Self-care and starting again. Again.

Self-care is a big thing in the trade that I've been learning over the last few years. If you spend your working life using your own body to assist other people to feel better in their bodies, it can be wearing - on the joints, on the fingers and thumbs, on the muscles, and on the soul.

Tonight, slouched on the sofa in my most disgusting clothes, having scarfed down an entire packet of Jaffa Cakes in a bid to feel good about where I am in life, I realised I'm not being good at self-care. Again.

I haven't eaten the five-a-day in months (the orange in the Jaffa Cakes sadly does not count). There have been days where it hasn't even been one-a-day. I've let these days slip by and accumulate. Oh, tomorrow will be different.

We've all made the resolution that starts right after we jump gleefully off the wagon. Right now I'm watching the wagon leave without me, telling myself I'll take up running again to catch up with it, while I plan more ways to make myself sick enough that I can't get out of bed tomorrow.

It's not the food that's making my body sick. I can only blame the nation I live in for so many things. The supermarkets in this part of the country are stacked with goodness that I could sink my teeth into, but instead I end up reaching for the boxed mac and cheese, telling myself I won't really eat it.

It was delicious, by the way, with a good lashing of black pepper.

I could eat the good food. I could tell Cowboy that beef is off the menu, he can just suck it up, it's steamed fish and vegetables from now on - although I'm not sure how long our relationship would last if I cut him off that abruptly.

I cleaned the stalls in the barn today while he was out, because it was physical activity that would get me warm and breathing a little harder, and it felt lovely. Later, in my Jaffa stupor on the sofa, the thought suddenly hit me in the face like a wet sponge.

You are really quite depressed, Bee. You need to do more exercise, and eat better, and you'll feel happier again. You always do! It's ok. You can fix this.

So I did the sensible thing and went to get into my pyjamas and go to bed in a funk. Here I am.

The first step to self-care has been to put on Beyonce in my outrageously loud headphones and blast some empowerment into my eardrums. The second step was to google counselling in this neck of the woods and discover that the gym is so very much cheaper, gracious me. So, my therapist will probably be telling me to squat and push rather than asking me how my week has been. But that's ok, I get the same end result of being a more normal human being.

Added bonus: revitalised buns, abs and guns of steel.

Here's the kicker: this whole thing is a cycle. Every few months, I get into this dark, deep place, and I have to haul myself out by my arse again. This blog will become a catalogue of pledges to start again, to change again, because I get happy and I get complacent, and then I get not happy again.

It's ok to keep starting again. As long as I keep checking in and noticing that it's bad, it's ok to have to keep restarting. Ignore all those snappy Pinterest posts about how if you're sick of starting over, stop giving up. Bullshit. Start over as many times as you need. Good for you!

I'm going to go and eat cereal for dinner. I'll start over in the morning.

The Battle - Farewell, Robin Williams

At 2am this morning, when I finally tore myself away from The West Wing and decided I should go to sleep, I saw the sad news that legendary actor, Robin Williams, had taken his own life.

Image from robin-williams.net

My generation was lucky to get to know him in our childhood as the Genie, as Mrs Doubtfire, and as a whole host of other benevolent and inspiring characters. We loved him - we still love him. He was a crazy uncle to us all. He was also, without doubt, one of the most talented actors we will ever know.

When I saw the headlines that he had committed suicide, I took a long, slow breath. It was sad news, indeed. I was not surprised. He had been open about his battle with depression for many years, and so many of the best comedians are blighted with the demons at the other end of the spectrum. Perhaps this is what makes them so good at being funny - they have so much practice at keeping the smile in place, at behaving as if everything is great, just fine, there is so much to laugh about... It becomes an effortless charade.

Sometimes, the smallest victory in depression is getting home and feeling as if you managed to fool everybody that day.

I think I put on a good show today. Nobody suspected how bad it is. I made everybody laugh. They all think I'm normal. Even better, they think I'm fun and outgoing and happy. Mission accomplished.

Some of the toughest moments are when you look at your successes, and you can see how good your life is, how many people around you love you and care about you, and you still sit slumped on the sofa, thinking to yourself, I don't want any of this any longer.

