days, I have also been noticing lots of very very old people, probably as there was a bowling green opened at the park and it seems to be a place where lots of older people go. I have been thinking about the fact that one day I will be old.
My granny used to talk about getting old alot, it usually was preceded by , when I am old I will.....
Thing is she was 96 when she said to me one day: I am thinking I might be getting old now. For her old age was something way off in the future right up util she was in fact extremely old. and then I logged in to check emails, blogs etc and found a wonderful post by annette on her blog about : What will matter http://petuniapill.blogspot.com/
It summed up what I had been thinking about. My daughter is having her own teenage existential crisis and has been asking all the why are we here questions. My conclusion on my own crisis is that we are here now, why we are here I don't know and will never be able to work that out, but while I am here I might as well take the waltz and enjoy it, instead of dreaming endlessly of the perfect tango.
Decided to load up a few photos for the next scavenger hunt as I had a quite moment while the children are baking and the homework done before I got home.
Golden: I was just driving to work after dropping the kids and decided to go down around the harbour to look at the boats on the way. I was amazed to see this wonderful golden glow over the water. I just had to stop to take a picture.
a river: almost unseen the river is nestling in grass in Annestown.
I am cheating a little here as I found this in September but I love it so much I thought I would post it just in case I did not get back to take a photo in October. I was starting to depress so I decided to go for a walk. I brought my camera but I really did not notice anything to photograph. I decided to just walk out to the end of the beach as I saw a guillemot drying his wings and I wanted to see what it was like there. The tide was incredibly low and so I traipsed through the mud and then I spotted the graffiti, you just gotta love it. :-)
fog/mist: All along the copper coast the mist was think and the countryside was so grey, ewwwww.
sunset: The only fine evening in about two weeks I turned about to look at the wagtail on the lighting column and there was the sunset just about to happen. Lovely.
While listening to the radio this morning I heard that one of our presidential candidates music would not be played while the election was going on. So I decided to find some stuff that I think sums up each candidate for me and upload it here and on my facebook. I would love to have a lengthy political rant but this blog is not about my political views it is about finding ways to be well and create n easy life for myself and my family. so instead I will express myself though video clips which sun up each one for me. Hopefully this will help quell my desire to deface some of the candidates posters:-) So soon I can go back to thinking about lovely things like walking the bunny, replanting the window boxes and doing a nice clay project with the children to night while sitting in a lovely tidy hose with some nice cookies to snack on in front of a lovley warm fire.
If there was no war would we have needed the peace process he is so proud of ?
Another Derry person was doing this instead.
i love the michaels , yeah mario
I love this but cannot reconcile this with so much of his other views , wish I could understand why he belives consent is more important than age, while being so enlightened in other ways.
and yet .......
and again entertaininment......used to love this during the popes visit
and the grey man in the blue shirt............
who cannot comprehend violence, pity I am not more right wing
Sovereignty erosion V special Olympics
I love sean on dragons den , a self admitted spa and culchie , but only just jumped off the sinking fianna fail ship , pity i am not more right wing I might give him one of my transfers
would be nice to have a real culchie in the arus , pity i am not more right wing
and let me finish with this one :
Not only do I love poetry, I love freedom, clarity, consistency and Michael Ds lovely gentle voice and gentle personality. Consummate politician, and sooo huggable.
I love blogging when cranky, the challenge is to get to the point where thinking in ink makes me happy, so I am off to think of a lovely president who is a cute as a teddy bear and not one who belives that it was ever justifiable to kill people, I can leave the house without my spray paint in the hope that others share my views of a happy life for all citizens.
So off you go today and examine the stuff that makes your blood boil and ask yourself what makes me calm instead. I can take another view, I can shoose what information I expose myself to. I create my own reality and mine is one filled with poetry and love. What is your ideal one?
