Tag Archives: Time to think

The cost of modern life

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I’m cold, I knew it was cold this morning even before I got up as I woke at some point with both feet on the floor again, it really is the most stupid position and one that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. Yet there, I was freezing cold and my legs both numb and heavy, almost too heavy to lift them back into the safety and warmth below the duvet, my back aching in objection to the whole thing. I can’t be totally sure which it was that woke me, the cold or my back, but it was my back that objected strongly to the twist that was applied to it a the first sound of the alarm clock in what felt like only seconds after my leg retrieval. The temptation to remain below the covers was huge, there is something even more compelling than pain at that time of day and that is warmth, warmth has a huge attraction, but I couldn’t risk the upset to my routine, cold or not, I had to get up. It is totally my own fault that the house is cold, I have for the last couple of months been turning down, then back up again the heater in the hall which keeps the whole house warm, even in the coldest winter, but last night I made a much bigger mistake, I turned it off. I made my way through here as fast as I could, not even stopping to go to the loo or to fetch a glass of coke, I knew that I had to attempt turning the fire on while as I was at my best and those few minutes are such a small window. As much as I love our fire for the way it looks, it is truly not the best design for someone who can’t kneel down to be at its level, but today it played my game for a change. I have often thought of making an actual list, as there are so many thing in this house which scream bad design when it comes to their usability by someone who isn’t totally fit, that I have many times added lines into my posts suggesting that designers think again, maybe one or two might actually listen one day to those who aren’t totally fit 30 somethings with money.

It doesn’t matter how much I hate being cold, I am already dreading the next few months and although selfish of me, I really do hope we have a rotten summer. Everyone in this world, including me are longing for the end of the winter temperatures and sunshine strong enough to heat the stones around us to fight off the cold of the night, but I drop off that equation when it comes to it getting any warmer than that. I was never a sun lover, never someone who would lie in the sun and get a tan, but these days I hate the summer with a passion, summers heat is probably the biggest single thing that makes everyone with MS, regardless of type, worse. Our nerves are so shot that there is no way of guaranteeing them comfort ever, it is bad enough that they cause us whatever unknown madness that our own bodies can come up with, to be caught knowing what the cause of our pain is and to be powerless to do anything about it, is a hundred times worse. There isn’t a fan or cooler that can remove the power of summer totally, no matter what they say on the box, at best most of them just recycle the same, or slightly cooler but still hot air whilst running up just as huge bills as we have to live with during winter because of the cold. MS is a loose, loose illness when it comes to temperature without any true win, win ones.

Tears were just rolling down my cheeks, it’s something I know that I do with so much more ease these days than I ever did years ago. I would actually go as far as to say that although I was still the person I am now, I had what I thought was healthy distance between myself and those things I saw on TV or in the movies. It didn’t matter how sad the story or even how uplifting, tears never once escaped me, unless there was something that I saw that was too close to my own life that the pain stopped me watching. There were many occasions that I have walked or ran from a theater or room simply because I couldn’t deal with the memories that what I was watching were stirring inside me. Oddly I can pinpoint the two things that changed that for me forever, first is one that I wrote a whole post about and that was forgiveness. It is easy to say, but hard and painful process to go through, but one I now honestly feel is essential to all of us. My tears had been blocked by so much anger and fear that I was carrying around inside of me, as I have said before forgiveness is a two way street as we all too often have to forgive ourselves as well as those involved. I never before I was housebound had the time to do nothing but think about me and to go through everything I could remember from childhood on, but once done, well I felt so much stronger and so much more able to be me and yes along the way I cried a lot, but I started to free the tears of emotion for others without turning them on myself.

