Category: Uncategorized
Taking Time Out
It is important, that in this world that doesn’t seem to stop, that you take time for yourself. Time away from your computer. Time away from work. Time away from the routine that can grate on your nerves. It feels, since lockdown happened last year, that everything feels so much more intense. People are angry, as normality appears to be keeping socially distant from us. Folk are very intolerant to views that are not their own, and as a result, give out underserved abuse.
So, I had 2 weeks booked off work. A holiday which was supposed to be spent in Cyprus, with my family. But, was cancelled, like everything else, due to Coronavirus. I kept the time off booked, because I still needed to use those holidays. So, I didn’t plan anything. I was worried, as when my brain senses no plans, it seems to go into over drive, and my mental health is atrocious.
My main focus was to just relax. Take joy in watching tv, or going for a walk. Not to have a reason for anything. Previously, I would say I wanted to read so many books, create a certain number of artworks, and lose so much weight. This has ended up with my going back to work more stressed, than I was before. Which kind of defies the point of being off work in the first place.
So, I worked hard at doing nothing. I ordered too many take aways, drank too much alcohol, and got up around noon. It was good. Maybe not the healthiest for my body, but for the first time in a long time, my mind was able to recharge. For the first time, in a long time, I feel light. I feel so super relaxed. And ready to go back to work, tomorrow.
Oops
I forget to write.
That’s nothing. Sometimes I forget to do basic things like clean up after myself and basic hygiene.
I forget because I sit and stair at a wall. As if the seams of the wallpaper are going to give me the answers to life. Which would maybe be true if there was conscious thought involved. There isn’t.
A glance at my phone, can tell me that time has passed, sometimes hours. But when I think, it’s like someone has an eraser and just rubbed out what was there.
It’s frustrating, because I can’t rationalise what happens. And that causes my anxiety to spike. Causes me to worry that I’ve done something stupid.
Luckily, I am normally alone when this happens. Staring at my tv, although the screen is blank. I am also sitting, which is also good. It seems to be when my mind is not busy. It’s like it switches off.
It is annoying. I really don’t know how to make sense of how my mind works.
Because half the time, I don’t think my mind works at all.
Escape
I have lived in the same area, since I was a child. I have been told that I need to ‘move somewhere else’. As if you can only experience life, if you have paid stupidly high rent for a teeny flat in a city. I will scoff at that, but at the same time, seeing friends buy houses, get married, and have kids, makes me sad. I work hard, but I stay with my parents, in my 30s. It’s very depressing. I have worked constantly since I was 16, and have tried previously tried college. I have struggled with my mental health, but ignored it for many years. And these feelings, of seeing friends ‘do more’, made me feel worse. I look at my life and see that I have wasted my time. Wasted a life. And that’s where depression takes hold. That if my life was worthy, I’d be in a different place.
Sometimes, I need to get away from these thoughts. And I do this by getting out the house, going for a drive, or for a walk. The good thing, about living where I do, is that there are so many good places to explore. I live on the Fife Coast, just across from Edinburgh, and I can easily get to the sea, or to the countryside. I can find peace, in walks on my own. With nothing but my own thoughts, where I can try and get my broken mind in some kind of order.
The thing is. Sometimes my over nostalgic brain would see any changes that have happened, and feel sad about them. Which, if you live in the town you grew up in, happens quite a lot. Walking down a set of stairs, can make you feel quite sad. Today, for example, I went into the town’s public park, somewhere where I went with my parents as a child, and friends as I got older, but hadn’t been in so long. And it changed. Not really for the better.
The park felt a little unloved. Paint peeling off benches, broken slabs, empty planting areas, it seems a little neglected. Which maybe rings a little too true to me, in the metaphorical sense. It was peaceful, which is what I needed, but that was it. I am like that, functional, but not really making any marks.
Sometimes, usually after a few deep breathes, you can see things you have forgotten. The things that you haven’t noticed for years, or maybe haven’t seen before. The things you look at ‘through new eyes’, that look completely different.
