Tag Archives: Mental Health

The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul

Bear with me on this one, it will be worth it.

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Daniel Craig stars as James Bond in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures/Columbia Pictures/EON Productions’ action adventure SKYFALL.

This week, a video went viral of how badly James Bond has treated his women in five decades. It is, I suppose, like that moment in The Emperor’s New Clothes when the young boy says what he sees, and only then does everybody else grasp that they’ve been had. Bond has NEVER been above conventional outrage, even during the 1960’s. For a woman like me, who fell in love with Roger Moore and then came to understand that these movies were a fiction, the allure of Bond isn’t the casual means by which he deals with the emotional. It is the fact that he so beautifully typifies how I feel about the World. It always needs saving, the pleasure gained by doing so is ultimately short-lived and nobody really cares about your commitment as long as they’re happy in the end. It is escapism, pure and simple… except now, you can’t even do that in reality.

All that matters right now is truth and honesty, which is great… but to a point.

Bond doesn’t do emotional, or at least he didn’t until Daniel Craig came along and made 007 something more than the misogynist, sexist Dinosaur that Judi Dench accuses Piers Brosnan of being in Goldeneye. Bond since Casino Royale isn’t the same fellow as his predecessors, but that’s not what the evangelising liberators will see. All men are evil when they dominate and subjugate women, and although I agree 100% with this statement, there comes a point where you don’t need to be told. Please continue to hang spurious toerags who do this in reality out to dry, but be careful when you start impinging on other people’s fantasies because this is a dangerous game to even contemplate playing.

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Today is Time to Talk Day and instead of talking about my own mental health, I want to talk about Bond’s. Yup, if you can attack a fictional character in mainstream media for being too brutish, I’m going to ask how many people will have considered the long-term psychological effects of being a 00 agent. In my own fictional version of this world, I decided that Bond is probably encouraged to be bad boyfriend material for a reason: emotional attachments in his job, let’s face it, are hardly conducive, and the one time he did fall in love, the woman ends up dead in a canal in Venice. It is a simple and damning reminder that emotions have consequences, but more significantly it isn’t just the woman’s feelings that can be destroyed. Bond is damaged for a reason. If the plan now is to cast him aside as an outdated trope, what the hell will that do long term to stop this kind of behaviour from taking place?

How will we change this kind of thinking without treating the root causes of the problem?

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Learning to end discrimination also involves the understanding that people with mental health issues can often be violent and unpredictable. They can also be highly intelligent, controlling and flat out lie in order to maintain their notions of safety. In case you think I’m generalising here, I’m not, this is me speaking from extremely personal experience. In my life, I have been all of these things, and have had others do the same to me in order to deal with what they saw were my ‘issues.’ If you’ve never had a mental health problem, it can be impossible to understand the motivations behind actions. Talking to each other isn’t just about making your illness the discussion: it is only part of a complex equation that involves emotional support and understanding.

Many people are violent because of mental health issues that have gone undiagnosed for decades. It is not ‘brutish’ behaviour, and most certainly not unconsciously meted. The world we live in now seems happy to condemn everyone without nearly enough thought and consideration, and media right now is in danger of causing more harm than good with ill-conceived pronouncements. The real trick, ultimately, is to teach people how to deal with their version of reality (that which they experience and that which surrounds them) when it comes into contact with everybody else’s. If others are not capable of accurately understanding their behaviour, it must be up to us to not only be able to objectively do that for them, and ourselves.

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The key here is objectivity: being able not to tar everybody with the same brush, to step back from stereotyping, being able to accurately separate fiction from fact. Please don’t start condemning my entire life history, modern feminists. If you reacted badly to Friends and you think Bond’s had his day, most of my childhood’s now on time and you’ll be petitioning soon to pretend that most of the 1970’s never happened. History is there to teach us, not to condemn everything as bad, wrong, and worth ignoring. On this #TimeToTalk day, why not stop making posts as you somehow feel as if that’s the right thing to do. Why not start looking for answers: not other people’s, but your own.

Stop sitting and waiting for the answers to come to you, or be dictated by the latest media outrage. Go and find solutions for yourself.