The second, well it was the day that the doctors started that ticking clock and I knew for the first time that I wasn’t going to live forever, in fact, it was worse than that, my time was totally limited. Facing your own mortality is very different from being diagnosed with a chronic illness that will kill you at some point, that some point could be anywhere, including the time that your life might normally have ended, but knowing, really knowing that you will never get that far, changes everything inside you. Once I had grieved for myself, I started grieving for everyone else around me, but that too ended and I thought that that was it, it wasn’t. The two things together plus this illness now means that I cry at the drop of a hat, but then there are tears like those from a few minutes ago, I saw actors showing such pain at the death of a loved one, that before I knew it, tears rolled and I felt true pain inside me. Oddly, it is an amazing thing that I wish I had learned to do when I was little, rather than being teased by my siblings and living through more things than anyone should that just closed them off. When the damage done by my PRMS started to make me cry for nothing and I do mean nothing, I hated it, I hated it with such a passion and was so embarrassed by it, that I chose at work to be hidden in my own office space where no one could see them and at home I just tried to hide them. Now, I actually would say that off all the things that PRMS have changed in my life, this is one that I thank it for. I thank it for opening up that route to my tears, despite the embarrassment that I felt. I thank it for making me take the time, even thought that took making me housebound so I could go through that whole forgiveness process and I thank it for teaching me that death is happening and it has to be embraced along with everything that goes around it.

It doesn’t matter how hard our illness is to bear physically or mentally, there are things that it opens up for us as much as it closes off many other, it isn’t always a totally take, take situation. Ask anyone with any chronic condition and they will all tell you that they now appreciate life and they now also feel so much more empathy and compassion for those around them and in the further outside world. It doesn’t change us as people, what it changes is the intensity that we give to life and everything in it, something we didn’t have space or time for before and every one of us just wish we could teach that to everyone else, without them having to become ill first. Everyday life, going to work, family, home and our modern busy lifestyle squeezes out what is really important, the result is we have lost touch with ourselves.

Read my blog from 2 years ago today – 20/04/13 – What happens next?

This may not sound like much but for the first time in more months than I ever planned in my head, my living room curtains are no longer closed. Open in the hope that winter has gone, I did actually turn the central heating off a week ago and the house has held it’s temperature, so fingers crossed. It isn’t the only thing that I have opened today for the first time in ages, I actually have just opened my entire collection of email accounts.

Where to

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I love the way sometimes how you can be watching a TV program and suddenly you see something that makes you smile and draws you back more years than you care to actually admit. I usually spend the day watching loads of documentaries but there are a few exceptions, programs that I suppose we all secretly watch, the bad drama’s and light entertainment shows that you would be embarrassed if someone walked in and caught you. Therefore, I am not naming it, but there was a car I hadn’t seen since I was a child, well I doubt it was the same one, but it was close enough. My grandfather, from my fathers side of the family was the person who always somehow meant more to me than any other person in the family, even if he totally loved to embarrass me and did so too often for my liking. His biggest embarrassment to me was his car, he drove himself everywhere in a really old fashioned Rolls Royce, you know the vintage ones that don’t seem to go faster than a sedate crawl and not the sort of car that an eleven-year-old wants to be either dropped off at school in or picked up by, especially not at the start of the 70’s when anything old was a problem. Oddly I now see it as the sweetest thing and just seeing that car made me smile and lifted my mood beyond belief, but back then I just wanted to crawl into a hole and never get out of it ever again. I have spent most of my life running away from memories, I started running when I was just 13 and stepped it up just days after my 16th birthday when I accepted a proposal of marriage, partly because it offered me a fast route out of Aberdeen. Life is bizarre, I never once thought back then that my memories would be the very place that I would one day spend most of my time.

