Saying goodbye is never easy.

I looked for you along the shore.

I saw your silhouette against the setting sun, in the distance
up along the strand where we used to walk our dogs.
Lifting my hand in salutation, my walk had just begun
yours was nearly over, but you never waved back.

I ambled for a while, gently wading among the lapping waves
bending my toes with each step amid the cool wet sand.
Occasionally, I looked up ahead for you, but you were gone
No sound, not even a distant yapping dog chasing some driftwood.

I found you in the beginning on this beach, staring out at the vastness.
Narratives so similar, I clung to you with desperate hope.
Your intellect is what attracted me, but your wit made me stay.
Your wit and the weight of your wounded soul.

I looked for you along the shore, but you were gone.
And when I reached the spot I thought you had been
There was no sign, nothing to mark your passing.
The surf and swells had wiped away even your footprints.
(For Ulla)

Is the glass half empty or half full?

(Picture courtesy of Uncommon chick)

Its been a while since I posted.  So much has changed and so much has remained the same.  The last time I wrote here, my son was ill in hospital.  Thankfully, his confinement there lasted just short of seven weeks and he’s on a cocktail of meds that are keeping him stable.  The night terrors have disappeared, the panic attacks are mostly gone and his mood is better.  I only said to himself the other night that it is really good to hear our son laugh again.  He has the kind of laugh where his very heart and soul come out his mouth and if you hear it, you can’t help but grin or laugh along with him. Especially now.  Now it just seems more precious.

The last year has been an unfamiliar ride, that’s for sure.  I was a passenger on this one, and all I could do was watch and try and guide him out of the cold dark place he was in.  That’s kind of scary.  That powerlessness, that sense of having no control whatsoever, no ability to help my child, someone I brought into this world. It was made all the worse I think, because I knew where he was.  I know that dark place intimately and its not somewhere we want our children to have to go.  For those of us who have children and struggle with any hereditary illness, that is always the worst fear isn’t it – that they will inherit our illness and it will destroy their lives.  Somehow we feel, or I felt at least, that he wouldn’t be strong enough to fight it. But he was, he is.  Because I also made him strong.  He is a part of me for sure and he has some of my infirmities but he also has some of my strengths.  The ability to pick himself up, dust himself off, face into the proverbial wind and put one step in front of the other and leave that dark place behind requires true grit. Strength with a capital S. And he has it in spades.  The doc says his depression may not be recurrent.   He may not have bipolar disorder, it could just have been a one off.  We won’t know that unless or until he has another bout.  And how great that will be.  Sounds strange writing it – but you guys know what I mean!  I would celebrate the fact my son only suffered depression once in his life, because that would be something to celebrate.  For sure….

Its coming up to the silly season and I know that for some this isn’t the best of times.  In fact, it can be the worst of times.  The dark evenings have a way of making their presence felt long before darkness actually descends.  The gloom and grey of the day is heavy.  The time that is so joyous for others can be torture for those who are separated from their families whatever the circumstances that brought about that divide – death, illness, distance.  Its not always the best of times for me, but this year I have much to celebrate.  This year I will take the wins where they come.  I will push away the black dog that normally tries to sit on my shoulder at this time of year and I will celebrate with gusto.  This year started off so badly and if I’m completely honest, it’s been a crappy year for so many reasons.  But it’s also been a year with so many things to celebrate. So I’m choosing to hang on to that.  My glass is half full this year.  It beats it being half empty any day…..

The Genetics of Depression

I sit down to write this with a heavy heart.  My beautiful almost 22 year old son is suffering with a major depressive disorder and has spent the last month in a psychiatric ward.  Watching him, I can only hold his hand, but knowing what he is feeling is tearing me apart from the inside out.  I know this isn’t about me, this is about him, but it doesn’t stop me feeling the most unbearable guilt that maybe it is my fault.  My own battles with depression have been passed on to my child.  My own demons are now his demons, because depression IS familial.  The triggers may be different, but the result; the not being able to see any reason to go on, is now his fight.  And he is fighting every day to stay here in this world.  I am so proud of the fact he was strong enough to realise he needed help and came to me, instead of the other alternative; that I may be sitting here writing about his death.  That is almost too much to bear, or think about.

