A blog that goes out onto the 'world wide web' and is theoretically available for anyone to read necessarily entails a challenge of confidentiality. This blog sits at the junction between the personal and the generic.
To my mind, as you will remember if you read last weeks posting, each and every detail of an object, subject or relationship is essential to its over all composition, meaning and value. In a 'masterpiece' take out a note and you change the entire impact of the music.
Nonetheless - you won't get any great symphony if you have that note on its own, and you'll struggle even to explain why the loss is so significant when so many notes remain. If I take Clam's recovery journey to be one note in the symphony of recovery journeys across the locality I am in, or the country, or the continent, or the world - then it will be of little if any genuine interest or value unless it can be seen as an example of such a struggle, relating to myriad other examples and testing itself out against recovery ideas - in other words reflexively evaluating itself as it goes along.
Forgive the above complicated way of explaining myself and please bear with me - I shall soon be returning to the anecdotal which makes for a much easier read. Were I a better writer I could express myself on these more theoretical points in a more graceful and popular way. To date I've not become so good a writer as that and I have to beg your pardon and invite you to read this intro a few times, perhaps, if your background isn't an academic one. Mine was - I think that's why I struggle to be a good writer when I'm trying to express complicated and abstract ideas.
Bluntly put what I'm trying to say is that in writing this blog I am both genuinely trying to drum up (internal and external) support for myself at this stage of my mental and physical health recovery and trying to provide a portrait of sorts of the difficulties involved, and the amount of determination needed, to effect a full recovery from mental health created life problems within our culture.
I'm thinking - I guess I should have spelled this out in the first posting of the blog. It is why there are currently two closely associated blogs being run by MissionMiraculous (in lieue of its forthcoming more comprehensive website), the other, as you probably know, is http://missionmiraculous.blogspot.com - an arena of more general discussion, although the latest posting is by way of raising the general through the particular.
And now let's get on with the update of Clam's life and recovery project:
It's not been going well! I've been smoking plenty of roll-ups, just a few days to go before Q day Wed 11th; by the time you read this I may already be onto an inhalator with an enormous achievement begun - to be fair we won't be able to say it's been a success until I leave that thing called life, with luck and a following wind that won't be for a very long time so..
On the home front the earlier part of this week (1st March onwards)was enough to push me to my limits. One family member for various reasons of their own to do with feeling stressed, and perhaps hormonal, found themselves compelled to do a great deal of yelling and swearing at me, accusing me of being a dreadful mother, of accusing me of caring about no-one but myself, of being extremely lazy, accusing me of being disgusting and so on and so forth. This reached a crescendo on the second day when, returning to the house in a rage for an umbrella, the ferocity of the door knock broke a pane of glass in the front door. After three days it was pretty much getting me down.
By Thursday morning this person's sun had come over the horizon again and they have been absolutely fine and cheerful ever since. Unfortunately by that time I was punch drunk.
Meanwhile, in my efforts to get involved in issues that are very close to my heart I've been signing up for everything relevant in recent weeks at CEIMH's suresearch group, while also trying to begin to make inroads on the state of the house, focus on very small targets that nonetheless need a bit of daily attention for maintenance; to continue business planning with my business advisor in my working toward a position of financial independence and positive health status once I have reached a sustainable level of recovery, and developing these blogs and a few other bits (not so few) of writing.
By the end of February I had managed to turn up to a suresearch related meeting still wearing my pyjama top and a week later a very kind and thoughtful acquaintance of mine had taken me to one side and observed that she had noticed my recent slightly dischevelled and tired appearance told me she was becoming quite concerned about me. 'You're not looking after yourself' she said.
It's true of course. I'm not great at looking after myself. I'm pretty good at looking after others. However - after a good long stint of not looking after myself I'm fit for exactly nothing and over the last couple of days nothing is pretty much what I've been fit for. I've managed to do the ferrying about of my teenage kids and I've managed to maintain personal hygiene; I turned up late to the writing group meeting half an hour late recently and didn't have with me the pieces of work I'd promised (since I still hadn't written them) but apart from that have made it to meetings all bar one (sorry sorry sorry to Pam Durrant - I'm still cringing as I think of you sitting and waiting for me at Sainsbury's the other Thursday) - BUT it's true I've not been looking after me, not been eating properly, not been sleeping regularly or enough and not getting anything like the amount of solitude my system needs to recover from social interaction.
Therefore the house is now in a worse state than it was when I went around it taking snapshots with my mobile phone, I wrote two or three totally unnecessary and slightly paranoid emails over the last day or two that I feel most remorseful about, I overreacted to news of someone within the mental health movement gossiping about me in an untruthful and insulting way AND none of this would have happened had I been rested and properly fed and feeling more in control and therefore able to feel more comfortably positive about myself.
Writing all this down helps me. It's the shape of my life I need to address. It's my needs I need to become aware of. And tend to. Because without this I can't recover. It's this chaotic nightmare of a life that I create for myself when I proceed to forget my own needs, get out of touch so much that I fail even to notice I'm beginning to crack that surely provides explanatory pointers to the cause of my breakdowns and depressions. If I want to travel away from these health crises then I am going to have to learn to pay attention to my own needs first. Not so near last that by the time I get to them I'm in hospital.
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3 comments:
By this time yesterday morning I was fully intent on telling Clam that she had her priorities all wrong, and I still do-but for different reasons today. Yesterday it was the conviction that stopping smoking was completely the wrong way to start getting 'organized' and I had all the quite convincing ideas stacked up and ready to throw into the ring. However, it now seems, 27 hours later and having read Saturday's entry, that the stopping smoking factor, though still to my mind an important point, is not THE important point. What I had to say was less than encouraging and for what it is worth, call anytime and I will talk about it.
Encouragement by way of the support and love of one's friends and family is what is needed on this 'road to recovery'. Indeed, without these two things, life would be pretty isolated, don't you think? We in the Samoyed House love you, but we reserve the right to disagree when we feel the need, without prejudice.
I clearly recall saying, not so many days ago, that the most important person in your life is YOU. I urged that care for one's self should not be confused with selfishness, so it is OK to look to self; I therefore applaud your seeming determination to start doing just that. Where it will lead and how long it will last, remains to be seen, but know that we are always here for you.
Thank you again for the arm-twisting.
Formart wishes you well in your mission to stop smoking. I cannot pretend to to have any idea what it must be like to smoke tobacco or indeed to it up. There is far too much beard where I and my assistants live for tobacco smoking to be anything other than unacceptable fire risk. Nevertheless I and my assistance do wish you well from this safe distance. You have obviously had a difficult and challenging time, and I will patiently await your call for help on your other blog.
Formart H. Sax Wednesday 11 March 2009
Best wishes in your attempt to reduce disorder in your life and to stop smoking from today. I believe you will still have the full moon this evening to light up the occasion in the most natural way.
I don’t have experience of trying to stop smoking. I do have a wealth of experience of longing for what I’ve told myself I can’t have, so I may have some experience to draw on in empathising. However my self denial has been of objects that would be enriching but seemed unattainable, rather than ones that were pleasurable but physically addictive. So I guess the best that I can do is to offer encouragement by contributing to your blog.
Some of the issues that you speak of very much concern me too, and now that I have found you and Mission Miraculous, I will read the comments carefully and make what contribution I can.
Ekesan Moppatt 12/3/9
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