I never realised what I was doing when I spent my life living at a million miles per hour, doing things that most people of my age would have thought dangerous or in later years even childish and stupid, was my attempt to fill my head with new memories to cover over and blank out the old. Nor that my inability to stay still was nothing more than me still trying not to remember, but I know now that is what I was doing. I had this hope that by filling every second of my life with something amazing or even trivial, would then mean that by the time I was old and ready to retire, well there would be so much there, so much more that those bits I wanted to forget. Being housebound, no matter how busy you try to keep yourself it supplies you with one thing that you don’t know what to do with and that is time. Time, when no matter how hard you try, all you can do is live in the past as today is exactly the same as the day before and every other one in the past 8 years. New memories are small and actually don’t even belong to yourself, they are what you see on the TV or what other people tell you about and the only new memories are so small that they can’t possibly ever stand up against or cover over the old ones. 8 years of thinking is a very long time and I don’t think I have a single memory now that I haven’t travelled through at least once, if not many more times, again and again reliving the life that I wanted to escape alongside the one I tried to replace it with. Every day that I sit here writing there are those memories, those things I have already talked about mixed with the so far unsaid, but little of my life hasn’t been touched on at some point. It doesn’t matter if I am talking about my health, my feelings or my thoughts on any subject, somehow in my head there is the net that always catches hold of some thought that I believed was long gone.

There is something that I think I have noticed over the years, I say think, because I can’t be totally sure as I have this feeling that I have changed my memories, splicing some things together that never belong that way. There is a muddled fog over some things and when I try to push past it all I now find is a bigger muddle. Some things have become clearer, things that happened in the past 20 years, I have discovered there are things that I now see were my fault, although at the time I didn’t believe they were. Analysis sometimes has the effect of uncovering the truth, but the further back I go the more and more muddled they are getting. It is as though I have a handful of crystal clear pictures and all around them is just this growing bank of fog slowly eating up the less clearer ones, until they start to vanish. If someone had asked me what the outcome of going over old memories would be, either making them clearer or making them vanish, I would have without any thought said they would become clearer. Just like when you think you don’t really remember that book you read years ago, the second you start to read it, the rest all falls back into place and the need to read it again goes, as you still hold every word. Seeing that Rolls Royce brought my grandfather back to me along with his desire to embarrass his granddaughter, but I can’t for the life of me remember how he looked, other than he was thin and very tall, I couldn’t and can’t see his face at all.

I have known for a very long time now that my short term memory is of little use at all, but long term, well everything I have ever read has said it shouldn’t be affected. I don’t remember having problems just a couple of years ago, but that is relying on my memory to confirm that, how do you trust something that you know 100% is wrong in far too many places. I don’t suppose there is anything that I can do about it, but it is just another part of what I can see is going to make my life more difficult as time goes on. As I said, memories are the place where I spend far too much time, but if those memories are going to keep disappearing, then where do you go. To date, when I have written about this, it has in itself been rather vague, just the fact that I can’t remember odd things, nothing that was clear enough to hold onto, but that list has grown and grown until now I can be very clear about what has gone. There are so many people that I can neither remember how they look or what their names are, people I should know as I saw them from my birth onwards, but now they are just shapes or the knowledge that they should be there, but their not. If it were just people, well that would be bad enough but there are places that I know I should know well, but they too have gaps or feel wrong as though I am bring two totally separate places and trying to make them one.

Losing your past wouldn’t be so bad if you could select what you want to go, but it doesn’t seem to work that way as the things I was running from in the 70’s still hold their place as big and as darkly as ever. I remember saying along time ago that I thought losing my memory wouldn’t be that bad as if you can’t remember how do you know it even existed. It appears that it’s far more cruel than that, you do remember, you remember that something should be there but isn’t and that is worse than trying to run away as you find yourself running towards the unknown, slightly scared of what it might be or what it will hold.

Read my blog from 2 years ago today – 18/04/13 – Over again > http://bit.ly/14vFzjn

Yesterday I took a tumble, not a serious one, I just went over as I was heading across the hall to the bathroom, one second I was walking the next I was twisting and pulling muscles as the floor was suddenly under my shoulder. In truth like most falls, I……