I wrote a piece a year or so ago about the genetics of bipolar disorder and how I wouldn’t have changed anything at all.  But if I could I would take this from him in a heartbeat.  I am a survivor and have survived over two decades with this illness.  He is only starting out in his life and already is facing into it cobbled, with one hand tied behind his back because of the genetics of depression.  I could not imagine my life without him and his brother and sister in it, they are the joy, the sunshine in my life, but I didn’t realise at the time of writing the last piece that I would be sitting here in a years time feeling so utterly bereft.  Life is a crapshoot – he could have ended up with any number of genetic illnesses that I didn’t know as a mother I could have passed on.  The fact that my son ended up with depression makes me feel like it is my fault.  Again, I know it is not “my fault”, but it doesn’t mean I’m not blaming myself for it.  I was diagnosed with post natal depression after he was born.  It never left, instead it triggered my familial bipolar disorder.  My own maternal family is rife with it.  I didn’t know about the extent of it when I became a mother.  And now, I have passed it on.

Depression is an insidious illness.  It crosses all barriers.  It renders all those who struggle with it almost immobile with sadness, despair.  I didn’t realise until recently what it must have been like for my family, my own parents and my husband to simply hold my hand and watch me go through it time and time again when the depressive phase of bipolar hit me.  I have a new found appreciation of their loyalty and support and their pain.  Because that is what I am feeling now.  Pain; pain at watching him, pain at listening to his words, pain at the helplessness he and I feel for different reasons, at the utter lack of control I have to help him.  And the guilt.  I wear that like a cloak.  It is smothering out everything else.  I haven’t shared that with anyone.  Except here, where I know it will be understood.

I am trying to stay strong.  I am trying to push back the corners of my own sadness because going there when he needs me the most is not an option.  I tell everyone who asks I am fine, I am coping.  Inside I feel like I am falling apart.  But I don’t have that option.  Not right now. I put one foot in front of the other every day and when I visit him I paint a smile on my face and chatter about the most banal normal everyday things, I actually want to slap myself.  I am ‘hugger’.  I hug people.  When it is time to leave I cling on to him as if it will be the last time.  Leaving him there every day over and over is the one of the hardest things I have had to do.  But there he is safe.  And I walk through three locked doors and don’t look behind.

And I pray.  Which is kind of funny because I’m not a believer in a higher being of any faith.  But I have prayed to have this lifted from him.  I pray and feel guilty and drag myself through every day as I have done for the past month, and I will continue to do that till he is out.  But then what?  I don’t think I’ll ever sleep soundly again.  I know this is about him.  I know he is the one suffering here.  So why is it that I feel so damn guilty all the time.

CBT that wasn’t

I finished Cognitive behavioural therapy a few months back for the major anxiety I was trying and failing miserably to deal with in my life.  You could have knocked me over with a feather when the psychologist started the session with ‘not everything in your life is bipolar related and not every expression of anger or sadness is bipolar induced’.  In all my life, and in all the decades of therapy I have had, not once was I told I was allowed to be angry, or that some anger is justified and some sadness is just a result of my life experiences.  I shouldn’t have to be told that, it should have been obvious to me, but I obviously needed to hear it.