Panic

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Yesterday was a hard one for me. I woke up ready to do a lot of important stuff with my son, who completely forgot we’d organised it. This makes me cross,  but I’m trying not to get angry about it, so there was lots of deep breathing and patience. Then my daughter insisted on rearranging my afternoon. I was about 82% cool about this. After all, until both of them are 18, I am still responsible for actions and that means… well, being flexible. There were days I’d really struggle with this when I (and more importantly they) were younger.

By teatime, I was mentally exhausted, and still hadn’t done a weights day at the Gym, so managed to get myself out of the house. Arriving at said establishment, it became apparent that they were holding a ‘Power Hour’: DJ, lots of free instruction, and no way I’d be able to do what I’d planned. If I’d been in private I’d have just gone and locked myself in my bedroom and cried over the change… however I was stuck in the lobby, waiting to get in.

I panicked.

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Except, this time I didn’t just turn and go home, which was normally how I’d deal with these situations in the past. I focussed on breathing and trying to make the feelings of anxiety and fear into something positive. After all, I’ve been practising all this mindfulness for exactly these occasions. This is the moment where I’m supposed to use the shit to good effect… and I was reasonably successful. There were no (major) tears and a surprisingly dispassionate response to all of it. However, my higher brain functions largely shut down, I forgot how to talk and so just ran and Octane-d. However, I did force myself to do the Negatives in front of about double the normal number of Friday night Gym goers.

I still feel sick this morning: however, once I’ve eaten and had a cuppa I’ll go and walk back there and do the weights I couldn’t do yesterday, so I have done at least two sessions this week. I can return to three next week as everyone is back at school. On reflection, I know now all the reasons why yesterday ended up as it did. I can work out how to make things better based on a whole day’s worth of data. I can also be reassured that the Mindfulness training has 100% improved my entire existence. Yesterday could have ended up as the first day when I truly went backwards on exercise, but instead, it will now be remembered as the first day I fought, beat and won against a panic attack.

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I ache a lot this morning, and very little of it is to do with last night’s exercise, I suspect: stress has begun to physically manifest in my body as I have gotten older. My sleep wasn’t stellar last night either as a result but I got a full 8 hours in total, so that’s enough. I wanted to write this down this morning after a night to reflect because I’m only just beginning to grasp how important yesterday was in making sure I’m mentally prepared for what is to come. Doing stuff on my own used to be a fraught experience, but not so much now.

I look forward to the day when I can breeze through everything and wonder what the fuss was about, to begin with.

Brilliant Mind

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I am noticing a disturbing trend on Social media. I hope this is just isolated incidents, and the people involved realise that there’s a very fine line to be skirted here that maybe, possibly, is being overstepped by the zealous.

There is an increasing feeling that some people are using mental health as a way to sell themselves.

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First off, let’s be clear: having mental issues being discussed openly is NEVER something I want to stop. It’s an important, nay essential part of removing the stigma and increasing awareness. However, as has been the case in the last few weeks, I’m seeing people using mental health issues to promote websites (that aren’t anything other than personal portals) and to sell items, where I’m told the money goes to help mental health charities, but the implication remains that they’re also allowing individuals to profit from the exposure. I appreciate the sentiments behind sites like this, but honestly? That’s not the way this works.

Twitter wins with charities like Time to Change whose presence is 100% not about selling me something or offering suspicious advice that may only work for a minority of people. The sometimes broad-brush nature may annoy those who feel there are better ways to deal with these illnesses, but the fact remains the generic nature of their campaigns reaches the widest possible audience. Accepting you have a problem will be the hardest thing most people ever do. After that? Then you get the chance to work out the details.

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Watching other people using mental illness as the means by which to further themselves has always been a prickly subject to address, especially on Social media where it is almost impossible to tell who’s being honest (or not.) I know where I stand on this, that my mental issues are very much real and historic, but can’t speak for anybody else. What I would absolutely never do is use that as a means to market myself. I make headers for posts to alert people to the discussion, but you won’t see it used in the Patreon as a selling point at any time. My personal life is something I talk about, but which doesn’t get sold. If I help somebody by sharing, then great, but there’s no way that becomes my stock in trade.

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Without the Mindfulness Course, my life would be a lot more stressful right now. I’m very grateful for the lessons learnt and an ability to step out of myself objectively. I just hope those people jumping on the coattails of the mental health ‘revolution’ currently taking place are well aware of the depth of responsibility everyone shoulders when they talk about their illness. Using it to sell your product is wrong. Using it to sell yourself may be even more insidious.

