Lydia and I had a bit of a wet walk in the morning, although she was reluctant to let me give her a ‘rub a dub dub’ with a dry towel when we got home.
My friend treated me to a green smoothie- full of nutrients and very flavoursome – and then I had a decaffeinated coffee.
It was busy in the retail park where we met – hard to believe it’s not yet December as Christmas shopping seemed to be in full flow.
I did a bit of shopping after I’d said goodbye to my friend, using a gift card I’d been given to buy a really nice bottle of wine.9
I’m drinking the wine now and it is good. Trying to keep a craving for chocolate at bay – and winning. I did have some cheese puffs earlier so the craving for something sweet will have to wait.
Lydia is chewing on her horn. She showed a lot of restraint when I was eating the cheese puffs earlier, so I’ll take a page out of her book. She’s a good role model, that’s for sure.
After grinding to a halt last year (when I was 64), I’ve had 12 months of resting and recuperating. It’s been great to have no time pressures, be able to catch up on household jobs and generally just ‘chill’. However, I still don’t feel like giving up on my working life altogether and have just started a new job. It’s part-time and temporary – just for a few weeks – and has tested my ability to keep calm in the face of new technology (use of a smart phone is an intrinsic part of the job). With some effort I’ve been able to keep my anxiety levels within manageable parameters – breathing through the stress and repeating my ever-faithful affirmation of ‘I choose to be peaceful and calm; everything is unfolding as it should’. There have been times when I have felt anything other than peaceful and calm but I seem to be settling in. It’s tiring, but I’m doing it.
When I was going through the worst of my breakdown, one of things I hung on to, to haul myself through, was the knowledge of how hard I’d worked when I was younger – dealing with anxiety without any coping mechanisms for a long time – to develop work skills and experience. I was determined that all that hard work would not go to waste.
I do believe that if more people had more help with anxiety and associated difficulties when they were younger, it would help to avoid the devastation that having a breakdown can bring. As a society we still have a long way to go before we can consider ‘inclusion’ a reality rather than a pretend game.
With no Qigong this afternoon, it’s the woodland walk for Lydia and me this morning, then yoga. Lydia often partakes in this remotely, being particularly good at ‘downward facing dog’!
The yoga teacher introduced a new exercise aid to the class: conkers. They formed a focus for our meditation and visualisation and I must say I enjoyed the experience of familiarisation with the seed of the chestnut tree. It was somehow comforting and inspiring at the same time.
As I now complete this latest 28-day cycle of writing, I reflect on how far I’ve come, not just since I started writing this blog in 28-day cycles a few months ago, but since I started my overall journey of recovery over fifty years ago, when I was still very young.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it essentially started in my teens, when I decided that I needed more than physical food in my life.
That may sound ungrateful as I know there are many people in the world who have less food than they need to survive. But my needs for nourishment were psychological, emotional and spiritual. They were very real for me and presented in the forms of social anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and an eating disorder. That’s a lot for any teen to have to deal with and I hope that in writing about my experiences, it may help others to not have to go through the same.
It’s taken me a long time to work out what I needed to work out, to find pieces that I didn’t have reference points for. How could I know what I’d lost when I had no memory of having it in the first place?
For whatever reason – probably survival – my emotional brain closed down, and it’s taken me a lifetime to find ways of opening it up again. I’m still working on it, with Lydia’s help and a lot of help and support from a lot of other people along the way.
The most significant latest step for me is on the path presented by the Buddhist faith. It helps me to make sense of a lot of things, accept what I can’t change, and do my best to make the most of each day as it comes, recognising the value of what I have when for so long I was focused on what I didn’t have. Grief doesn’t go away, but we can grow to encompass a wider experience of life around it. That’s what I’ve been doing my best to do.
As I now take a couple of weeks break from writing a new daily blog, I’ll continue with republishing previous posts, looking back a bit before again moving on.
The paperback versions of my two latest books – ‘Rules, Rhymes, Recovery, Recipe, Random: Glad About Life’ and ‘A Woman, a Dog and a Blog: Writing into Life’ will shortly be available on Amazon, along with the Kindle and Kindle Unlimited editions:
‘Rules, Rhymes, Recovery, Random: Glad About Life’ brings together over 60 blog posts, from March 2020 through to September 2024.
It offers personal insights into the mental health recovery journey, recognising that there are no easy answers or quick fix solutions to complex problems but demonstrating that growth is possible through whatever difficulties life presents.
‘A Woman, a Dog & a Blog: Writing into Life’ presents a summary of my own backstory and that of my dog, Lydia. We had both experienced trauma before we met and, though I effectively rescued and adopted her, in many ways she has also rescued and adopted me.