I have spent my life thinking everything I did, said, didn’t do, didn’t say, was all a factor of or symptom of my illness and that is just not the case.  It is very easy to decide to paint over everything in  my life with the bipolar brush.  I used it as an excuse, as a reason, as a symptom, as justification and explanation for every little thing in my life that wasn’t right or perfect.  But I have learned over the years that life isn’t perfect and neither am I.  And my illness is not responsible for every single thing that happens in my life.  Irrespective of my illness, I would have most definitely felt sad, angry, annoyed, bitter and euphoric over the course of my life because that IS life.  It is a journey, a shifting path where things don’t remain the same for long.  And that is okay.  Learning to be okay with that has taken my over two decades.  I can’t control everything.  I can only control my reaction to things, to people, to circumstances I feel are not good for me.  I can’t control what others think or do or say.  But I can choose to either react or not to react at all.  I say that and in my head I am screaming “do you know how hard it is to actually do that”…  screaming it.. because it is hard, because having bipolar complicates things, relationships, huge big ones and tiny ones that shouldn’t matter at all but somehow do.

I know I am oversimplifying things here.  I know that there are some who may read these words and think, ‘yeah, she’s finally lost it’, but I don’t think I have.  I think at last I finally get it.  I am allowed to be human without being judged as a nutter.  I try very hard to turn the other cheek when someone hurts me, I try very hard to approach life from the view point that if someone is really terrible to me, that they deserve another chance, and another and another, because no-one knows what’s going on behind closed doors or inside their head.  I have off days, I have off months and sometimes years – where would I be if no one gave me a second or third or forth chance.  Some people haven’t and my life is I believe emptier because of their absences.  I have lost some people who I considered closer than my own family because I was not strong enough to deal with them and I ran out of chances.  Others still just seemed to drift on out of my life and while it is sad, I’m not grieving over it.

I didn’t learn one damn coping strategy at CBT.  We never got around to breathing sessions, or sending your mind elsewhere or focusing on the positive or any such stuff like that.  But I learned something vastly more important.  I learned that it was okay to be emotional, that I can be emotional outside of my illness and it is not always as a result of my illness.  My awesome psychologist was just gorgeous.  She was such a warm person, I felt completely at ease within the first half hour.  After three months, I knew we were coming to the end of our sessions and each one was all the more bittersweet because of that.  And I know that as a client/patient/whatever you want to call me, I was forming an attachment to her, and even that was okay – understandable even.  I poured out my heart.  I was completely and utterly honest with her in a way I am not with other people, because there was no consequences to that honesty.  And had we met under different circumstances I think we may actually have been friends.  But what I did learn was ‘Hope‘  My awesome therapist gave me a courage to face the world differently, a faith in myself that I am human and its okay to be flawed, a desire to be better than I have been, more kind to myself and a trust in myself I have not had in a very long time.    My bipolar illness is still there – I am not cured, but she wasn’t dealing with that.  I will always have bipolar, I will always be ‘off’, but I learned to love myself a little better and that makes all the difference.

Hello…. It’s been a while….

I haven’t posted here for a while.  I was not sure what to say, what to repeat yet again, what to think about where I was, where I am and where I will be in the future.  Sometimes for those of us who struggle with any mental illness the future is bleak, sometimes we see it that way when it isn’t, and sometimes it is that way and we are simply calling it as we see it; at least that’s the way of things for me.  I have always said I can only say what I feel, what I know to be true for me, what I have experienced and all of that informs who I am at this particular point in time.  I may have taken a break from writing and posting  here, but I didn’t take a break from writing.  I poured myself into creative writing instead.  I joined a writing group in an effort to socialise and ‘broaden my horizons’, to have some sort of positive influence coming into my life.

“And, what do you do yourself?” was asked about a dozen times over the course of two months by members of the group and I actually didn’t know what to say.  What do I do?  Presently I am doing nothing.  I suppose the best way to describe it is that I am on disability, but to look at me I don’t look disabled and that raises more questions than I care to answer to strangers who will not be significantly involved in my life, ergo they don’t need to know my disability is of the mental kind.  I simply said ‘I am between jobs at the moment’.  I didn’t mention what I did before, who I was before and I didn’t mention what I will be doing into the future, because even I can’t answer that.  I’m a bit too young to say I’m retired, but that may be a better answer into the future.   If I say it with enough ‘force’ then that may be all I need to say.  “I’m retired – end of discussion”!

