Broken hearts have been around since mankind first walked out of the primordial slump. But for all the long and painful history of heartbreaks, there is still no tried and tested formula for navigating something that is so deeply personal and individual for every person.
Read MoreDepending on which of the nine different eating disorders is the primary issue, we may have to eat more or less food, more or less frequently, or different food altogether. But as food is an essential survival tool, at the end of the day, we have to eat.
Read MoreToday my friend, I want to talk about grief. This is a hard story to write but let me start at the beginning.
Read MoreJanuary 28 will forever be a memorable day in my life. It is the day my mother was born. And it is the day my father died.
Read MoreFor much of my life, I was driven and busy and energetic and doing shit all the time. I didn’t sleep. I ate a lot. All my spare time filled up with mothering or wifeing or friending or working or volunteering. It was a fairly typical life for someone in their thirties and forties. Then I imploded and everything changed.
Read MoreOver the weeks and months and years of my healing journey, I have heard the word ‘boundaries’ whispered in my ear countless times. Although, sometimes it’s less of a whisper and more of a fish wife’s guttural screech, echoing around the chambers of my people-pleasing brain.
Read MoreI take up space in this world and I don’t like it. I am wired to the core of my being to […]
Read MoreI did a hard thing. Well… It was hard for me. Perhaps you would find it easy. Or impossible. Perhaps like me […]
Read MoreWell a wedding is one thing, but discovering a little piece of Indonesia that rarely sees foreigners is a whole other exciting […]
Read MoreI am so proud, excited and overwhelmed to share the story of my son’s marriage with you. It has been an exciting […]
Read MoreI have made it abundantly clear since I started sharing my story with you, that I have an eating disorder. Or should I say, I had an eating disorder. I have been pursuing recovery since I first graced the doorstep of my psychologist in 2015 and I can say with absolute certainty that I have reached a very happy place when it comes to my relationship with food.
Read MoreMy house was spotless when I was growing up. I can take no credit for this – my mother was a meticulous […]
Read MoreMy house flooded. It’s a bit of a bummer really. And caused a lot of angst and stress. We’re fortunate in many (most) ways – floors are ruined but no structural damage, and we have good insurance to cover most of the repairs. But getting flooded is a pain in the arse. Aside from extra expenses insurance doesn’t cover, it’s a week of packing up the house to store in the shed, and several weeks of living without floor coverings while listening to the gentle roar of three industrial fans. It’s also forced us into unplanned, premature, costly renovations. I know in six months time this will all be history and I’ll have lovely new floors and plaster work, but right now, the stress has got to me and my recovery journey is not solid enough to avert relapse. So relapse I have.
When the word addiction is bandied around, images that come to mind frequently involve drugs and alcohol. But addiction has as many varieties as there are addicts, and the compulsion is a symptom not a cause. What it’s a symptom of, varies for individuals, but we’re all numbing something.
There are lots of reasons women – and men – might experience anorgasmia. I’m only going to talk about one – because it’s the one that affects me. Medication. Specifically, SNRI anti-depressant medication. All medication has an effect – that’s why we prefer prescriptions to placebos. Side effects are unwanted consequences of medication and when we treat conditions pharmacologically, we weigh the pros and cons of our options. I’ve been on my current anti-depressant two years. At the lowest dose I struggled with orgasm, and at my current dose it is an impossibility.
It’s the day after a migraine. Yesterday was the worst in a very long time. It was once suggested I “write into” a migraine – stop whatever I’m doing and write about how I feel. I assume that person never had a migraine – writing is the last thing on earth I do when my eyes can barely open. Usually I take medication when I feel a migraine coming on, then a few hours later I’m spacey but pain free. Not so this time.
I challenge anyone not to collapse to some degree under all the stress I experienced. The grief and trauma of losing my mother and sister, as well as my grandfather, both my in-laws and a handful of aunts and cousins – eight deaths in six years. Dealing with my teenage son running off the rails and looking dangerously ill, and taking in my adult nephew with all his issues after losing his mother. Our marriage in utter turmoil. My grandmother’s decreasing health and cognition requiring constant care and demands from me. Ending over three decades of performing and teaching music. Losing my identity as my children left home, my career was gone, and my youth was a distant past. It was a lot to deal with.
Over the past three years my mental state has varied in its’ health. After completely breaking apart, I have just been slowly – ever so slowly – getting better. It’s not a straight line – sometimes I went backwards – but if I look back at the overall trajectory, I can see I am a long way from where I was three years ago.
It’s easy to know when your body needs food – physical cues are given out. We all know what they are (even when some of use choose to ignore those cues), and we know drinking a glass of water doesn’t make them go away. So feeding physical hunger is easy. And yet I do not stand alone when it comes to yearning for food regardless of physical hunger.
Whatever our individual faith and beliefs may be, we all have an inner spirit. That little voice of wisdom and love that talks to us. No matter how many ugly voices are talking in our heads, there is always a little voice countering the ugliness. Sometimes the destructive voices are so overpowering it’s impossible to hear – but it’s always there.
And according to Susan David, we need to consider emotions in the same light. Not adorable – but as neither good nor bad. They are just emotions – all valid and no qualitative labels required. Apparently most of us are expert at either brooding or bottling our emotions, and we live in a world full of forced positivity where, “being positive has become a new form of moral correctness”.
Every day – every moment – of my life, I change and transform one way or another. My body constantly regenerates – most of it anyway. Some cells every few days, some every few years. And a few important cells in the brain we apparently need to treat carefully as they’re just one-timers. But overall, my body has been changing and transforming since that winning sperm first introduced itself to a welcoming ovum more than 52 years ago.
I am still struggling with high levels of anxiety and resorting to moments of scratching at my hands – but it isn’t escalating. I have an appointment with my new psychiatrist tomorrow and managing the anxiety is going to be top of our chat list. I’m still on clonazepam and I’d like to be off it and find a longer term solution. I feel the improvements in my eating regime have contributed to my sense of fragility and vulnerability – escalating my anxiety.
It’s been a wild ride. My last two days at the clinic were focused on discussing healthy ways of managing my out of control anxiety issues. I had one day of leave cancelled altogether (Sunday) as I couldn’t be trusted not to harm myself. I didn’t even trust myself. The next day was escorted leave and Tuesday – my final day as it turned out – back to full unescorted pre-discharge phase.
Forty three days down. Nine to go. I am ready – but glad to have these last nine days to consolidate what I’ve learned, set up support at home, invent a new life for myself, and gain the confidence to know it’s not only possible for me to recover – or even probable – but I have to believe I will recover.
g things I have to share. And it’s not because I only focus on the negative – I promise! It’s because life in the clinic is fairly routine and dull, and unless I’m having some kind of emotional crisis, there’s nothing to share. And today I’ve had no emotional crisis. I have in fact had a great (but slightly dull) day.
Today’s psychology task – write two letters. One from my body to me. One from me to my body. Here goes:
