The trouble with rapid weight gain is there’s no time to let your wardrobe adjust – one day everything fits and the next day nothing fits. Well – there’s perhaps a three-month passage of time but still, slowly morphing your wardrobe into something three sizes bigger should take time. It didn’t. Due to medication, I ballooned fast and today I had to finally accept I couldn’t squeeze my sorry ass into any of my clothes anymore.
Today I watched the film Embrace again. It should be compulsory viewing and reminded me that if I can’t love the body I’m in right now, I won’t love the body I dream of having. The perfect body is a perfect lie.
The scarecrow wanted a brain. The tin man a heart. And the lion – well he lacked courage. If your brain malfunctions, […]
How are you, is so common our responses are automated. That’s fine for chit chat with the checkout chick, but when you’re with your nearest and dearest, when you have big emotions you’d love to share (or would benefit from sharing), it’s not helpful to reply with a conditioned, I’m fine. But what other options are there? Are you okay? is becoming popular, but it’s still not enough.
Over the weekend, I contacted a number of friends asking how they felt when they found out about my overdose. While sometimes the truth hurts, I’m so very grateful for their honesty.
A lot can happen in two weeks. You can lose everything, as so many people around the world are now discovering. You can become isolated, locked away, afraid and no longer in control of your life.
Bipolar II is… my diagnosis. Not my choice. Bipolar II is characterised by Dr Jim Phelps as “mood swings but not manic”.
Navigating a lifetime of depression is like being an avid bushwalker and mountain climber. For years on end the scenery is stunning, the flora and fauna breathtaking and the hard yards well rewarded. For short periods of time steep, rocky, unnavigable mountains appear that seem interminable and impossible to navigate. Clambering over invisible rocks always happens in the dark and every inch of your body screams, No! I can’t do it any more! There are people at the summit cheering, saying, Come on – not far now! You know there are people below struggling on the same mountain, or back in the safety of the pretty woods. But on that dark mountain, you’re alone, lost in that sense of hopelessness – completely reliant on voices from afar – and the squabble between the angels on your shoulders.
Highly sensitive people are often empathic and empaths often feel other people’s emotions radiating out like a solar flare. No amount of 50+ sunscreen can shield the soft flesh from the onslaught of heat – so we absorb it. Which is fine, because not all emotions are dreary. Joy, hope and excitement wash through me in the same way as grief, fear and despair. Trouble is – I don’t let it go. I spend more time grieving and despairing for someone else’s woes than they do. I’m more invested in other people’s problems than they are. This seems like an inappropriate boundary – not to mention, an excuse to stop dealing with my issues.
“We belong to what we value, not what we desire.” A cool guy I know. I love that statement – it really resonates with me. I spend time and energy, make commitments and secret pacts, with the things I value. Not with the things I desire.
This is my cat. Isn’t he lovely? He spends most of his days soaking up the suns’ rays, looking content, waiting to […]
I’m the girl in limbo who lost who she was and doesn’t know what comes next. In the meantime, the grocery bill has significantly decreased at the expense of my sanity and my husband’s peace of mind.
It takes six little words feeding the eating disorder voice, to override a year of conversations nurturing the timid voice of recovery.
It takes very little time in the world of mental health treatments, before acronyms and mnemonics become everyday language. Psychiatric therapies have come a long way from the induced seizures, exorcisms and lobotomies of the past. Today there are countless methods of treatment – pharmacological, behavioural, community, and medical. Psychiatrists tend to be the big boss of drugs and medical treatments like ECT or TMS, while psychologists tend to deliver the behavioural and community therapies. And they love their acronyms. For anyone out there that hasn’t been blessed with the opportunity of gracing the couches and uncomfortable plastic chairs of therapy groups, I thought I’d share a summary of my experience of the ABCDs of therapy.
I don’t know where it comes from as I listened to it prattling away for half a century and it’s only recently I noticed another voice hidden in the background.