What I have learned at this group is that I enjoy creative writing.  I enjoy it a lot.  I have learned that some of this new group are ‘elitist’ and take their writing seriously; to them it’s not just a hobby, they want it to be a way of life.  Hell, I joined for a bit of companionship outside of the few close friends I have, to expand my horizons a bit and to get me out of the damn house.  But I found myself for the first time in a long time, unwilling to fill in the blanks for anyone.  Before I used to tell people I would be working with that I was bipolar, as easily as if I was saying I had cornflakes for breakfast.  “Would you like a cuppa, and by the way I’m bipolar…..”

Recently though I couldn’t find the words, nor the will to explain it – and this is a ‘first’ in a very long time.  I went out of my way to not say anything about it.  Unemployment has been high for the past few years here, so my saying I was between jobs presently was accepted freely, without follow-up needed.  The little tilt of the head with an accompanying ‘ah’, was all that was said.  And so I left it that way..

I’m not ashamed of what I have. I am not in control of that, it is something that I suffer from, that I struggle with.  I don’t choose to be depressed or manic, but people sometimes don’t make a distinction between what I ‘have’ and who I ‘am’.  And presently, I couldn’t be arsed with all that.   I get lost in my own world when I write and I am enjoying that distraction; the weaving of a story, the development of a character in a very short space of time and the conclusion then, with either a twist or an anticipated end.  The elitists in the group pick my stuff to pieces – constructive criticism they call it. In my head I am shouting; “ah here, just feck off”,  on the outside I just nod and smile instead, reminding myself that this group is getting me out of the house…..   Ultimately, this writing is for me and me alone and as I am acutely aware, I am my own worst critic at times, to the point that my self worth is non-existent.  I survived that – I can survive them masticating my stuff to pieces.  Now that gives me a great sense of achievement and I haven’t felt that in a long time…….

There is no such thing as recovery from bipolar disorder; only an acceptance of how your life has changed.

‘Recovery’ means a lot of different things to different people. It even has different meanings depending on the ailment or illness to which it refers. Recovery from a bout of the flu, for instance, will leave a person weakened, but ultimately there will be no lasting or long-term effects as a result of their short illness. Recovery from an operation can be a slow process (depending on the severity of the operation), but wellness can be fully restored, especially if it is something routine – in fact at times wellness can be enhanced as a result of the operation itself. Recovery for an alcoholic or drug addict means being able to stay away from the substance that had them addicted in the first place, so is all about personal willpower and overcoming those addictions rather than any lasting ‘recovery’ – hence the phrase a ‘recovering alcoholic/drug addict’. But there is no doubt that their lives are greatly enhanced (excuse the pun here) by the absence of those substances from it. Recovering from cancer means being in “remission” and having your fingers crossed that you won’t get a secondary cancer somewhere else or that the initial cancer won’t reappear five or ten years down the road. Recovery can be complete but most cancer survivors will tell you they never quite lose the fear of re-occurrence, even decades later.

Recovery in terms of mental illness, especially bipolar disorder, is a fallacy. There is no ‘recovery’. There is simply a reduction or decrease in the severity of symptoms from time to time and somewhere along the line, a loss of ourselves piece by piece, episode by episode, whether that be through the illness itself or indeed the ‘cure’. Irrespective of the severity of the symptoms, and that is such a subjective and inflammatory thing to say, because while there are ‘degrees’ of severity and degrees of symptoms, there are not ‘degrees’ of mental illness. No one ever says “Mr Smith down the road is a quarter mental”. You either struggle with mental illness or you don’t. Degrees don’t and shouldn’t come in to it – for any form of mental illness. That is so degrading on a personal level, but it also shows an ignorance for the illness of bipolar and its effects on the individual struggling with it. I can say this because at one time I felt this way. I felt my bipolar disorder wasn’t “as bad” as ‘a.n.others’, so why should I be feeling the way I was. I didn’t need to be hospitalized, therefore I wasn’t ‘as sick’ as someone else. I came to realize the error of my ways and also to realize it was the depressive side of my bipolar disorder making me feel so shitty about feeling depressed – but not depressed enough!

