Tag: writing

Day 9 – trusting

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Writing into Life

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A few months ago I had high levels of anxiety which manifested in various ways.

I became highly stressed about my car, as I was having problems with the gears and I started to catastrophise about ‘worst case scenarios’, knowing the extent to which I need my car for daily walks with Lydia.

I pushed through on positives as best I could at the time, the worst-case scenario didn’t present itself and my car has been fine for a few months.

Recently, I’ve started having problems with the gears again.

In the intervening months I’ve taken a lot of time to rest and continue to practice meditation, yoga and Qigong.

I write my blog, in 28-day cycles. The process of writing is proving to be very therapeutic. I’ve written intermittently and irregularly for years but not in the same way as I do now.

My daily walks with Lydia have also been therapeutic, giving us both a good start to the day with regular exercise, fresh air and that all important connection with the natural world.  In Lydia’s case a lot of her connection is through her nose; for me it is more a sense of the air around me and the ground under my feet; the slow steady movement of walking.

This time I haven’t experienced high levels of anxiety about my car problems.  It’s been a minor inconvenience which Trev has helped me with by picking me up from the garage when I dropped it off this morning. It should be ready later this morning and may need a new clutch in the longer term. 

Anxiety, I’m sure, arises from past experiences when we’ve needed to address a problem, and haven’t been able – for whatever reason – to find and implement a solution; where everything fell apart and we had no help in finding ways to put things back together. We’ve learnt to ‘not cope’ and to retreat instead of establishing ways of knowing what to do and how.

When I was younger, I had none of the personal resources and resilience that I have now. I wasn’t taught any coping strategies as any assertion on my part would have upset the status quo, however uneasy that status quo was (and it most certainly was uneasy, at best).

However, through experience and reflection I’ve done my best to learn and change, to take responsibility for the things that make up day-to-day life and to see and do things differently.

I still rely on a small dose of anti-depressant medication every day, but the main processes I use are the ones that are active not passive.  Moving from passive to active has been the major achievement of my life.  The mental effort it has taken has been enormous and sustained, which is why, at the moment, I need to rest a lot as well.  Re-focusing and re-prioritising takes time and I need to continue to trust in the process, however frightening the prospect of uncertainty may seem. I’ve come a long way, just in the last few months. I’m not going back now.

Day 8 – caring

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Writing into Life

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I wake early, around 6am, relieved to know that there is no pressure for me to get up and out of bed for a few hours yet.

I set myself a target of 9.30 but rise before then, go downstairs and make a cup of tea.  The important thing comes first though – giving Lydia a tummy and chest rub.  Then I open the back door and do a few repeats of ‘Healing Form’ as Lydia welcomes the day in her own way.  Sue, the Qigong teacher, reminded us of some of the details of the Healing Form movement in the class last night so I was able to reintroduce these to my practice.

It’s a quiet walk for Lydia and me this morning, with no passing cars, joggers, cyclists or dogs; just a tractor going to and fro’ across a field in the distance. 

Back home and she has her breakfast from her breakfast ball as usual; she is an expert now at nudging it around with her nose so that the dried food pellets fall out; it’s a lot better for her than passively eating from a bowl.

I have a restful morning, doing nothing much more than loading and setting off the dishwasher, and putting away some clean laundry.  I’m sure if I looked around the house I could – and would – find dust and cobwebs in various corners, but on the whole I’m up to date with what needs doing inside.

As it’s Tuesday I visit my friend who used to live in the village but now lives in a care home, a few miles away.  Her personal carer, J is there too, and we have a lovely chat together outside in the sunshine while J does M’s nails, commenting on the wonderful weather we’ve had this summer and how we wish we could have weather like this every summer.

After J leaves, I read M a short story from a magazine I’ve brought with me. She lies on the bed and snoozes as I read.  At 85, it’s good to see her relaxed and looking so much brighter than she did a few weeks ago.  It’s amazing what a change of environment can do.