I started thinking today, that age seems to make a person more cynical. It begins to get harder to see past the negative stuff, because that’s what you’ve come to expect. So, maybe we need to remind ourselves to keep a part of a childish outlook. See things in a hopeful way, and look past the bad bits to see something positive. But that is hard.
Well Read
I have been an active user on the internet since my school days. Back when MySpace was huge and every person has a GeoCities page with sparkly letters everywhere. I used forums to share my life with people I never met. It felt like a safe space, a place where I could be the kind of person I wanted to be. I never knew anyone interested in alternative music, or that were questioning their sexuality, so the internet helped me find people I could connect with.
Recently, social media has become king. Where MySpace was a thing for young people and a new way for them to connect with bands. Facebook has become a site for everyone, where parents, babies and pets all have pages. Where algorithms decide what people see, and people share everything as fact. And when you become overwhelmed by your own life, seeing the most ridiculous nonsense being shared, just to start arguments, sometimes it’s best to switch off.
Which is what I have been doing.
I have been reading a lot. I have had a massive too-read pile for a long time, I am good at buying books. And to put down my phone, and get lost in the pages of a book, has been very therapeutic. I have got books in both audible and on my kindle, that are still part-way done, but I have been struggling to focus on them. My brain gets anxious, especially when a device like my phone is concerned. I have found that physically holding a book, and feeling how far I am going, actually helps. I get a joy out of physical books that I don’t get out of ebooks. And at the moment, it has been great to focus on something that is separate from the internet connected everything else.
I have a target of reading 30 books this year, and I am on number 15. I am at the stage where I am reading a book a week, and it has helped me immensely. I am splitting books into what I will keep post-lockdown, and what I will take to the charity shop when they start accepting things again. I need to de-clutter my life, so this is a good way of working my through the waist high pile of books I have in my room. I would like to share reviews on here, but I am not the most articulate. Because I try to review every book I read. I do write them over on my Goodreads so that you can look there, if interested. If I get a little more articulate, I may also post reviews here. But I don’t know if that is interesting though.
Lockdown On Productivity
The very word, lockdown, is something that most people are sick of. Since the the middle of March, many of us have found ourselves doing everything from home. Not meeting friends. No social activities. Maybe not even leaving the house for work. Something, no matter how much we love our homes, becomes suffocating.
It is for the health of those around us, that this lockdown will continue for the foreseeable future. And, the majority of people can see and understand this, and so will try their best to stay at home as much as they can. My mental health relies on me being busy, and it is hard when I can’t do that.
I am a person who loves my own company. I like going out, wandering around on my lonesome. If my mind was hitting a brick wall, I could pull myself out of bed and go for a drive. Go somewhere else for a walk. I am finding it very difficult, mentally, as my coping mechanisms have been taken away. The ability to meet with people who help, can’t happen. It seems rather selfish, I think, complaining about things, when I still go out to work, and I live with people. But that feeling of being selfish just makes things worse. It becomes harder to deal with.
One of my last posts was about how all I focus on are things like computer games. Well, I haven’t even been able to focus on that. I feel like I am doing so little, that I shouldn’t bother. Everything I write or do, is just shit. Rubbish. And, although I know it’s just my brain and it’s skewed way of thinking, it doesn’t make things easier. I spend a lot of time, just feeling sad. Just lying on my bed, staring into space as the time disappears.
It’s times like this where I feel like I am wasting my life. But then, a lot of people are feeling like that. The months of 2020 are (slowly) passing, and everyone is standing still. Things aren’t happening, for anyone, and it’s quite scary.
**Apologies if this post seems a bit odd. It has been in my drafts for weeks and been edited at least 5 times. But today I finished it and decided to post. It’s a reminder not to give up, even when stuff seems a bit hopeless**
Work In Progress
I explained in earlier posts, that one of my aims for 2020, was to try and be a lot more creative. Something that always helps me boost my creativity is to ‘refresh’ things. I feel like it allows me to mentally draw a line under what has happened already, and focus on what is coming next. It is not foolproof, and sometimes I still struggle, but it is always worth a try.