Dreams caught in time

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Having just enjoyed one of my favourite treats, oatcakes and as it is breakfast I ate them with ginger marmalade, I am now suffering the problem of having not been to the dentist in 8 years. No, I don’t have toothache, just two broken teeth that everything of that texture seems to take pure joy in lodging themselves in and can’t be shifted by my tongue alone, probably why it used to be fashionable for toothpicks to be in every home, they were needed daily. I know there is a dental service available at the local hospital for people who are housebound, it has to be within a hospital as to get there clearly I need an ambulance with a stairclimber just to get me out of here and home again and they are only available if you are going to a hospital. I find that so maddening, it is almost as though by being housebound, we suddenly don’t have the same right to health and is the reason why I don’t ever really see my GP. I don’t expect them to assist to take me out just for the hell of it, but surely seeing our GP’s and dentist should fit into the same bracket as seeing a hospital consultant, it is after all, still our health. Either way, I still might not have been to the dentist any sooner as I so hate that stair climber and the whole process as I have said before, of just getting ready to fo anywhere is draining and best to be avoided if at all possible. Just sitting here thinking about it has made me decide that I can live a bit longer with strange gaps where tooth enamel once was.

It’s odd how all our values change once we are ill, so many of the things that we held as important and life essential, seem to just fade and become a dusty memory and of no value at all. Chronic illness doesn’t just destroy our health, it destroys our dreams and diminishes our belief in not just ourselves but in everything that once seemed so clear and so simple. When Adam and I got married, I knew without the slightest doubt that our dreams were very different from each other, not because we had spoken about them, we were still at that stage of love when words aren’t needed as be felt we understood the other without them. I didn’t need words to tell me what I knew was a fact, because I was 38 and he was 21, I knew his head was filled with wild hope about riches, success and a long extravagant life together and all those other fantasies we believe will just happen at that age, mine was filled with stability, planning and financial security. It was Adam who wanted to buy a house, I was strongly of the opinion that they were nothing but money pits and unless you were going to have children to pass on your home and money to, not a great move at all, but I couldn’t say no to him, his wide-eyed fantasy was possible, but on my terms. I refused to have a huge mortgage around our necks, it had to be affordable and it had to mean we could still have a life, not one spent living on baked beans and water. So we bought our flat, the one I am now so much in love with and he wishes I hadn’t given in over, as now we would be housed somewhere more suitable for me. I didn’t have the time to secure our future, to build up a nest egg that would mean I could retire and enjoy a life with Adam for as long as it lasted, or the slightest chance of securing a future for him once I was gone, as within 2 years, I was too ill to be allowed to dream.

Being diagnosed with a progressive degenerative condition takes away all our options. From the day I had to walk into my office and tell my employers that I had PRMS, I also knew that was the day when I lost all power over my future. I lost the biggest and strongest bargaining position that employees have, to leave and find a new job if they don’t pay you what you are worth. Other than the annual increment that every employee received, I never had a pay rise from that day on. They knew just as I did that I couldn’t just leave and get another job and as my health got worse and I needed at first a stick, then a wheelchair, the harder they drove to get every single penny of what they paid me and more. 10 years on the same wages meant that I was miles behind what others in other companies earned for doing half what I did and every last dream I had was snuffed out. Yes, there are laws out there to protect those in my position, but use them and it goes without saying you really will never work again and I needed I thought to do everything I could to build up our home and make it the best I could, while I could. My ambition and only one became to work for just one more day, week or month, to have a wage for just one more day, week or month, that was my only focus, not my health or what was happening to anyone else, I had to make things as perfect as I could right then as I might not be here tomorrow to do so.

I no longer had or have, any dreams that look any further into the future than those same days, weeks or months, at least not for me, my health has taken them all away. Becoming housebound whilst still working, put me in the oddest position, but one that allowed me to live in a very different way and changed my future even more. I don’t know why but it gave me back a strange feeling of control over what was happening to me, a limited life had it’s advantages and it’s bonuses that I wish I had seen long before and once I was made redundant and eventually I had totally broken that fear of not earning a wage again, I found freedom. Once there is no possible future left, well oddly other than depressing, it is actually liberating. My health has taken every single thing that we have in our heads about what having a future means and replaced it with total freedom. I have lost the concept of weekdays, weekends and holidays, I no longer have to think beyond this hour as what can the one after it hold other than more of the same, freedom of thought and of heart. No matter what we like to believe, true freedom of thought doesn’t exist when we are locked into the world of work, a world we are told is our right and what our dreams can be achieved through, but it’s not.