Arriving home, I have a supply of dental sticks that I ordered for Lydia, and proof copies of my latest books in paperback form waiting for me.  I give Lydia a dental stick for a treat straight away and flick through the proofs.  I’ll need to look at them in more detail before I approve them for publication, but am pleased on first sight.

Self-management rule no. 20 is a good one: enjoy the process. I have found in my life that it is enormously difficult to do this, but am working on it, and – I believe – getting better at it by the day, bit by bit, step by step.

Day 7 – purpose

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Writing into Life

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Lydia and I did a double circuit of our woodland walk this morning.  It was good walking weather, neither too warm nor cold, and she was doing really well with her “heel” work, tugging on the lead only a little but also at times pulling herself into the “heel” position, which I was quick to reinforce with the reward of a treat (or three). She’s not just a “good girl”, she’s the best girl (but then I’m biased).

I’m rewarding myself with the treats of a yoga class followed by a Qigong class this afternoon.

I keep to the routine of my ‘Mental Health Mondays’ most weeks, providing the classes are on. It makes for a great start to the week, working at deep levels which, combined with meditation, help me to push through on positives.

That doesn’t mean that I’m always ‘doing stuff’.  It just means that I’m working on training my mind to not revert to the negative thought patterns that I grew up with, so that I can move forward in different ways, taking care of my body at the same time as I need it to carry me through.

I’ve taken a further positive step by applying to do some volunteering at the Buddhist Centre.

My offer is one afternoon a month for now, as I don’t want to over-commit on top of existing commitments, particularly since I’m still working through a phase of burnout.  But being at the Centre yesterday helped to remind me how replenishing an atmosphere it is, and I have a lot of skills learned in my working life that could be put to good use.

It isn’t always easy, during retirement, to re-establish ourselves after the rigours of working life have taken their toll. I don’t want or need too many things going on but I do need to feel that there is some meaning and purpose in what I do and why I do it.

Day 2 – belonging

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Writing into Life

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Lydia loves her home; our home. 

I’ve noticed how her confidence has increased, particularly over this last summer when she makes decisions about what she wants to do and when she wants to do it. The back door is open most of the time, and she comes and goes as she pleases, within the confines of our garden.

While I continue to train her and manage her behaviour around reactivity, reinforcing basic commands such as “sit”, “wait”, “down”, “stay” and “heel”, I like the fact that she works things out for herself, and we sometimes have a compromise. For example, if she’s outside barking at birds or other dogs or motorbikes going by, and I use the “here” command to bring her in, she will often come towards me but then settle down quietly, still outside but near the door.  I think this is really clever. She gets what she wants – to stay outside – and I get what I want – for her to be quiet and not disturb the neighbours. I like the fact that we can come to an understanding about this arrangement between us, me using my language and she using hers.

Some people may say that I shouldn’t let her get her own way like this, that I need to be ‘top dog’ but I’ve read that the ‘alpha’ principle that used to be thought to apply to dogs, doesn’t, and I’m happy to go with the latest research.

Source: Alpha Dog Myth: Understanding Canine Behavior – PetPress, and others

Lydia belongs here.  After the life that she’s had – much of which we know nothing about until she came into our lives through adoption – it’s good to know that she has a strong sense of home now. Her home; our home.

At the poetry open mic meeting that I performed in last week, another reader read out an extract from ‘The House of Belonging’ by David Whyte. I hadn’t heard of it before, but it resonated with me at a level that leads me to want to reproduce it here:

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

The House of Belonging poem – David Whyte

Homepage – David Whyte

Going forward, that poem will underpin how I apply my own ‘rules for self-management’ that I introduced in yesterday’s post: https://gladabout.life/2025/08/26/day-1-filing/.

It somehow feels like it’s what I’ve been working towards for a long time, and the poem just said it for me.

Thanks and thoughts go to David Whyte, and to the lady who read out the poem at the open mic meeting.