Over the next week or so, this blog is going to be changing a wee bit. I am going to try and find a new layout that suits what I need, and personalise it a wee bit. I think that refreshing online accounts is always a good thing. It also means that if you don’t feel like you use a service or site anymore, you can get rid of it. Lessen the load, if you know what I mean. This is all the more important, if you read the reports on how so much social media, and web services, are causing people anxiety due to the pressure of ‘trying to keep up’.
Luckily, keeping this blog is something that actually helps me mentally. I don’t think many people I know actually read it, so there is no pressure. I can write honestly, which helps document my journey. I have kept this blog for years, so I do feel that it deserves some TLC every now and then. To be honest, when I fell out with the graphic design stuff, a few years back, I started to find being creative so much harder. I felt that the stuff that came freely to me, wasn’t good enough, and it broke my flow. If that makes sense.
So, if things look a bit odd over the next week or so, that is all it is. A wee freshen up.
A Good Bye
Goodbye is hard to say.
It is these days, anyway.
In childhood, goodbye was never really goodbye. There was the promise that it was more of a ‘see you later’ than actually parting ways forever. You’d see the person at the next break, after school, at the play park, or even in a few days. Most of the people you leave, you will see again, and the phrase ‘goodbye’ doesn’t feel negative.
However, as you get older, the promise of seeing people once you’ve said farewell, isn’t always so certain. People start to leave your life, and they never come back. It becomes harder and harder to say goodbye. Because the promise that was once there, the idea you’d always see the person again, has gone.
Goodbye mean last forever. Until the time comes that it does.
Accidents Happen
I am very accident prone. I can trip up over thin air, and my grip has always been really poor (I blame my small hands). Most of the things that happen in my life, seem to be things that that have ‘fallen into’ without any real thought. These tend to be situations that fare better than the things I actually plan.
But I am learning that accidents and mistakes happen. They are what makes up the experience of life (or so people have told me).
Jane Fonda
You don’t learn from successes; you don’t learn from awards; you don’t learn from celebrity; you only learn from wounds and scars and mistakes and failures. And that’s the truth.
National Coming Out Day
Today is a day where a lot of members of the LGBTQ+ community tell their’coming out’ story to the world. It is to encourage other people to feel safe in telling the world about their sexuality. And, as a person who knows how hard it is to try and tell people, this is a good thing. And the day should be celebrated, that people should be who they are without any negative results from that.
For myself, I have found it hard. I identify as a lesbian, I like girls, and have never really been interested in boys, past that small period of experimentation as a teenager. A lot of the people I hang out with, just picked up that I was gay. Which is nice, because that way, you don’t have to cross any barrier, its just there and nothing changes. It’s hard to type this, because I have never felt that I wanted to publicise it, in any way. It would be different if I was in a serious relationship, but I am not.
When I was younger, I had this thought that I shouldn’t expect anyone else to love me, if I don’t love myself. A thought that has stuck with me for a very long time. Looking back, I think that I believed this because of my own lack of self-belief. After speaking to a therapist, it seems that a lot of my problems with mental health and how I view myself, has come from that part of my life, when I started struggling with school and realised that, unlike my friends, I wasn’t going to achieve what I wanted. And I kind of put my head down, and just tried to get on with it. But, as time went on, my self-worth has got less and less. Which is sad.
So, I went out with boys and girls for a while, because as well as my mental health, I was also struggling with my sexuality. Part of me felt so different from everyone around me already, I didn’t know if defining my sexuality would actually make things worse. As it happened, it didn’t, but it also didn’t make things any easier. I did date a bit, but nothing has ever stuck. And, it feels like my brain needs a definate answer of why nothing seems to last, and it goes back to the thought of ‘noone can love you, if you don’t love you’. And I can’t say when the last time I loved myself was. So I have held back.
I haven’t really publicly ‘came out’ because, at the moment, that isn’t the thing which is suffocating me. And, it’s actually okay for me. I mean, who I date, or love, is something that is personal to me. In fact, there some people who may read this, and this will be the first they have heard about me being gay. Because my sexual orientation is just part of who I am, I never thought about sitting people down, and telling them about it. I think I am very fortunate though, I have good people around me, who are very loving and have a relaxed attitude towards a lot of things.
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