So, it is my belief that ‘recovery’ is never ‘fully’ achieved by someone struggling with bipolar disorder. Please don’t get me wrong, of course those of us struggling with mental illness can lead productive lives, have loving relationships with spouses/partners, family and children, keep and sometimes indeed excel in a fulfilling job, be strong independent proud people; but not with the label ‘recovered’ attached to us, we can’t. “I’m a recovered mental(ist)” is not something one would say at a job interview. If you go online and try to research up recovery + mental illness you will be showered with a plethora of articles some as asinine as espousing that the key factor that determines who recovers and who doesn’t most often is the willingness and ability of the person to engage in his or her own healing, and offering ways to become ‘stronger’ in order to do this. I don’t believe that, mainly because the problem with that hypothesis is when we are struggling, when we are either hypomanic or depressed, we don’t have either the willingness or the ability to engage in our own healing process. When I am well, I feel I don’t need it – I’m stable at that moment!

There are also very dangerous editorials (albeit few and far between thankfully) that say we should be medicine free to be completely recovered. They offer alternative treatments and ways to get ourselves medicine free and therefore ‘well’ and ‘recovered’ using light therapies, psychoanalysis, diet and exercise. This is an extremely irresponsible and reckless position to take for any form of mental illness. There is no doubt, all of these therapies work, but alongside medication, not instead of it.

I can only speak to my experiences. I can only speak to the veracity of what I am about to say as it pertains to my illness. With each ‘attack’, with each swing, with each episode, I feel like a piece of me gets lost. I don’t come back from the mania or depression as strong as before. I don’t come back as confident as I was before. I don’t feel as capable, as independent or as ‘bright’ as before. Somewhere along the line my brain has been enveloped by a fog that never leaves. It’s a fog that thickens when I am struggling badly, it stops me functioning almost completely on any full and real level with the world outside my home. It makes me withdraw further and further into myself because that is where it is safest. My thoughts, when I can form them are not coherent, not fluid; it’s like I have to wade through quicksand to get to what I want to say, to wrap my tongue around the words that at other times flow so freely. I used to be extremely quick witted. My significant other has witnessed and too readily comments on my ‘slowed’ pace these days. When I am balanced or going through a period of ‘wellness’, (lets call it that for want of a better phrase) the fog is simply like a haze, a mist. It is there but it is more indistinct. I suppose the best way to describe it is to say I feel slightly muffled instead of engulfed by it.   I know everyone changes with the years. I know that a persons’ personality does not stay as it was when they were in their teens. I know my character has changed, my personality has been weathered by the years, yes it has been altered by my experiences and also damaged by my mental illness.

Depression by its very nature robs me of my abilities to form coherent thoughts, to think in a clear and concise fashion and to function well in society. Simply getting up out of bed is a big deal. Deciding to take a shower can seem a humongous task and actually doing it can take all my reserves for that day alone. My depression can sometimes be measured by my actual smelliness. But when my depression lifts and yet the fog remains, that is very difficult to deal with. I am acutely aware in a way I was not when depressed that my ‘abilities’ are limited, my memory patchy and my clear-headedness isn’t actually quite so clear after all.

Memory deficits as a result of the medication to alleviate the symptoms of bipolar disorder for me are significant. Of course I can form short -term memories. If you ask me what I did yesterday, of course I can recall it. But if you ask me what I did on a particular holiday a month or two or six months ago, and I can give you only generalized answers. I cannot recall specific details of day-to-day events even just a few weeks later. I cannot recall conversations I have had with my children, sometimes on issues of importance.  If I don’t write down appointments or events to take place in simply a few weeks time, I will forget them.   Learning to cope with this type of memory loss is tricky. Unfortunately because the medication is lifelong, so is the memory problem.

