Tag: sleep

Day 22

'A Poetic Potter & A Potting Poet'Leave a comment
The path beside the wood: a carpet of green with purple, yellow and cream

Continuing the story of Lydia and Me

I slept!

After resting from late afternoon into the evening, I slept.

I decided to take two paracetamol tablets, eventually, to help set me off. I do this only very occasionally.  I’m wary of relying on medication to help with relaxing and sleeping.  They are addictive and eventually don’t work.

30 or so years ago, after I’d had a complete breakdown in all aspects of my life, I became addicted to prescription tranquilisers and sleeping tablets. Never again.

I detoxed by walking miles and miles in the hot Mediterranean sun, sweating it out. To do cold Turkey I went to hot Turkey.  It worked, and after that I started finding more constructive ways to manage my mental, physical and emotional health.

It hasn’t been and still isn’t easy but I push through on positives, most of the time.

Today I’ll have another woodland walk with Lydia; then go to a yoga class for an hour and a half this afternoon.  There is no Qigong today – we have a week’s break between blocks of three. I’ve already done some physio exercises for my knees, while waiting for the kettle to boil.

Yesterday’s wall of emotional exhaustion is no more.

As I enjoy spending a bit more time in bed, I listen to whatever sounds the world is bringing to me: the beep of a lorry reversing, the gentle rustle of leaves, a motorbike revving and cars passing by.  They’re nothing spectacular but they are the sounds that are here for me this morning, and I like them, just as they are.

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Day 9

'A Poetic Potter & A Potting Poet'Leave a comment
One of my bowls, featured on a friend’s windowsill

Yesterday’s combination of walking, yoga and Qigong worked well as I had a restful evening and a good night’s sleep.

I did wake up at around 3am when dawn was already breaking and the birds were already singing. Listening to the birds, the sound of the wind and what was at one point quite heavy rain, I fell back to sleep and woke feeling refreshed, ready to make the most of today.

It’s been a good start so far.

Lydia and I have had a wild and wonderful walk, with the weather warm and slightly breezy. The sun came out too.

It’s a Tuesday, so I’ll go and visit my friend in the village this afternoon. I go every Tuesday, for a couple of hours in the afternoon. We usually go out for a stroll, if the weather’s OK. More fresh air! More exercise!

Lydia is outside enjoying some sunshine now.

I’m going to start making arrangements for my latest pots to be fired.

I don’t have a kiln at home – yet – but I do know someone who runs a firing service. We arrange a time and a place around mid-way between her home and mine, for drop-off and pick-up. She provides a very good service; takes the greatest care.

I have plenty of time before the next planned event for selling my wares – the Aldborough & Boroughbridge Show:

https://www.boroughbridgeshow.co.uk/

Consolidation is going to be a theme for me, going forward, for the foreseeable. I’m not quite sure as yet what form the process of consolidation will take, or what forms my pots may take, but process and pots will take form, one way or another.

Sleeping

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Ironically, I’ve recently been feeling too tired to write about what I have wanted to write about: sleep. Until today.

Breaking the cycle of inactivity is massively difficult during a period of depression. It feels impossible to know what to do or where to start that will make any difference in any meaningful and lasting way. And then sleeplessness takes hold and so it goes on.

I still have variable experiences of being able to get to sleep, and sleep long and deep enough to feel rested. However, any current difficulties I have are nothing compared to what it was like for me, years ago, when I became addicted to sleeping pills (Triazepam).

In the end, to detox, I took myself to Turkey in the hot season, walked and sweated for miles and eventually screamed myself off them.

The process of detox itself, especially in unsupported circumstances, is very dangerous, and, to anyone contemplating taking tranquilizers of any kind, I would say, “Don’t!”.

It might be easy for me to say that now, as I did take them then and felt that I needed to – desperately – at the time. Maybe I did. But that was before I had explored all the other options and possibilities, mainly because I didn’t know about them.

There is much more awareness and access to mental health coping strategies than there used to be over twenty years ago when I was going through some extreme experiences. Meditation courses and apps, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, affirmations (I use these a lot), talking therapies, the benefits of exercise and so on. Even so, despite drawing on these approaches and applying them in my day-to-day life as best as I can, I don’t always sleep well.

Now, though, I’m much more able to sit or lie with the lack of sleep and rest into it, be patient with it, rather than going for a quick fix with all the associated draw backs. If I’m really struggling to settle I might get up, watch a bit of telly (reading is usually out of the question at these times, such is the impact of depression on my capacity to concentrate), make a cup of tea or – even better – hot chocolate. I also occasionally indulge in a glass or two of wine or a gin and tonic. (I’m conscious of the drawbacks and addictive aspects of alcohol reliance but it does sometimes do the trick; a couple of paracetamols – again as a very occasional alternative and never at the same time as alcohol – also eventually send me off.)

I’m gradually working towards having a kinder and more balanced relationship with myself, doing what I can to be good to my body and my brain. I work on being thankful, get my brain into ‘glad’ mode and accept that I am getting “there”, which is “here”, with every day a blessing.

It is much easier for the me that I am now, than the me that I was twenty years ago, to not fall back on the quick fixes, partly because I have worked hard to find out about and put self-management strategies into practice and partly because I am in a much better place on a personal level. It is much easier to get to sleep on an evening, knowing that in the morning I will wake up in my partner’s loving arms.

Maybe there was a time when I did shoot the Albatross, and paid the price. But sleep is a very gentle thing, and doing my best to let sleep slide into my soul is part of an essential process of healing.