If there is anything to be learned from the battle of another man, it should be that there is not a scale of severity with depression. If you're not suicidal, that doesn't mean you are less worthy of help and support and treatment than somebody who is. If you have mastered the effortless charade, that doesn't mean that you are coping well. You don't have to be looking at the last option for what you're feeling to be recognised as serious. That 'waiting it out' isn't the answer. You don't have to accept the bad days, because it's not just a bad day when they happen over and over again.

Depression bites deep, and hard, and holds on. People who are lucky enough not to know this black dog don't realise that you can't just shake it off. They don't realise that we are all actors, giving the performance of our life, because we worry about the reaction of our friends and family if we admit that sometimes life is impossible, and we don't even know why.

Let's talk about the battle. Those of us fighting in it are brave, and strong; not weak, nor cowardly. To go out into the world every day, despite the growling and the darkness, is an act of courage and determination.

Let's talk about those people who march in to the darkness, seeking the light on the other side. Genie, you're free...

On climbing back on.

"Get straight back on!" my instructor would shrill, marching over to wherever I was picking myself up out of the dirt. "Up you get! Get back on!"

That's the first rule that I remember learning about horses, apart from never using a mane comb on the tail. If you come off, get straight back on.

It's decent enough advice, and intended to stop setbacks from sticking long enough to become issues and obstacles. See that crappy thing that just happened? You can get over it and move on and still have a great time, and that crappy thing becomes a great big nothing.

It's been a strange time in life lately, and I fell off this blog. I fell off normal life. I fell into being somebody else for a little while, and realised it was no fun. Worst of all, I climbed off my horse. I climbed off, voluntarily, intentionally. Even though I landed on my feet like a regular dismount, I might as well have thrown myself face first into the dirt. My demons cackled with glee.

See these crappy things that happened? They're huge and terrible and your life is over and you'll never be happy again. You are a great big nothing.

It spiralled. I watched myself behave in a way that I hated. I listened to myself say things to Cowboy that were unfathomably horrible. I felt myself sliding like a poisoned body into a murky swamp, completely apathetic to stop it from happening.

It wasn't quite what I wanted, given that I was making plans for my whole future at the time, and a murky swamp wasn't what I really had in mind.

Shut up, the demons said. What you want doesn't matter. You'll never get it. You're going to fail at everything you ever do, you'll lose everything you've ever had, and you'll never have anything again.

And then I finally saw the sunshine. I saw this Sunshine:



I sat in the saddle in tears, about to climb off again (throw myself metaphorically face first in the metaphorical dirt). I had a violent meltdown. I was on the verge of quitting - quitting everything. I'd just go back to bed and never get up again.

Cowboy gripped my knee as I went to dismount, holding me still. He was unusually forceful. He almost shook me.

"Stay on the horse," he said. I fought him feebly for a moment. He said it again, slower, more urgently. "Stay. On. The horse."

"I can't," I protested, sobbing. "I'm just not in the right mood." I'll never be in the right mood again. Everything is worthless and useless and my life is already over.

"She doesn't care," he said. "Go ride." He let go of us, and chased Sunshine off into the middle of the arena.

I sat there as she walked about, looking for a spot where she might be allowed to stop. I didn't even pick up the reins. I watched her look back at me first with one brown eye, and then the other. She listened to me as I tried to catch my breath between the tears. She heaved a big sigh, and stepped onwards across the sand.

I finally came out of the haze. I emerged, squinting, from the toxic fog where the demons muttered at me, and I noticed the way she moved beneath me. I noticed her gentle, deliberate footfalls, and her patient breath. When we finally stopped, I felt her big heart pumping.

We had a big breakthrough that day. I say "we" did. I mean me. She has life all figured out already. I needed to hear it from her. She turned her head a little, looked up at me on her back. I like to think she was saying "Hey, human, what's the big deal? I've got this."

She became a safe place. That's an amusing notion, given that just a few weeks earlier I had been frightened to be on her back. Now, I will climb on her fresh from the field, and we put the world to rights.

Except now I am back in England, thousands of miles from her, and looking into the fog once more. In searching for another safe place, I'm climbing back on to the blog. Let's ride.

Insomnia

My peace of mind is less than peaceful just now. I have been out for walks in the surrounding countryside in a bid to find some peace and quiet.



What is it about being out in the air? It is pouring with rain at the moment, and I am seriously considering donning my coat and boots and trudging out into it. Last night, I set my alarm early, with every intention of squeezing myself into my running lycra and getting out early to stretch out and put some cold air in my lungs.