Think

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I am returning to something I never finished before the start of the Summer.

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I began this course before being diagnosed with the gallbladder issues. Without it, I doubt I’d have coped nearly as well with surgery. It seems like the right time to return to it, especially with the peculiar background of World News. Mindfulness, as I have discovered, is not for everybody. In fact, challenging demons is a tough ask for a great many people. I’ve always avoided drugs, mostly because I am well aware of the addictive nature of my personality. Writing has granted a clarity to vision that I have no desire to either diminish or lose. Mindfulness grants an opportunity to listen to yourself, and cope with what is heard.

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In my case, this was eminently apparent an hour ago, as I sat in a dentist’s chair for a check up. As a kid there was a horrible incident with gas and air, which I still dream about (and not in a good way.) That makes even sitting in the chair an unpleasant and uncomfortable experience, but today I went with the ability to detach myself from what was happening. As tools whirled and sharp metal things poked my gums, I concentrated on the shape of the chair itself, how it felt under my body and ignored the other sensory inputs. It was, if truth be told, a pretty effective exercise.

This was how I’d rationalised moments that could be dealt with back in May whilst ignoring those things that couldn’t be changed. It is how I’ve quietly and systematically taken out of the equation a number of negative factors affecting my daily output, and pretty much just focussed on good. Of course, nothing is 100% foolproof, and I’ve still had some massive fails along the way (Car getting hit again being a case in point) but, in the main, I can thank mindfulness for quite a bit.

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The next stage is to complete the course. The one I’m taking asks for a fee (£30, $38) and then allows you access to all relevant materials online. You can see what that entails by clicking here. It absolutely won’t be for everybody, and if you’d like to do some more general reading about the concept, try starting here. Like most things in life, treatment depends on knowing what the problems are to begin with. For me, there’s a fairly specific list of issues, and each one is being ticked off in a slow and methodical fashion. Patience has never been my strong point, but as I know how long it takes to learn new skills, there’s no point in getting stressed. Things will happen in their own time, but often that’s not good enough.

In this case, slow and sure is absolutely, totally fine.

Musclebound

Exercise is bloody hard work. Believing that simply taking protein supplements is going to give you a body like The Rock’s is, like it or not, living a massive delusion. I have to admit, the implication that under 30’s would believe this feels pretty insulting, and without any kind of hard facts that prove the point, the bigger issue is teaching better nutritional awareness. Protein shakes have their benefits: my husband’s using them to very good effect currently as a way to maintain weight, in tandem with what is a stupidly healthy diet prior to another bike race on Sunday. They can be incredibly useful to kick-start weight loss too. The article that started all this talks about what an average body requires to stay healthy in terms of protein: no two bodies are alike, and if you don’t sit behind a desk every day the number of calories needed will vary.

Mostly, the press can only ever talk about health issues in general terms. Studies and reports increasingly are taken out of context to highlight particular issues, headlines created as clickbait. It is quite rare to be presented a whole truth in reporting: like it or not, that doesn’t make for very engaging content. History reminds us however that promising people better bodies using advertising is hardly anything new. This kind of ‘persuasion’ has been going on as long as newspapers have needed advertising: this isn’t about buying anyone into the idea of supplements or aids either, it is convincing the gullible that their physique is flawed. In the modern world, obsessed now with body image in all its various forms, that is probably more concerning that handing over money to companies for anything that could be considered largely pointless if you just amend your diet and exercise more.

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I was asked at the weekend why I’d started weight training by a total stranger. The answer is twofold: it has always been something I wanted to do, because I equate strength with physical fitness. Body image is largely irrelevant, but keeping asthma in check is far more important: I can have a direct and positive effect on managing an illness which, as a child, meant exercise was off the cards… except, now I find myself wondering what might have been different if my parents had encouraged that urge and not suppressed it. I’ll never know, of course, but now I’m in a position where breathing difficulties are the exception due to my own hard work. The sense of satisfaction and achievement that gives is beyond significant.