We continue our journey together, day by day, step by step. Volume I of this book presents the first cycle of me writing a post a day for 28 days, at a time when the depression I had experienced most of my adult life had started to lift, only to reveal an underlying and extreme – at the time – sense of anxiety. Having lost everything that I’d worked for in the past, due to a severe breakdown in my thirties, I was absolutely petrified that history was going to repeat itself and that I would lose everything again, including Lydia. I was determined that wouldn’t happen and I drew on every aspect of resourcefulness and resilience I’d built up, and all the support mechanisms I could muster, to make sure that it didn’t. And it hasn’t.
Volume II presents the next 28 days of continuing to work with – and write about – positives in whatever way that I can. Affirmations, exercises, working with clay, working with words, walking, reflecting, resting, meditating – they’re all in there as I find my own way through and I hope it may help others find their way too.
Lydia started whining when she saw a dog from a distance this morning. I think she may be starting to process the pain associated with her fear. I don’t know for sure, but can only continue to provide support, guidance and reassurance in the best way that I can, using the guidance that I in turn have been provided by dog behaviourists and trainers.
Later we both enjoyed some quiet time outside at the back, with the warmth of the air very soothing this September.
I did some breathing meditation, using the ‘Om Ah Hum’ mantra: Om, as I breathe in, Ah as I hold my breath, Hum as I breathe out.
That is also very soothing. I know that it is much more than soothing, but I don’t have the words to express that right now, so I’ll settle for soothing for the time being.
After a bit of garden tidying, I don’t feel like doing much else today. I’ve made the preparations for tonight’s evening meal so I can just relax and do nothing, although I’ve started watching the latest series of ‘Married at First Sight: Australia’ on demand.
During Covid I binge-watched all the back series and carried on watching until I reached a point where I didn’t want to watch any more. I do struggle, though, to find anything else that draws my interest these days and the other day I thought I’d give MAFSAU another go.
It’s pulling me back in, not least because, cutting through all the glamour and gloss, it brings into focus the struggles that many of us have in terms of establishing and maintaining close personal relationships. My heart goes out particularly to those participants who think that it is a shortfall on their part when their newly wed husband or wife starts to reject them. I personally don’t think it’s anything of the kind. It all, I believe, comes back to fear.
Today I’m considering rule no. 3: Establish (and maintain) good relationships with other suppliers (providing the bases are reciprocal).
Not all friendship relationships are reciprocal. I like to think that I can and do reach out a hand of friendship and support to people without any expectation of return. I do, however, have friends where the relationship is one of mutual support. These relationships help to sustain me through difficult times and I do what I can to sustain my friends through any difficult times that they might be having.
Coming, as I am, through a period of emotional and psychological burnout, I don’t have a lot of giving energy available at the moment.
I am, however, gaining spiritual nourishment and sustenance from an increasing commitment to the Buddhist faith.
‘The Liberating Prayer’, composed by Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Rinpoche, includes the following two verses:
With folded hands I turn to you Supreme unchanging friend, I request from the depths of my heart
Please give me the light of your wisdom To dispel the darkness of my mind And to heal my mental continuum.
Basically, that’s what I’ve been working on for a long time without knowing it but – more recently, since I started reciting this prayer – with growing awareness of what I am doing and why I need to: to dispel the darkness of my mind and to heal my mental continuum.
To know that I can do this, using methods through meditation and putting the Buddhist teachings into practice in other ways, has been like a hand of friendship is helping me to pull myself out of a deep well. I still have to do the work myself – and it’s taking a massive effort – but I’m not stuck and I’m not on my own. That’s friendship.
I also feel an increasing sense of friendship with members of the Buddhist teaching group that I go to. It’s good to have friendship groups as well as ‘besties’ in our lives.
Having just given Lydia a good ‘rub-a-dub-dub’ tummy rub and chest massage, and knowing that she looks out for me and Trev too, in her way, it’s good to know that we have our own friendship group here at home.
In one sense, this post should just be entitled ‘Being’, because age is irrelevant.
I interact with the world essentially as a being, and don’t need a label.
On the other hand, I do have history, and the ways that I have worked through that history impact on the way that I interact with the world – and other beings in it – on a daily basis.
It isn’t always easy to put the past behind us, especially when heavily loaded with emotions associated with trauma and grief.
Accepting things that I cannot change has been a hard life lesson to learn for me, helped by meditation, affirmations, and Buddhist teachings (including one in particular by Gen Togden of the Kadampa tradition).