My memories may be muddled now and my body crippled but I don’t remember ever feeling as free as I do now. I don’t have the money to do any of the things I once thought important, I don’t know where the money will come from just to cover the bills at times, but we always manage somehow and most importantly we still have each other. For everything that the outside world would say I have lost, I have gained something in its place, I just wish that I didn’t have to live in pain to have it. Adam is approaching the age I was when we first met and he has suddenly discovered the ambition for financial security, I truly hope that he too will eventually understand the freedom I feel, but without any of the pain or physical confinement.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 25/02/13 – Something ODD? 

Well an hour ago I know I had something that I needed, really needed to write about today, I just wish I had the slightest idea what it was now. Yes I know it is a constant problem and one that you would have thought I would have taken the logical step of writing things down when they are in my head, but I always forget to do it……………

Right or wrong

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I found myself in the middle of the night just sitting on the edge of my bed, I had woken up for no reason I could find and for equally no reason I decided I needed to sit up, I was sat there still wearing my earplugs and sleep mask with my head down as though I was looking at the floor. I wasn’t in pain, well no worse than normal and I didn’t need to go to the loo and I was still tired, I just didn’t want to lie down, which made no sense. I think I sat there for a couple of minutes before deciding it was rather silly and I took my mask off and almost automatically headed for the bathroom, just in case it was just my bladder not giving me the correct or recognisable signals. Just in case seems to be one of the ways you learn to live with a body like mine, you can never be sure of anything or accept anything on the face value but this time I had made a wasted journey, annoying, yes, but better than wetting myself. I knew I was tired, but I equally knew that I wasn’t going to go back to sleep at that moment so I sat in the kitchen for a while and smoked a couple of cigarettes.

Earlier I had made the decision because I had put it in yesterday’s blog that I had better tell Adam about the lump on the back of my head, he instantly went into his doctor mode, asking me what were rather stupid questions, but I have learnt to answer them all, as it is the only way to stop him from turning nothing into a disaster. No I hadn’t fallen over, nor had I banged my head on the headboard of the bed, nor had I got up in the middle of the night without waking, fallen over and knocking myself unconscious before going back to bed still all the while asleep. Sitting in the kitchen running it all through my head, it all seemed rather funny and cute, just as the fact that I had a sore left arm which I had already told him that I was sure was an injury rather than an PRMS symptom, although I didn’t know what or how, suddenly in his head it had measured up as my having a heart attack. This is, unfortunately, one of the side effects of having a condition like mine, somehow we find ourselves with partners who are paranoid about every single little thing that happens with your health. No matter how much I love him, and I do, he is so scared about every little thing, from what has, to what might and what never will. Today is shopping day, late this week I know but hey we all slip up sometime, but he will be home at lunch time regardless of the fact the the weather is terrible, the heavy bags I can deal with are now lying on the hall floor so he will get soaked today just in case I might fall over them, my sight isn’t good but I am not blind. It’s the same with everything, the slightest sign that I am not as perfect as I can be, well it is turned into something that might kill me any second, if I didn’t love him, he would have driven me up the wall by now, I know all to well he cares and is just trying to look after me. At least last night I managed to leave the bedroom without waking him, as all to often my efforts to avoid the creaking floor boards that all old houses have isn’t at all easy, especially when you are inclined to the odd stagger, the tiniest squeak usually find him standing in the kitchen with me, just in case he is needed, what he needs is a full nights sleep without keeping one eat open and listening for me all the time.

