I'm baaaack (again)

Life over the last year has been pretty fraught, but isn't it always? I feel like I just lurch from one crisis to the next. Not that these crises are always terrible, or necessarily negative at all, just times when life requires more than I thought I had to give.

There are tough times for a whole bunch of people - a dear friend had a rather serious breast cancer scare and another close friend's preschooler had open heart surgery and yet another one of my closest people has a horrible infection that is proving very difficult to treat. There are others having dramas in their personal relationships and tough times with their kids. I don't think I dwell on this stuff too much, but I'm conscious of all of it all the time, sending my love and good thoughts out to these people I love that are having difficult times.

I have also been the recipient of lots of love and good thoughts - as many people know Sanjay and I are in the process of divorcing. I'm not going to go into detail here and now, except to say it's been a long time coming, it hasn't been an easy decision for us to make and that our focus now is on the kids and making sure that we do what we have to do without too much negative impact on them.

This week I'm back at uni, which is great (structure to my weeks! learning is fun! closer to graduating!), but increases the stress level (assignments! classes, readings and self doubt!) and I received a challenge to write a bit more so I will be procrastiblogging a bit over the next few weeks. I want to write about nursing and bullying on prac, and how it relates to feminism and the performance of gender identity. I'm doing a mental health subject, one on the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, I had a crappy time on my last placement and I have just finished Clementine Ford's 'Fight Like A Girl' so it's all swishing together in my head in some pretty interesting ways.

Tanya asked what an Atheist Hindu was...

..and I told her I didn't really know, but I would try and think it through. She asked in the context of me claiming that my Pundit acknowledging 'Atheist Hindu' as a thing. It's something I've been thinking about a bit recently, as I try to make sense of the difficulties I face and when I revel in feeling like I am fulfilling my dharma as I study nursing and raise my kids. I was brought up by a non practicing C of E father, a mother lapsed from her strict Methodist upbringing to vague eastern hippiehood and I went to an anthroposophical school. I was not destined to get all fundamental about any religion, but to give all of them a certain grudging respect.

I don't think there is a divine plan, or really a divine at all. I don't believe in anything supernatural, but I know there is stuff that science can't explain (yet). I suspect our minds are more powerful than we give them credit for.

Hindu gods can be approached as a manifestation of a feeling, or a desire, or even perhaps a social construct. As such I give a respectful little (mental) nod and a wink to Ganesha (Remover of Obstacles) before I start some new endevour. In distracted moments I wonder how I would depict Saraswati (Wisdom and Learning) if I were creating a likeness of her (traditionally she has a musical instrument, but that doesn't work for me). Really what I'm pondering in these moments is what obstacles I may have to overcome or the nature of wisdom

I look at my life in terms of fulfilling my Dharma (looking for, and following, my life's path). I don't believe in literal reincarnation, but I do believe that in so far as our actions impact the world, those impacts can easily last beyond our deaths and they are something to be mindful of.

Please, I know very little about Hinduism really, so standard disclaimer: all errors are entirely my own. 

If you aren't comfortable with me claiming Hindu status then I am perfectly comfortable sticking with Atheism

Homework

I've had a shitty week. Lots of tears and gritted teeth but a lot better after seeing the compassionate Dr S. He told me I should be writing stuff down more (I think he meant writing good stuff about myself down so I could go back to it in moments of self-loathing) but making notes for myself and diary writing have always had a whiff of make-work about them to me, so I will write here. Also, writing good stuff down about myself makes me nauseous, so I'm going to write other stuff.

Dr S asked me where I thought my crazies came from and I have no doubt that for me there is a genetic and environmental component. I am not a geneticist, psychologist or neurologist. I have not seen inside anyone else's brain and I have not studied theories of the mind. I have a working knowledge of undergrad sciences, a smattering of anatomy and physiology, and I've read some pop-psychology books, including the wonderful 'Brain that Changes Itself' by N. Doidge about brain plasticity. And I know that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar. All that being said I want to explore where my crazy comes from (disclaimers: This is about me, not you. I'm not a doctor. Blah blah blah).