With each ‘episode’ of mania or depression I have survived, I believe a bit more of my mental acuity disappears. My memory becomes a bit worse, my brain becomes just ever so slightly more ‘fogged’. If you didn’t know me, you may not realize anything much is wrong with me; I look normal, I can shake your hand, discuss the weather and pass the time of day with you. But I feel ‘lessened’, I feel slower, I feel pickpocketed. Because this illness is a sly one. As with a thief who has pilfered your pockets, you shrug off the loss and move on, so it is with my bipolar disorder. I shrug off my loss, and learn to live with what is to come…..

Cognitive Impairment in Patients With Bipolar Disorder: Effect on Psychosocial Functioning | Psychiatric Times.

Depression/Bipolar Disorder makes you FAT!

Yeah – there is nothing like an over-sensationalized headline to grab the auld attention! But, despite my joviality, I am thoroughly depressed and completely rotund! Think Mrs. Clause corpulent and you probably have a good idea of what it is like to try to fit into my clothes, to look in my mirror and see me looking back and be so utterly disheartened that you can almost feel yourself giving up on the spot. Welcome to my world. Welcome to the world of where I am now. And how in high heaven did I end up here?

Depression makes you fat say some experts, while others say that the obesity comes first, then comes the depression. No, it’s the medications for depression say even more surveys. And then there are the experts who say that it is a combination of perhaps all three; you get depressed, then fat, then take meds and get even more fat! Yipee, what a wonderful merry-go-round we have.
Whatever the reason, obesity is not a good thing under normal circumstances for anyone. But combine that with the crippling low self-esteem that is part and parcel of bipolar disorder (or any depression) and you end up with a very bad cocktail altogether.
Does Depression Cause Weight Gain or Weight Loss? What’s the Depression/Weight Connection?.
Obesity, Genetics, Depression and Weight Loss | Psych Central.

I have never lost weight when I struggled with an ‘active’ phase of my bipolar, active here for the uninitiated means that I am actively depressed – or actively breathing. (To me, sometimes they are one and the same.) I’m not one of those people who can’t/don’t eat at all and can lose like 40 lbs in a month; but wow, what that would do for my self esteem!! For me it is almost the opposite; I can’t stop eating.

I comfort eat, I stuff biscuit after biscuit into my mouth and I don’t even taste them. It is a reflex – an urgent ‘need’ almost. I need carbs, and lots of them. Sometimes I can find myself eating without even remembering going to the press and getting the ‘food’ – now that is FUBAR. If it is not biscuits, it is crisps, or popcorn, or whatever is handy; crackers will do just as fine, or an open box of any type of breakfast cereal. It is the act of eating, not necessarily what I am eating, that is the big issue. Sometimes I do it in secret but I would do/will do it all day long. And then I become just enormous. There is no other way of saying it. Clothes get tighter and I will not quite waddle around the house, but I certainly don’t spring on light footsteps either. I am awkward, bulky and clumsy. I have to wear what I term ‘sloppy’ clothes because that is all that will fit and of course, they don’t do anything for that image in the mirror either. They are shapeless, predominantly black and sometimes just downright ‘ugly’.  And I hate myself for it. Of course then there is the shuddering-to-a standstill-libido as a result of the obesity/depression/medication/crushing-lack-of
–self-esteem, but no one seems to want to discuss that. So I will mention it in passing only and leave it at that. Except that it is a big deal – it is a big deal for me. Sex drive for all of us is natural. So when it gets up and leaves, it is a big deal. (‘nuff said….)
Depression: Effects on Your Sex Life and How to Increase Libido.