I had sat there for far longer than my cigarette took to smoke and when I tiptoed back across the hall I stopped for a second to listen to see if I could hear him snoring in the living room, it wasn’t until I had undressed and I was getting back into bed that I realised that I was still wearing my earplugs, so OK the memory isn’t that sharp at that time of day. Adam had fixed the bed for me earlier, it had taken minutes and turned out to be exactly what both of us thought it was, the two sides of the mattress elevator had split apart, it was just a brief job of slotting them back together, as it turned out I should have asked him to do it the night before. I think it had been separating for a couple of weeks as lying on it correctly was at first odd, I had become used to sleeping on a sideways slope, it just shows you, you can adapt without even knowing you are. Even on an incredibly comfortable bed, I didn’t go back to sleep straight away, partly because my head was hurting again but mainly because I couldn’t stop thinking over and over all the time that Adam has spent just worrying about me in the last 14years, time he shouldn’t have been worrying about anything. He may not be officially my carer, but he truly is, even though it is mostly in his head, whenever I try to get him to stop and to reassure him that I am fine, he just says “it is his job as my husband to worry about me”, it is also his job as a human to live and as my husband to be happy.

Why is it that it is always in the small hours that our brains click onto things that could easily be thought through during the day, but they believe that 1 am is a much better time. Chronic illness is a multi-edged sword and it isn’t just me who is being slowly destroyed, it is also my beautiful husband. As much as I would love to have my health back, I would rather see him happy and free of constant worry than my being well again as it wouldn’t change anything, after all that has happened he would still be as he is now, just waiting for something to happen. I may have all the physical pain, but I honestly think that he like many caring partners is carrying enough mental pain to equal it. If he isn’t worrying about my health it is about our financial situation and what will happen in the future as my health gets worse and this house becomes more and more unsuitable, he mentally beats himself up about it constantly even though there is absolutely nothing that can be done about any of it. People forget all to often that when someone’s partner becomes seriously ill, they to become ill in so many ways, none of us were born mentally strong enough to deal with all that happens in this situation and no one teaches us. We support each other as much as we can, but it is all to often the blind leading the blind and undoubtable, because I know it is true for me, when I am struggling I don’t always listen as much as I should and I am sure when he is struggling it will be the same thing the other way round.

For some things like support groups help, or counselling, but he has tried both and found neither of any assistance to him at all, so we muddle on doing what we believe is right and what we think might just make it that bit better for the other, but are either of us right.

 

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 08/01/13 – The monster ‘Can’t’

It is now 6 years since I last left the house by myself, my final day in the office when it all went so wrong that they gave me permission to work from home, I don’t think at the time that I truly realised what an impact that day would have on my life………..

Dealing with feelings

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The house is so cold, yet I keep hearing on the weather forecast that it is warm for this time of year, usually without them clarifying that they are in fact talking about London and the far south as always. It is odd how that annoys me, as I never watch any of the so-called Scottish channels, they drive me up the wall with their small town attitudes and they’re stuck in the past profiles. Sorry but I really don’t care who won the ‘Mod’, or what happened in Ballater yesterday and if I hear one more person trying to draw comparisons between now and the battle of Bannockburn, I think I will explode. Honestly, you can be a proud Scot without wearing tartan, dying your hair ginger and draping the Soltar over your shoulders. All I can say is thank God we have Sky and that we can choose which versions of life we prefer to live in. I guess that is one of the things that truly divides us from previous generations, we have choice over how we want to live, who we want to be grouped with and what we make of our lives, we are not dictated to by the vagrancy of birth. Even now, I still have all those options open to me, I would go as far as to say that if there has ever been a good time to have a serious chronic illness and to be housebound, this has to be it, it may not be perfect, but we all still have free choice and possibilities open to us. Just 60 years ago we would have been shoveled out of sight and dismissed as not worth making an effort to help, beyond nutrition and hygiene, which is exactly what happened to my grandmother. My grandfather divorced her when she became chronically ill, I don’t know what was wrong with her, I have asked but the answers were always the same, no one really knew. He bought her a house and supplied her with a nurse, but none of the family were allowed to see her again, not that she lived that much longer, only 5 years or so. I used to hate it when people said to me that I should count my blessing, probably because I didn’t really understand the saying in it true sense, as to be able to count our blessings, we first have to have lost something life changing. I know it is the proud scot in me that makes me angry with the weather forecasters, stuck in their cupboard in broadcasting house in London, their worlds are as narrow as the studio they work in, to them like most people, their life, where they live and what they do, is where the world starts and ends, so it’s odd that it has taken me to be housebound to really start to understand the extent of the world we live in and blessing that we all really have.