Lets see how far I can stretch my little marble-run analogy. At my conception genes were reconfigured and I got my own set of blueprints, part of this was the plans for an amazing marble run that would become mind. Genetics used the building blocks available, from my mother, to build the marble run. It was so complex that a marble could barely get from top to bottom - too many options, too many connections, inefficient. But genetics had a plan - it knew that after it had built this complex structure, it would start getting used, and as that happened the connections that weren't useful would start getting dismantled, or at least have blockers installed so marbles (thoughts) would take the more efficient way, thus the thing could actually work (so far this is OK, it's just my understanding of basic neuroscience). Unfortunately, in the plan for my mind, my genetics included a bunch of things that are not very helpful. Some were probably included in case they could be helpful and some are probably attached to other things that are helpful in ways that I certainly don't understand. 

For instance worrying is a useful adaptation. It allows us to plan for the future and keep ourselves safe. Anxiety and panic attacks are unhelpfully overdoing worry, and making it difficult to manage normal things, like putting on pants and getting out of the house. I have always thought that anxiety and creativity were also linked - as in, you have to be creative to make up that many scary scenarios in a mundane world - but apparently research backs up my hunch (admittedly, I haven't read the research paper, but that article makes me feel like I have a superpower!).

More unsettling than the anxiety is the depression. Why did the plan include whole sections of the marble run that for some reason colours all marbles blue and slows them right down, takes them in circles and drops the marbles off the edge of the table rather than neatly into the velvet lined box? Why weren't those bits pruned off in the early days? Worse than that, some of those blue sections were somehow encouraged by my early experiences. Some of the splits where a marble can either roll, unimpeded and cheerful, to its destination or head down the blue and tangled depressive path have had the happy option blocked. 

Triggers? For some people, healthy people, who maybe only have one tiny offshoot of 'blue' can weather life's ups and downs. They may get depressed, but there is usually a trigger - major life changes, losses, identity changes, that kind of thing. Once they recover, and they almost always do, their depression is in their past. For me the triggers are often untraceable, some tiny switch that was triggered long ago that means that random marbles will end up in the tangled mire of depression. I have major depressive disorder and my depression is always in my future as well as my past and when it is really bad it is almost impossible to live with (as a friend said to me once, urging me to get some help - you have an illness that is trying to kill you). Sometimes there are triggers for me - lifestyle factors like alcohol (specifically binge drinking), lack of exercise, toxic people, being in situations where I feel my options are curtailed or (more usually) a combination of the above can be problematic. Add normal stressors on top of those things and my thinking can go off the rails.

The next question becomes how to manage things when the marbles are travelling through a blue section, is it possible to avoid the blue sections or can I make the blue sections less blue or even unblock routes so the marbles can exit the rough parts. Sometimes I can avoid triggers (still doing 100 days sober without any problems, still having issues with exercise), often I can use CBT style thinking to interrupt my patterns and divert a marble* sometimes therapy can help divert those marbles. Medication helps massively to keep my brain chemistry in order. Hopefully this combination, including having to mess around to get a good stable medication regime going can help me get back on track and then stay there.

..... and if you made it this far you deserve a punchline - now you know why I smirk whenever I talk about losing my marbles ;-)

Question of the week: is it weird to send your therapist your blog posts?

* Like yesterday when I attempted my clinical skills exam - I did something wrong and need to resit, but managed to halt my catastrophising feelings of 'I swabbed a wound wrong, clearly I'm not cut out for nursing. I can't contribute to society I may as well be dead' and get back to 'drat, I have to re-sit the test on Friday')

Group Therapy - R U OK DAY?

**TRIGGER WARNING - discussion of mental illness, anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts**

For those that don't know, these recent posts have been coming to you from a nice private psychiatric hospital. This came about because after fronting to my psychiatrist appointment and sitting there for my allotted time sobbing about how it was all too much and too rotten, and how it wasn't really and I hated myself for feeling this way because I knew that nothing had really changed, but my feelings had. I live with a fair amount of background anxiety and depression, and it had slid into a major depressive episode without me really realizing it. Happily, we got to it before it got to it's worst (I know how bad it gets, and this was not a 'rock bottom' scenario). Anyhow, my meds have been sorted, we have a plan for care going forward and I've had great care from the psychiatrist, psychologist and nursing staff and, despite some trepidation, I'm ready to go home tomorrow.