Day 1 – Filing

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Writing into Life

Lydia is loving this summer.

She soaks up the sun when she wants to, and searches out shady spots when she needs to cool down.

We have a good walk together, mid- to late morning.

I still find the ‘waking up and getting out of bed’ bit of the day very difficult. But I do it, with the help of a routine which involves meditating and sitting quietly with a cup of tea before I do anything else. And this morning I did get myself out of bed a bit earlier than I have been doing, so something must be working.

Over the last couple of weeks, as well as preparing paperback versions of my two latest books, I’ve also taken part in an open mic poetry session at a local library. This was so inspirational not least because the library is in my home town, and I don’t have many positive associations with my home town, due to what I now realise is the trauma I experienced as a child. I disassociated, went into survival mode, and the rest isn’t history because I can hardly remember any of it. But it doesn’t matter.  I’ve realised it doesn’t matter because it’s in the past, and I’m living my best life today.

What constitutes a ‘best life’ for me though, doesn’t mean that I need to go on exotic holidays or do ‘special’ stuff all the time. It’s the ‘small’ everyday stuff that does it for me, most of the time. Yes, I like to go out for meals, have treats and takeaways, holidays occasionally, but I don’t want to miss out on what I have around me, in the here and now, every day.

And that includes attending to my own personal paperwork – and filing.

Historically I haven’t been the best at this, although steadily, during the process of my recovery, I have been pulling chaos into order, establishing priorities and making sure that I don’t leave a pile of debris in my wake (literally, in my wake, i.e. when I do ‘pop my clogs’ my affairs are going to be so simple for the Executor to administer).

I first started developing a set of ‘rules for self-management’ some time ago, as an antidote for having been badly managed by others.  Ideas for these rules popped into my head from time to time and I wrote them down, not knowing what I was going to do with them, or when I would be able to do anything with them.  The self-management rules became ‘poetry rules’ for a while, as I related some of my poems to the inherent principles within.

Now I’m back to thinking again in terms of self-management, and I’m going to steadily work through my rules, applying them to my life as I continue to walk and work with Lydia, write this blog, live with my partner, meet up with friends and neighbours, write more poems, make more pots. I’m going to do my own filing as well along with a lot of other things I want and need to do.

Ambitions

Gleeful

Wild

Outrageous

Contagious

Cheerful

Fearful

Full

Respectful

Disrespectful

Mad

Sad

Glad

Cook

Read a Book

Make Tea

Dance

Romance

Work

Shirk

Naughty

Nosy

Silly

Me.

Available on Amazon for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited:

Rules, Rhymes, Recovery, Recipe, Random – Glad About Life – https://amzn.eu/d/1ljZIDA

A Woman, a Dog & a Blog – Writing into Life – https://amzn.eu/d/0wj6lWa

The paperback versions will be available soon.

Talking

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First published 18 November 2020

Photo by Cup of Couple on Pexels.com

I’ve never been very good at talking.

At primary school I was cast as a mouse in the school play: all I had to do was say “squeak, squeak”.

The career advice I was given at secondary school was to become a librarian. 

I didn’t want to become a librarian (or be a mouse) – I wanted to be able to speak.

There have been times in my life when I felt, finally, that some degree of fluency was coming through. But I’ve never quite reached the point of feeling that I could say what I wanted or needed to say, in any given situation. I think that’s why I’ve turned to writing poetry, because however much the spoken word evades me, and for whatever reason, I can express myself in poetry, one way or another.  It doesn’t mean I don’t end up feeling ‘dumb’ and stupid in conversation when my brain can’t tune in to what is being said.  However, in more positive moments I can also reflect on the many facets of communication, and the importance of being heard, in one way or another.

Day 28

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Continuing the story of Lydia and Me

On the 28th day in my latest cycle of “Writing for Life”, I reflect on how far I’ve come.