I was feeling sorry for myself yesterday, yes I am human, I do have days when all that whirls around in my head is why me, what did I do to deserve this, there isn’t a person on this planet who doesn’t have days like that, just as we all have days where the world is filled with flowers and butterflies that no one but we can see. It can be hard when you are sat alone in your home, cold and in pain, just wishing your day way, as you know that it will change when the front door opens and in comes the grumpy monster from work. Adam comes home every day with this black cloud and lightning bolts over his head, but it makes me laugh as, stomps around the kitchen swearing at himself and getting even more angry over stupid things, like his sleeve being stuck to his hand as he tries to take off his jacket. I know that within 10 minutes of him leaving the kitchen and putting away his outdoor clothes, then slumping on the small settee with the belt of his jeans undone and his hands up behind his head, that it will all start vanishing and he will then be home with me for the night. For me it was a day where that was all I was waiting for, all that I looked forward for, it doesn’t matter how busy I keep myself or how well planned out my day, once you have slipped into that feel sorry for yourself slot, climbing back out is hard. Unlike Adam I can’t stomp around the house slamming doors and turning the air around me blue, I don’t have that coping mechanise in me, I am a pusher, not a stomper, I push myself and I push myself hard.

I don’t know where it came from or why I even did it, but it has always been my answer for feeling sorry for myself, I start pushing my abilities. It used to be doing a workout, or a frenzy of cleaning, anything that would make my muscle ache and meant I was too busy to allow myself to feel down. I used to push myself for days, not hours, not allowing myself to feel anything mentally and it worked in its own way, but with that option gone, all I can do is to push myself to do things faster were possible. We all have our own coping mechanisms and those I have seen or read about mostly seem to have a physical aspect, whatever the action is, it comes down to distraction and controlling the release of our feelings, so we can work our way through whatever it is. It is very ease once you spend as many hours as I do alone to start over thinking everything, to invent things that aren’t really there, or to blow things up from minor to major. Routine and distraction can only go so far and once your concentration levels are low, slipping off into thought is amazingly simple. Every one of us looks back on our lives and compare what we have now, to what we had and then we project that into the future, you don’t have to be disabled or ill to do that, it’s just human. I like anyone can list the things I have lost simply due to everyday life that hurt me the most and yes, most of them still hurt, but then on top of them I can add what I have lost due to my health, but the real issue is that no matter how positive your life, or how much you have in your life that is good, there will be times when it all gets just that bit black.

For me now, the best way to bring myself out of the low times is to bury myself in the things I love, to watch my favorite TV programs, especially history documentaries, they always put my life into perspective. It’s hard to feel sorry for myself when I compare my life to that of someone in the trenches of world war 1. I guess it is still distraction, but it feels kind of tame compared to lifting weights or doing sit-ups until I can’t move, which would now be less than one. I guess what I am trying to say is that low days happen, sometimes they might even group themselves into a few days, but don’t write them up as depression, they are just the things we all have to work through so that life can go on. The real trick is to work out what works for you, for some even wallowing for a while is correct, but don’t let it hang around too long, as the truth is life goes on, so why not make it the best we can.

 

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 29/10/12 – Strange day.

There is a great temptation today to simply have a rant about Twitter as my account was suspended yesterday evening as I had unfollowed a large number of people who hadn’t followed me back, apparently this is against their rules and well my account suddenly went offline. The system they have actually……