The run was thwarted by an abysmal night's sleep. I tried some of those herbal tablets that smell and taste like shit, hoping that they would let me get to sleep at a reasonable hour and stay asleep. They didn't work. Well, they worked enough to make me drowsy and floppy - so floppy that I was slightly concerned my hips would dislocate if I lay on my side - but I was still wide awake.

Cowboy messaged some time after 1am, and we talked on the phone for a little while. It made me miss him all the more. The PVP is bad. My dreams when I did eventually get to sleep were threatening and stressful. I woke up remembering why I don't like taking those pills - they dredge up some very disturbing dreams.

This morning, I lay in bed for several hours before I could bring myself to get up. I did some yoga to stretch out and get oxygenated, which was helpful. I often feel I should make it more of a ritual.

I know it's getting bad when my thoughts don't even make sense to myself. It's time to get out of here...

The library

What a strange start to the year it has been. The weather has been grey and dull, with many parts of this small island flooded and without power. I have spent the last five days in a bit of a funk, not sure what to do or where to go or what I want from life just now.

I look at my colour-coded list of things for 2014. Some have been ticked off already. That should be achievement! It feels like nothing. So many things feel like nothing. I wondered this morning if the demons were sneaking in again, dressed up as sadness that Cowboy has gone home, or dressed as bad weather and an overly sugary diet recently.

I'm undecided.

I had a craving for adventure today, and because the weather was shoddy, I decided the best way to satisfy the wanderlust would be to put Skyrim into my Xbox and wile away some hours. I ran up and down a mountain. I killed a dragon, a bear and a troll. I found a dead goat and took its horns to use to decorate my house. Then I went to my second home (where the wife and kids don't live and I can get some peace and quiet), and built myself a library, a trophy room and a greenhouse.

I sent my character to sit in the chair in the library for a moment, so I could see what the room looked like from the reading spot.

The room is a tower attached to the side of the house, and the bookcases line the walls. With the doors closed and my hired magician left in the kitchen to find himself a biscuit, I surveyed my new reading nook. It's a lovely place.

"Well, bother," I thought to myself, triggering my warrior to get up again and do some more running around. "It's not even a real house." Annoyed and needing to vent some frustration, I ran outside and killed another troll.

I've added the library to my "ideal home" list. It could double as my office, it would just need a large, leather-topped desk in there, as well as a very comfortable chair or a small sofa where I could sit and read. Assuming I will ever have time in my life to just sit and read, of course... That's an amusing notion.

While I live at home with my parents, I am discovering a lack of meaningful space. This is not the house where I grew up, they moved here a few years ago, and it is ordered according to their needs. There is no spare chair in a spare room where I might take myself to read, or to earmark as my spot. My dad has generally agreed to share his Man Cave with me - his study and little haven in the house. Still, I am surrounded by things that do not belong to me. Most of my possessions are up in the loft, packed away and waiting to be shipped to my more permanent home, once I have one...

I crave the home of my own. Perhaps that is why Skyrim's adventures today were mostly about shaping a home and not about killing dragons. Next Skyrim quest will be finding books to fill up my library.

Perspective: Spiders vs South Dakota

Like many people I'm sure, I am often lacking in a sense of perspective. I have a tendency towards drama and exaggeration.

"There was this spider in my house and it was literally about twenty feet across and had laser eyes and napalm breath!"

Well, look at the sucker. I wasn't that far off...


Sorry for the gigantic spider image. That should maybe have come with a warning...

I woke up today convinced that the next two years were going to be difficult and terrible and miserable, and that I would genuinely be better off staying in bed all day.

Then I got hungry, so I ate two banana maple oatmeal cookies and had a cup of tea, and life didn't seem so bad. I did some research into various things that have been troubling me, and read some magazines, and dealt with a couple of business issues. I took a step in arranging to catch up on the classes I've missed over the last few days (due to certainty that bed would be a better place to be - thanks, Black Dog).

Then I read about South Dakota and the snow storms. To those of us living in cushy little England where it barely dips below freezing and there's a Tesco's on every corner, understanding just how devastating and destructive the weather has just been is a little difficult.