Why start talking about this now? Good question, thanks for asking! Today is R U OK day. I have had some wonderful people (friends, family and professionals) recognize that sometimes I am most definitely NOT OK and as a direct result I have been able to get treatment. I'm now at a point where I am more-or-less OK, and more to the point, comfortable sharing my experience. My hope is that there will be a critical mass of stories so experiences of mental illness are normalized and personalized to such an extent that getting treatment will be standard. In doing this I want to in no way diminish the horrible suffering caused by mental ill-health, I just want to remind people in pain that they have the right to seek treatment, whether they are currently coping or not.

Here is the short version: Ever since I can remember I have had periods of depression and anxiety. I started thinking about and planning suicide at eight. I had good days and bad days, good years and bad years. I got a formal diagnosis in my twenties (I went home and cried about that. For a week). I had postnatal depression after the birth of my first child (or was it just another depressive episode? I'll never know). When it I started to worry about my anxiety and depression effecting my kids I got serious about treatment and since then I've had several years of therapy and about five years of medication. Now I can add a few new medications and a short inpatient stay to that list. Going forward there will be more therapy, including DBT, a few lifestyle changes (including more exercise and 100 days dry) and of course, meds.

The other big one is how I explain this stuff to my kids? At 9 and 6 my two boys know there is something going on, and I respect them too much to lie to them. At the same time I definitely don't want to upset them so I explained, just two nights before I came in to hospital, that I was sick. I told them that last time I was sick it was my tummy, and I went in to hospital and when my belly was well enough I came home. This time it was my thinking and feeling that was the problem so I was going to a hospital that would help me get my thinking and feeling back to normal. They seemed OK about it at the time and they have been OK about it since - a lot more understanding than most adults, to be fair. In fact the little one got a lift home with a friend the other day and she told me he had been explaining things to her kids in the car. He said "Mum's brain is Out Of Control" (complete with whatever arm movements signified an out-of-control brain to an imaginative six year old). I think he nailed it.

Now, go look at a website like Black Dog Institute or Beyond Blue and read and learn something new (no matter who you are I PROMISE you can learn something from these sites) and then consider what you are going to do. Are you going to get yourself some help? Could you ask a friend or family member if they are OK? Can you afford to donate to one of these organizations? Or are you just going to smile at someone on the train or walking through the shops tomorrow?

Some days are like this for me...

(From the ever hilarious XKCD)

...And blogging is like this for me some days too. I have things to say - I want to talk about our holiday, my kids school, my new fresh uni degree, religion (!), my wonderful mates, my inlaws, the list goes on - but making it all coherent isn't happening. Maybe it might work out as exams get closer and I need to procrastinate from study...

Clauunk-schk (that's the sound of gears changing, without the benefit of a clutch-pedal)

Ssoooo, it's been a while....

I'm still wearing my 'office clothes' (although I have swapped my tights for pyjama pants) and I've applied my lipstick because it's nice to look ones best for old friends with whom one has not caught up with in a while. I also have a glass of red wine beside the keyboard, and one in my belly (dutch courage - something I also need when it comes to old colleagues/schoolmates/lovers).

My life is so different now to when I first started this blog that I was considering closing it and starting again, but instead I'll just draw a line under the past and start again anyhow. I don't want to forget how far I've come - although I don't need anyone else to remember.

A (very) brief recap: born, school, depression, uni, depression, work, depression, more work, marriage, work, baby, post-natal depression, part-time work, another baby, life, depression, medication, more part time work and now, a new house with a decrepit garden.

Now I'm working as an educational designer (whatever that is) and moonlighting helping another project with SEO/social media. I spend three days per week in an office huddled around a computer and the other days working in the garden and/or with friends. Since I'm now helping other people write their blog posts I thought it was only fair that I started writing for me, too. Let's see if I can keep to my aim of a weekly post!

Kiran Update

We went to the Early Childhood Health Centre (ECHC) yesterday (when I started this post the visit was yesterday, now I'd have to say 'Thursday' instead) for Kiran's 8 week check. It was all good and apart from the Whooping Cough he is fine and growing like a weed. In fact it appears that he put on around 500g since last Tuesday's paediatrician visit. That is a lot of breastmilk! When I told Sanjay he suddenly realised why I've been so hungry recently and why I've been a bit tired (I feel like a Cheshire-mother, I might vanish at any moment, leaving just my milky breasts).