Not having had children is a major regret. Raising this as an issue with a therapist recently, still needing to work it through, I was met with a profoundly uncompassionate response: “So you decided not to have them then, did you?”
At one level, she was right. I made choices – decisions – that led to me being in a state of extreme mental and emotional turmoil in my late 30s and 40s. Decisions that I made as a struggling, vulnerable young woman in my 20s were mine, and I was an adult. But should I really have had to pay such a high price in later life?
Shit does happen though, and doesn’t discriminate. Thankfully, I have had previous experiences with other counsellors/therapists who’ve approached my distress with humanity and empathy.
Even so, some things take a long time to work through. Some ‘stuff’ from the past has just come up that I thought I’d put behind me, or at least wanted to. It doesn’t always work like that though, and I’m sure my brain dredged it up now because I hadn’t properly dealt with it previously.
Now I’m in a much better place than I have ever been before, living with a kind, loving, supportive, funny partner. Being 65 is a starting point for me, and it’s never too late.
If I can send out a message to anyone who’s going through personal difficulties – whether recently experienced or long-term endured – it is to say: “Don’t give up.”
We don’t always know what we’re made of until our backs are to the wall, especially if we’ve oriented towards ‘flight’ rather than ‘fight’ in early years.
Fighting for survival is a primary motivator and there is always light at the end of the tunnel. Even if you can’t see it for yourself, let someone else – a friend – see it and hold it for you until you can.
I’m only 65, and I’ve got all my life ahead of me. So have you.
After a long day at the Show, I’m enjoying a large g&t and reflecting on the list from yesterday’s post. My focus is on ‘Let ourselves be held’.
I’m not sure if this means emotionally, psychologically, spiritually or physically. Probably any or all four or a combination.
I’m not good at letting myself be held, and neither is Lydia.
She now lets me give her massages (the “rub-a-dub-dub” massages I’ve referred to in previous posts) but she still doesn’t let me fully ‘hold’ her when we’re out walking, in terms of believing that I will keep her safe. She’s been too badly traumatised in the past.
I’ve had to be so self-reliant for much of my life that I will always fall back on myself too. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but historically I’ve tended to look out for others, while at the same time my own needs weren’t being met. That’s not because I’m a selfless saint, but it is because I really don’t want anyone to have to go through what I’ve been through in my life if there is anything I can do to help them not to. I just don’t like that level of waste.
Looking again at the list, I’m drawn to ‘nourish our senses’.
My senses feel jaded, as if nothing is fresh and invigorating any more. This is where Lydia comes in to help, as I do find our walks together on a morning have a stimulating effect on my senses, even if it’s still at a low level of intensity.
I’m certainly much more open to ‘imperfection’ than I used to be. I can still be a bit obsessive about details, but more able to let things go.
I can only ‘do one thing at a time’ these days, and very slowly, so I’m doing OK there.
I’m not always great at being able to ‘ask for help’ although at least I know now that help can be sought out. In the first half of my life, I had no idea that such a thing might be available, never mind what form it could take.
‘Expressing emotions’ is complicated, I find. I’ll keep trying to work that one out.
I do ‘create daily rituals and routines’ although I tend to need to be flexible on timings and interpret this very broadly.
It may be a while yet before Lydia and I are both as relaxed as we need to be, but we’re working – and resting – on it.
The fact that my partner has just made a delicious meal while I’ve been resting helps enormously.
The theme of yesterday’s Buddhist teaching was ‘Transforming Adversity’.
It was the first of the latest 4-week course, as an outreach from the Kadampa Madhyamaka Buddhist Centre, near Pocklington.
It only takes me 15 minutes to drive to the Meeting House.
A few years ago, when I was living in Leeds, I drove to Buddhist teachings and meditation meetings in Pickering, a distance of over 50 miles.
I went regularly, almost every week, for about two years, until the classes there stopped.
They helped me a lot those meetings, with the words spoken by the teachers, the benefits of meditation and the experience of a supportive group.
When I started going to the meetings that I go to now, I was in a very bad state mentally.
These meetings have helped me a lot too, to reach the point that I needed to reach, where I am now.
When I first started with my journey of mental health recovery, I was like a drowning person – thrashing about desperately trying to find something to hold on to, so that I didn’t sink. Well, I did find things to hold on to – lifelines – and I didn’t drown.
Now, I feel like I’m waving. I need to keep working at it, to make sure that I keep my head above water, but I’ve learnt a lot in different ways and I keep learning.
Today is a good day.
I take Lydia to a dog field.
Trev and I go out for breakfast.
I meet a friend for coffee.
In my book – literally, in my book – that counts as a good day. A very good day.
Glad About 
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