Dating a cowboy means I can see how the loss of a vast proportion of your livestock would be damaging both financially and emotionally. Many ranchers put their cattle before themselves time and time again, sacrificing lazy lie-ins to go and feed and check up on their animals. Whole families revolve around the cycles of cattle: brandings and sortings and shipping.

I've started to see my future with Cowboy as having a large element of cow in it - he'd like to run a small herd of cows one day, alongside our horse business. That means I will probably have to help with the round-up, the branding, the sorting, the shipping. It means I will have to get up early to help feed (if only to help feed the hungry humans who go and do the real hard work). It means we might have to put our bedroom on the ground floor of the house so that when there's a sick cow or a difficult calving, Cowboy can go out every two hours without disturbing the kids or having to negotiate the stairs in his exhaustion.

Reading about those who have lost their cattle, and some who have lost their lives, was rather more emotional than I expected. It certainly put my problems a little more in perspective, made me rethink what was really important, and gave me a kick up the backside that I sorely needed.

Confession Time

I have a confession to make. I decided I should make it now, whilst I don't have many (any) readers and it's less terrifying.



I suffer from depression. That's not a bad mood, or a sad mood, or any kind of mood. It's a mental health condition. It's an illness. It's chronic, and it doesn't go away. Sometimes it's "in remission" and sometimes it's crippling.

I went to my doctor a few years ago whilst I was working at an office in London, concerned about my lack of sleep, my poor appetite, my unruly digestive system, my fatigue and my general sense of dread about life. I'd actually gone to see her about something else entirely, and added on a nervous question about stress as an afterthought.

"I wanted to ask you about managing stress," I said as she scribbled me a prescription for something else. "I mean... I'm not..."

I burst into tears. She offered me a box of the finest in NHS-funded flimsy tissues.

I was lucky that my GP was so kind and attentive and listened to my garbled sob story (literally) as I tried to explain that I couldn't get up in the mornings, that I felt like an observer in life, that my guts were churning over every single worry and fear I could think of, and that I was thinking of a lot of them lately.

She smiled sympathetically and said, "I don't think it's stress that we need to address here. I think it's your very obviously low mood."

Low mood. That's how the medical profession label it to start with. It sounds innocuous enough, as if it's just a little deflated and needs some air. My GP offered me antidepressants, although even she admitted they were little more than a chemical scratch for an itching sore, which I declined for exactly that reason. If my mood was low, I needed to find out why, and I needed to fix that.

She gave me a leaflet for a counselling service which had a sliding scale of fees depending on your income, and suggested they would be better than NHS therapy which would only be a few sessions, and likely wouldn't be of much use in managing a long-term condition like mine.

I went to weekly therapy for six months back in 2012. If anything, it gave me a morning off work once a week, and a place to go and say things that I thought were too idiotic to say to my friends and family. For the first few weeks I would sit and cry and talk about how I couldn't stop crying even though I didn't know why I was doing it. After that I began to struggle a little with what I wanted to say.

That's the problem with depression. It isn't about anything. I wasn't sad. I wasn't angry. I wasn't frustrated or tired or embarrassed. I wasn't anything. I felt like a big void was inside me, and I was drifting through each day just hoping to make it to bed so I could at least be unconscious for a few hours and not have to think about how empty and useless I felt.

Then I met Cowboy and my life changed direction entirely, and my demons took a pretty decent break. I no longer had the office drudgery, I lived somewhere new and quiet and pretty, and I met a whole new bunch of people. Gosh, I even had some fun.

In January and February this year, I had some low days. I had days when I couldn't get out of bed - I just couldn't do it. I hid away from people, convinced they didn't want to see me anyway, and certain that if I saw them, I'd only make the emptiness worse.

I still get those days sometimes, and I've noticed them sneaking back in more and more since I've come home from America. I need to take a stand, and writing this post is part of it.

A young man on my course took his own life over the summer, having battled his demons for some time. His counsellor came to speak to us to explain how good he had been at recognising his low moods and suicidal thoughts, and how diligent he had been at seeking help. It made me realise that I am no good at seeking help when I need it.

It feels like a failure to admit that I am in a place where I can't help myself, where I can't just snap out of it and get on with it. Even though I am one of the millions of people enduring the long battle with depression, I am all too quick to pass judgement about it, and deny myself the help I need.

Not any more. This week, I'll be going back to therapy.