As well as getting longer and chubbier he's developing in other ways. He seems to recognise my face from several metres away now, he will lie on the floor and look at his toys or lie on the bed and gaze out the window for ten minutes at a time or more. I don't remember Asher being able to amuse himself for that long with any regularity until he was much older. He's very communicative and loves to gaze into my eyes, smile and then we have 'conversations' where I ask him questions and he vocalises with little 'ahs' back to me.

Kiran is also getting into a really good nighttime routine (will writing about it jinx it?). He goes to bed between 8 and 9:30 then wakes for a feed between11:30 and 1:30. He generally wakes again around 6 or 6:30am and Asher usually wakes and comes in before 7am so we are effectively awake for the day, even if Kiran sometimes goes back to sleep.

The little guy also had his first bottle last night. I went out for dinner with the Mummies and left both boys at home with Sanj. I expressed some milk the other day (almost 100ml) when I was feeling a bit full and so I got another 100ml yesterday which I hoped would be enough. It turns out he was a little reluctant to drink from the bottle at first but once he got the idea had the 100ml and a bit more from me when I got home before he went back to sleep. Dinner out with the mummies was great for me - just the tonic I needed after feeling a bit caged and tense for the last week or two. We were talking about how everyday things slip by so fast, particularly with second children, and how we should all be keeping a diary everyday and I thought about how irregularly I blog and made a pact to write something every day for a week. That seems a bit poor in the light of day, like I should be doing more, but I really want to do it and I hate over-committing. So, stay tuned for a post, however brief, every day for a week!

Blog Anniversary!

Well, the anniversary itself was actually a few days ago, and considering my tardiness generally with this blog, I think that five days late is perfectly acceptable as 'on-time'.

I was lying on the couch a few minutes ago (feeling terrible - I'm coming down with something that feels like the Black Death. I hope Asher doesn't get it from me), and wanting to get up and blog but only having an amorphous swirl of ideas of exactly what I wanted to write about, when I started wondering why I bothered writing here at all. Now, although that sounds like a terribly melodramatic and depressive thing to think it actually wasn't, because I recognise that I get something out of blogging but I'm really not sure what. Anyhow, I thought drag myself from the couch to the computer and check when the anniversary of the blog was so that I could craft an excellent 'what I've learned from blogging' type post, but since I'm already late I'll just cobble something together as usual, and probably go to sleep tonight thinking of ways it could have been a better post.

I guess the first and most wanky benefit of the whole blogging thing for me is that I'm slowly, slowly, finding a voice. Since high school some time I've believed I'm a poor writer and although that hasn't gone away I feel a little more confident about getting my ideas across. I wouldn't have been able to start writing if I didn't have Asher to write about - I didn't start this to muse and ponder, just to record the little guy's developmental milestones and perhaps my state of mind, in lieu of a baby book. A budding confidence in writing is a happy side effect.

Ironically, I also have told barely anyone about the blog. In a burst of enthusiasm I told a few 'internet friends' (and IRL friends who I see more of inside the computer than out these days) and Emma and Brendan, because they were away for an extended period of time and writing their own blog, so I thought I could keep in touch and still maintain my record as worst long-distance friend (which reminds me, I should 'fess up to the Irish Cousin about the blog!) but I haven't told my family or anyone else and I avoid mentioning it in front of people (er, not that there's much to mention!). So for all intents and purposes I have no readers, and I can't work out whether this helps me to feel more freedom when I write, or whether it is the overwhelming contributor to my extreme slackness in posting. Perhaps I should open up a bit now? Perhaps I'm concerned that my lackadaisical attitude to posting will irritate or disappoint? Why should I care?

On a completely different note I've also discovered that having a separate blog for dealing with food, wine and cooking is absolutely pointless, so any further discussion on such matters will be posted here. I'll also try and post Asher development updates more regularly - all about Asher's growing vocabulary coming soon!

Sanjay is in the kitchen. He's bathed Asher, read bedtime stories, and put him to bed and has just cooked me dinner - I'll sign off for now, with a small self-congratulatory grin. I'll eat my dinner, watch some TV and worry about how I'm going to look after Asher tomorrow if my headache, aching muscles and oversensitive skin turn into the flu they are threatening.