I know all the things I should be doing… I know that I should eat healthily, take plenty of exercise, play with my pet, cut down on carbs, fat and sugars, oh, and stop drinking caffine (well, now that is never going to happen!!), get enough sunlight, (I can’t control the sun, or the seasons, or the lack of sunlight when it’s supposed to be summer – but I could get a light box!), make time for relaxation, do something creative just for me, take time for myself, all the stuff I about and haven’t fitted into my days. I don’t do things just for me (except this blog; that is just for me).   I only have a three legged cat, so she’s a bit limited on the walk end of things and anyway, I can’t really take a cat out for a walk – but if I could that would get me my fresh air and my playtime with a pet in one go.
But I could do lots of other things to help myself – I just need to get myself motivated…. Which brings me right back to almost square one…. Depression robs me of that, before I take my first step out of my bed every morning…………

I don’t have time for this.

Doctors, therapists, self help books all say the same thing: “make time for yourself”, “treat yourself”. What?? I don’t have time for that.

Life for the most part is too busy, money is too scarce to flash, and I am just too damned tired and uninspired to think of something that doesn’t either need lots of time, or lots of cash.

What do they even mean when they say make time for yourself.

Time for me used to mean 15 minutes locked in the toilet where my little ones couldn’t get to me. They could however knock on the door over and over… so it kinda defeated the purpose of getting some peace… How I came to hate the word “Mam” at one point in my life… but that is just being selfish.

Time for me then became a half hour when I would go into my bedroom and lie on the bed and take some ‘time’ to myself; before the onslaught of dinners and homework, after my days work that is. It would be half an hour to chill, to try and put away the stresses of my job and calm my mind so that I had space in there for the kids and their day, and their homework and anything else that came along. When you have three dyslexics at home, homework takes a long time…

Time for me then became the calm before the storm – the journey home in the car from work. When I would walked through my front door, that was when my twadults (my nickname for my teen- adults) would either assault me with their grievances, their problems, their arguments or simply just their bad humour. (Oh, and there was a hell of a lot of that – still is sometimes…)

Time then became endless as my ability to work, to function stopped. The black dog came to stay at my house two years ago, and time wasn’t an issue at all. I had lots of time, and nothing I could do with it. Nothing..

But I don’t have time for that! I don’t have time to be where I am. I don’t have time to be me, not this me; I don’t have the exuberance of youth, I don’t have any appreciation for who I see in the mirror, I don’t have any damn energy! But by the same token, I don’t have time not to have any time….

I need to make time for me, I need to encourage my brain back to normal activity, I need to take exercise, I need to do something just for me. That is probably the most important thing: I NEED to do something just for me. My life can not always be about other people, because if it is, then I won’t be a happy bunny – and I say that without prejudice!!

But by not making any time, I am not allowing myself to be important in my own life. And that really is the crux isn’t it. My sense of value! My sense of my own value!! And therein lies the rub; (or as Hamlet would say ‘there lies the rub’)!

So, yes, its over to me. It’s over to me to make time for myself, to make me important in my own life, to increase my sense of worth, to give myself a good kick up the arse and tell myself to get a move on…. Life is ticking by, I need to banish the black dog from my house and lift myself up, give myself time and and all will be right with the world, my world!! Oh, were it that simple eh?

I’m here but seriously lacking in abilities right now…

Hello??…..  Anybody in there…..????

I stare at my screen and have absolutely nothing to say.  (Scratch that, – I have plenty to say, but just no words at present.)  I always have lots to say, but it’s mostly for myself.  It’s my rhetoric, my ramblings, my screechings and my whimperings.

But for the most part, the last few weeks I’ve been dry.  Dry as a bone – except when I get inspiration from other peoples posts.  I think, “hey, why didn’t I write that?”  or “Yeah, I feel that way too but what that blogger has said is just so eloquent I can’t pen my own scratchings on that subject! it would just be inadequate”.

Oh, the devil of comparison.

We’re riding that beast again are we?

And we’re reaching the top of the rollercoaster oh, so, slowly….

The knot in the pit of my stomach is the wrench before I am pulled over.  Yeah, I been here before – on this particular ride..

How utterly wonderful to know that is what this is, how desperately dreadful to know what’s ahead…

I just wish for once, someone would change the ride and give me a surprise.  Now that would be nice…!!

What If I knew I was beautiful…..

Words to live by: