To lose someone you love is the very worst thing in the world. It creates an invisible hole that you feel you are falling down and will never end. People you love make the world real and solid and when they suddenly go away forever, nothing feels solid any more.
Matt Haig
Today is my Abba’s second-year death anniversary, and yet this morning, I woke up and felt absolutely heartbroken again. I think the pain was different this year because this was the first year I was completely alone in remembering him. I’m sure his siblings thought about him today, and I’m sure Mama and my siblings touched his urn and lit a candle, but this year, I was completely alone with my thoughts without a memorial service to organise and wake up for.
I know my mom thinks about him every day – I mean how could she not – they were together for more than 50 years, and solidly together for 7 years when my father fell ill because she was his primary carer. I cannot imagine the depths of her pain and how much she misses him. But this morning, I felt absolutely heartsick and I cried like a child because I missed my father so much.
I know the void that my father’s passing has created in my life will never be filled. I need to remember to give myself time – time to come to terms with my father’s death (because I don’t think I’ve properly grieved), time to heal, time to allow the pain to shift. I know the pain will always be there but it will feel differently eventually.
It is a real thing. It is an anxiety disorder where the person is unable to speak in certain social situations.
This is going to be a snarky post.
Loquaciousness is an admirable trait, but not everyone is blessed with it. Because there are people who seem to have something to say in every situation. EVERY bloody situation. Even when the situation calls for, oh, I don”t know, sensitivity and reflection, they always have something to say – most of the time something off the cuff and inappropriately insensitive.
I understand that it is all about them and the insecurity they feel. It is a defense mechanism. Silence can be uncomfortable and it takes a relatively mature and secure person to sit in silence, to not have to voice an opinion. It might be that they learned that they wouldn’t be overlooked or taken for granted if they said something. It also takes a relatively sensitive person to know what is appropriate and inappropriate to say. But really, if you just say something for the sake of saying something, aren’t you just an empty clanging bell, or an annoyingly noisy cymbal?
I am fully aware that these feelings may just be unique to me and how I feel about certain situations. These are probably just my idiosyncrasies. I’ve been in situations where I’ve opened my mouth and promptly inserted my foot in it. I’ve been in environments where you’ve had to learn when you should or shouldn’t say something. I’ve been in circumstances when your ability to convey information was important for understanding. Not everyone has the opportunity to be in those teaching environments.
I think I need to follow my own advice. Not every situation that makes me want to shout “Can you just shut up?” requires it. You can teach people vocabulary, but you can’t necessarily teach people eloquence and utterance. Sensitivity is learned through experience. Also, it takes a certain humility and openness to want to know.
Okay, feelings expressed. I’m getting off my soapbox now.
I had a few people over. It was planned and I loved the prep that it involved. I could exercise my cooking muscles and I cooked a southern fried chicken lunch with my favourite fixins (coleslaw, gravy, cornbread and green beans) and I made blondies for dessert.
It was fun and I loved having people over. I didn’t even mind the cleaning up (weirdly, I love dishwashing). But I find that I’m very peopled-out today. So I’ve stayed indoors and kept mostly to myself – save the occasional foray into social media, WhatsApp message reply and a call from a favourite relative.
I hope your weekends were lovely and it’s prepared y’all for the coming week 🙂
I’ve never shied away from talking about my mental health struggles and the journey I’ve been on – still on to be completely honest but I’m in a much better place now. But I think I’ve shied away from actually properly writing about it.
18 months ago, someone I worked with asked me if I was okay. I did what I usually do at the time and pasted the brightest smile on my face that I could and said that I was fine. It took that someone sitting me down and asking me if I was REALLY okay because, they said, they could see it in my eyes that I wasn’t okay and that my non-okayness was starting to reflect in my work. I’d been in difficult situations before and work was the balm to my soul. I could make work work for me. Work helped me cope. If my mental health was starting to affect the one thing that kept me sane and on an even keel, I had to finally admit that I wasn’t at all well. Whilst admitting you have a problem is a step in the right direction, it can also be a rabbit hole that you can go down and never come out of again. That someone talked to me about counseling, the resources that were available, and offered me the support that I didn’t know I desperately wanted. That person might have just saved my life.
I did what helped me the most when things started to get on top of me. I read and I wrote. I read about my situation, what I felt I needed to figure out, what my options were. I went online, I read through things, I looked at my options, talked to people who’d gone through the same things. I made a pros and cons list. Then I chose a course of action. I got help. I talked to somebody. I talked to a lot of somebodies going through the same things I was going through, professionals who could help me figure out what course of action to take and sort out the spaghetti bowl of tangled thoughts and emotions in my head. It was a lot of work and it took a lot of tears and it got really, REALLY dark for a while. I’m in no means done with this journey, but now I am properly smiling again, from the heart.
While I think my love for my family and my faith foundation is too established for me to feel so hopeless for me to consider unaliving myself, I did have thoughts and I knew exactly what I needed to do if I decided to actually do what to me would’ve been the unthinkable. But I think my colleague asking me about how I really was saved me from a downward spiral that I was trying to ignore. I believe that if they hadn’t asked the question, I would have ignored everything until it would’ve been quite difficult to extricate myself from the mental tangle I’d allowed myself to be ensnared in.
We need to be brave enough to ask after people around us. We need to learn that asking the difficult questions are important. We need to create safe spaces where people feel secure enough to make themselves vulnerable. We need to break the stigma and start the conversation about mental health. We might just save a life.
Please, please dear friends, make sure you make YOUR mental health a priority. Make sure you take time for yourself. Make sure you practice self-compassion. Kindness and compassion are important for humanity, but it is equally important that we are kind and compassionate to ourselves too.
It’s okay to not be okay.
It’s okay to ask for help.
If you need it, the meds are there to help too.
Remember that addressing your mental health issues is a journey, you don’t heal instantly. Every step forward is a victory. Take the wins. If you get a setback (and believe me you will, because the work is a habit-setting exercise in the most basic of terms), don’t let it stop you; pause, breathe, find your bearings and find your path, then move forward.
Things you do, when you’re home, alone and recuperating from a bout of Covid, is listen to music…or at least I do! Possibly much to the chagrin of my neighbours, I blast my music out and occasionally warble out loud and pretend I can sing. One of my favourite songs is All Mine by Shedaisy
My favourite lyrics are: My loss My lonely My mistake Mine only Mine all, mine all
This song used to fill me with a lot of regret and latent sadness. Because when I used to listen to the song, it just felt like I was accepting status quo and the blame for something that wasn’t entirely something I could control. It felt like I was paying lip service to myself, the people around me and the entire universe and saying “yep, it’s my fault!” because it was expected of me, and that I was going to be blamed for it anyway. I think my rebellious subconscious nature objected to this acquiesence and was trying to stage a strike against just accepting the blame completely and accepting the full weight of responsibility.
These days, I’m completely happy to raise my hand up and say “Yeah, I f*cked that one up – all on me!” because it is all on me. I have no one else to blame but myself. My personal landscape has changed and I am now in the driver’s seat of my life. Well, okay, the somnolent Christian in me knows that I’m not really in control because God has a plan. But I am allowed choices and the choices I make, while possibly crap and not in keeping with what He has planned, are my choices and I am actually prepared to face the consequences of those choices. Because the choices were mine, I was not coerced, gaslit, forced, or bullied into making those choices.
I know I need to gain a better grip on the steering wheel of my life and the intention is to do that. I know that the renovation isn’t going to be quick, because there are so many horrible habits I need to unlearn, so many learned responses I need to decondition and so many thoughts in my head I need to silence. I need to have better conversations with myself and I need to stop the self-sabotage. I need to stop hearing A’s voice naysaying in my head.
I am definitely a work in progress and in no way nearing completion. But at least I am not working towards a blueprint of me that I have control over.
So it’s possibly Day 2 or 3 of this Covid jag. To be fair, I’m not quite sure I wasn’t ill in Vienna. Quite a few of us were unwell during the trip. This would mean that this would probably be Day 8 or 9?
I’m quite sure this intense apathy is a symptom of Covid. Because to be completely honest, I couldn’t necessarily care less about anyone or anything at the moment. I’m just so very tired and just want to hibernate.
At the moment, I just want to shout to everyone – NOT MY CIRCUS, NOT MY MONKEYS.
For most of us, we get stronger slowly, and then get weaker slowly, with our cycles sometimes in synchrony with the land’s health, though other times independent of its larger cycles…You find yourself as you have always been, square in the middle of the metamorphosis, constantly living and dying: becoming weaker in your strength, finally… ― Rick Bass
The passage of time is relative…sometimes it feels like a day is over in the blink of an eye…and then there are days when it feels like time is dragging its heels.
I started writing this post a year to the day that I left my old life in Harwich. At the time, I was marking the anniversary of the day my entire world shattered into a million tiny pieces (I ended up posting a completely different blog entry). I moved away from a life I thought was going to be my forever life because the person I thought was going to be my forever person decided that I no longer belonged in his reality. Whatever his reasons (I’m sure it will be something I did because it was always my fault), I knew that I was no longer welcome in that environment and that I needed to go (my ex-forever person even helped me find a place to move to, wasn’t that nice of him?). While it was very polite and adult, it was becoming a toxic environment with the potential of becoming a powder keg situation. It was healthier for us to be apart rather than together. At the time, I absorbed all the blame, and even managed to convince myself that it was because I was at fault. After a lot of pragmatic soul-searching, I’ve come to accept that while I am to blame for the disintegration of the relationship, the blame is not entirely mine. I’m telling it like it is without any intention of assigning blame. It takes two people to make and break a relationship. It isn’t always 50/50 because relationships will require sharing the burden of balance, and sometimes, sharing the burden of balance requires that you carry more than half the burden. I know now that my understanding of relationships and the kind of compromises one is required to make was so different from his. I think his understanding didn’t factor in the gray areas (or maybe it did – we didn’t have the important discussions because I don’t think he liked laying himself bare because it made him vulnerable. I’ve accepted that he was all about protecting himself above all else). And that’s okay.
Life has certainly changed for me.
My environment has changed. My relationship status has changed. My living arrangements have changed. My appearance has changed considerably. My routine and habits are changing. My mindset is adapting to the changes in my life. My life is in constant flux and the only constant in my life right now is the certainty that change is a constant companion until I am able to settle into a rhythm that fits the person I am growing into. I’ve accepted that I was in a state of arrested development (because I’d willingly given up my life in order to adjust to the demands of my relationship with the ex) and because I’m no longer in that relationship, it’s as if the pause button has been pressed again and my life is moving forward again. To be fair, it’s probably not an accurate description of how my life is moving because I think my life pivoted when I was in my relationship and now that I’m not in it anymore, it’s pivoted again.
My life is pivoting again.
it certainly makes me wonder what my life will look like next year.
“Sometimes in life we need to sit with things for a minute, maybe on the fringe of things, not only to savor the wealth of the moment, but take a moment to figure out how to respectfully engage it.”
I’ve always laughed at this quote from Must Love Dogs. Lately it’s resonated for a different reason. Because I’ve actually found myself eating chicken over the sink! Ah the glamourous stylings of living alone!
I remembered the quote today because of a documentary I watched on Netflix – Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food. It’s just underlined the importance of food safety and being clean in the kitchen. If anything, I’m particularly thankful for my ex’s hyper-vigilance about being desperately clean when working with raw meats in the kitchen, in particular, chicken. I’m particularly fussy about washing fruit and veg, but I think being particularly aware about cross-contamination when dealing food has kept me safe in terms of food poisoning. That’s probably a whole other post in itself.
Yellywelly 