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The irony for me is that my stomach refuses to process either protein shakes or gels: I can swallow them but they’ll be straight back up in short order. If I want to lose weight and build muscle, it’s good old fashioned food groups: chicken, lean meat and white fish, flapjacks and nuts, or protein bars at a stretch. On days like this when the sugar craving is strong, that can be a hard ask, but my brain’s spent over a year grasping the undeniable truth that you really are what you eat. If protein shakes help people be healthy, honestly, what’s wrong with them? In 40 years, if Global Warming has its way, we could all be eating proteins in powder form anyway. There’s an assumption only one real way exists to be healthy, and that’s simply not true. Sure, you can eat cake and drink coffee but if that’s your life without exercise, it’s as bad in its own way as never eating a ‘healthy’ meal. The key here is not one thing or the other in excess, but balance.

The truth about health is never hard and fast. Reality, as always, depends on the individual deciding to make a change, and then sticking with it. There are many success stories, but for every miracle weight loss or transformation there are the many who can never make it past the scales or the next meal. Like so much else in life, change must be yours to instigate. If you want something enough, it will happen. For myself, I can attest that a healthier lifestyle has transformed my life at 50, but that is only part of a far larger and more complex set of circumstances. Knowing that, I’ll never discourage anyone wanting to start the journey, but it has to be on your own terms.

Decide what you want, and then make a plan to get there in the healthiest manner for you.

Iconography

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I’ve been stealth writing stuff all weekend, since Thursday night, mostly because I don’t want to bore people with braindumps that means a great deal to me but not much to them. A friend told me I am perfectly within my rights to own my trauma, but there comes a point where the weight between exposition and boredom becomes very real indeed. I only need to look at my lovely and long-suffering family to understand that, like it or not, some days you just shut up and get on with life. The problem for me, right now, is that history is being rewritten. This is not revisionism, anything but. I am remembering the past as means to survive the present, and that is making for a lot of sudden and sometimes painful revelation.

This morning, we have returned to at least a semblance of normality.

I went out after dropping the youngest off at School and did about ten days worth of overdue external running around: paying in cheques, posting mail, organising various things ‘outside’ including trying (and failing) to get a doctors appointment for my son. The earliest I’ll now manage outside of school hours is Wednesday, I’m glad he’s not horrendously unwell, or I’d be camping outside the Surgery tomorrow. I am also, inescapably, suffering what I now know is referred pain. Tonight cannot come quickly enough and yet, it is taking forever to arrive. However, I am making the most of the perception disparity by shoving as much work as possible into the space provided.

This may be only a semblance of normality, but it will do.

There There

This week has been tough. Mentally I’ve coped pretty well but physically, my digestive system is a mess. Having to lose what I’ve become reliant on in terms of high fat foods was a wrench my body initially wasn’t at all happy about. However, a week in and I’m beginning to cope. The other major loss is what counted as rewards on Treat Days are effectively out of the window too until I can get the all clear on my scans. I’ve been living on coated nuts in small portions, the occasional flapjack and luck, mostly. I wondered if I was doing this right until I got on the scales: my weight’s dropped consistently this last week, and I’m almost two pounds down. The key here is that there’s been only light exercise, because again I’m on orders not to strain my trunk area too vigorously.

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It is more than a year now since my last period. The night sweats remain, but are slowly tapering off, and I don’t seem to get hot in the daytime nearly as much as was the case before: *gasp* I’ve felt genuinely cold on a few occasions this last week, which is a distinct change. The biggest difference is my skin, which used to be really greasy: now I’m almost permanently dry, but the skincare routine is taking care of that. Oh, and body hair’s stopped growing, which means that I’m brushing my hair less and it is undoubtedly thinning. If genetics isn’t lying I won’t go bald, but even if I did I think that’s a hurdle I could tackle. I love my long hair now and I’ll be making the most of it for as long as I can.

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It seems odd at this stage to be undergoing so much change, but I’m quite sanguine about everything that is happening at once. I’ll be doing a session at the Gym later with weights but only light Cardio, just so I can keep momentum going. I don’t have a PT on Monday as my trainer is away so I think going forward I’ll plan to do *something* daily in order to keep the weight loss moving but not get too stressed if I don’t break goals. I’m certainly not in a mental state of panic or unhappiness over anything related to weight or exercise right now, and long may that continue.

In fact, everything’s looking just fine.