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Tag: childhood

COMING HOME

I’ve known a lot of homes. An endless cascade of houses where I lay my head and unpacked my bags. A dozen educational institutions where a seat was mine and mine alone, and I found a place to feel belonging and purpose. Friends where no amount of time and distance have separated us, and despite the years in between, a phone call picks up where the last conversation left off. And I’ve found home in my husband and children, when all my world crumbled, grief stumbled in, joy and excitement were too big to contain, they’ve been the place to sit and share and hold me.

THE EMOTIONAL TRUTH

The universal human need to be needed. The basic human rights of love, care and acceptance. The intimacy of belonging to community. These are the emotional truths I wish to explore. How my needs, rights and sense of belonging have, and have not, been met. The consequences to me, and to everyone I connect with, from my lack of self-love.

FORGIVEN

There are many people in my world who have wronged me. No more than anyone else – we all deal with irritating twats, ignorant loudmouths, and just plain rude arseholes. Forgiving the sins – big and small – of others, is a powerful tool that benefits the forgiver more than than the forgiven. At the end of the day, most irritating, ignorant, arseholes are probably blissfully unaware of their foot-in-mouth disease.

THE GIRL I USED TO BE

Decades of maladaptive coping mechanisms crashed down around my ears, and the words severe depression and chronic anxiety were bandied about – in relation to me. I was in the depths of self-induced starvation, self-harming, highly suicidal, too depressed to function, and suffering the physical misery of high anxiety – pounding heart, shaking hands, internal catastrophising, panic attacks. I’d become one of “those people”.

TRANSFORMATION

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.

WEEK THREE

I’ve spent a lifetime as a highly anxious person pretending it wasn’t so and secretly not coping. Nobody knew. I hid it. Very well. Now I don’t want to. I want to accept and manage it instead. It won’t solve all my problems but it will be a good start. I have no idea how to manage it…

VISIONARY

I am a master procrastinator. Yes. It’s true. When I want to do something, or necessity dictates I have to get off my butt right now, I’m an amazing gogetter. But when I’m feeling a bit blergh about something, or don’t really want to do it, I can out-procrastinate the world champion procrastinators. In fact I believe if there were such a competition, I’d be inclined to win.

DREAM WRITING

Today I did some dream writing. It was a technique I learned through Joanne when I did her Seven Day Challenge. I was super teary and tired when I started the day today. It’s been a bit of a rough road but you know – that’s life. These things happen. It’ll be fine. I knew I needed to do some writing and couldn’t think of what I needed to write. So I thought I would do some dream writing – I want to mix and match a lot of writing over the period of this January challenge (have I mentioned the January challenge is to write a thousand words every single day? Which doesn’t daunt me in the least. But I don’t want to write the same thousand words in the same boring place every day.) So today I thought – dream writing. And I did. Dream writing involves setting a timer for a set period of time (just 15 minutes today), starting with a “prompt”, and then letting your hand flow across the page for the entire time without stopping or resting or going back at all – just an unbroken stream of thoughts. I wrote the prompt “In the clinic I hope to…” and then my hand flew across the page for fifteen minutes with the following stream of consciousness.

FLY FREE

On 19 October – 23 days before peace treaties were signed to end the first world war – Charles and Eva McDougall welcomed June Margaret into the world. A world where electricity and cars were yet to become mainstream and Tasmanian Tigers were still living and breathing.