For a long time, I thought and hoped that I would eventually arrive at a point of ‘recovery’ from the difficulties and distress that I’ve been working through for most of my life.

It hasn’t worked out like that though; in fact, it’s worked out better.

I’m still not and probably never will be a ‘morning person’. I need a lot of time to rest in bed, even if I’m not sleeping.  I don’t ‘seize the day’ with a leap and a jump but it doesn’t matter.  I let myself be what I am while still working steadily on turning old, ingrained patterns into new ones.  Big cogs take a longer time to turn and I do what I can when I can, in positive ways.

Rather than ‘recover’ to a known point, I’ve grown into the unknown; a place that is at times unfamiliar and uncomfortable. This opens up possibilities for further growth, pushing me to experience much more of life than I ever could have imagined.

It’s taken a massive amount of energy and effort and every last bit of motivation that I can muster, but I know that I have gone a long way towards training my mind and will keep doing just that.

While I take a short break from writing my daily blog, I’ll republish earlier posts. I’ll also be putting together paperback versions of my two latest books, available on Amazon for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited:

https://amzn.eu/d/0WFLADz

https://amzn.eu/d/aD4H94B

Thank you for your support.  See you soon.

Day 27

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Continuing the story of Lydia and Me

There were eight of us at the poetry group meeting this morning.

I hadn’t had breakfast before I went but I felt nourished by the nature of the group, sharing words that we’d prepared and formed in whatever ways we wanted to.

On the way home, needing food for body as well as soul, I bought buns and vanilla slices for me and Trev.

I then headed out again for the Open Day at the kennels that I take Lydia to when we’re away.

The kennels have a rescue and rehoming facility as well as the business side, so I like to support them in whatever way that I can. There were plenty of other people there to support them too.

Lydia and I had a rest together this afternoon. The importance of rest is a lesson that I’ve been learning only recently. Sometimes, the time and circumstances just have to be right.

Van Gogh featured in the discussion at the poetry group. He struggled to rest, with all the complex thoughts and influences going on in his mind, channelling his energies through paint. Quite how he found the focus for this I don’t know, in the time and circumstances that he lived in. But he did.

The theme for next month’s meeting was agreed and set as “something funny”.

I’m looking forward to thinking and writing about something funny. It’s time I had a good laugh. I’ve had to work hard and dig deep to turn my life around through decades of difficulties and distress.  Now is the time to start having fun.

Day 7

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Continuing the story of Lydia and Me

My book, A Woman, a Dog & a Blog: Writing into Life, published today on Amazon.

https://amzn.eu/d/d5VCvg0

Writing a blog post every day is a challenge I’ve set myself, after several years of only being able to write a blog post every few weeks or months. It’s taken a long time to get my brain to work the way it is working now, and writing has played an important part of my recovery journey.

Getting stuff out of my head and on to paper – however, incoherent and uncoordinated that stuff was – helped with clearing out the crap. I started the process long ago, it’s only now that I can write with a sense of connectedness to my self, and a sense that it might also help to connect with others.

A lot of people may think that they “can’t write”, like a lot of people think that they “can’t sing”, or draw, or paint, or do anything much at all.

We often judge and self-limit, at least in part because we’ve been previously judged and limited by people who wanted to control us, who didn’t want to feel threatened by our presence; our potential.

I know now, quite categorically and with absolute certainty, that I can sing.

I may not sing in a way that other people would consider to be ‘in tune’ or appealing, but that doesn’t matter. I can sing.

My favourite song to sing is ‘Fairytale of New York’ by The Pogues. I used to sing it every year at work, with my mate Dave. I last sang it – loud and strong – at a Hen do.

I know also that I can write. I write because I want to and I hope that my writing may also help anyone reading it to find the sense of self that I have done, in a world that for many years didn’t make sense to me at all.

I’ve struggled all my life to identify with any kind of role; but I do now identify with the self-appointed roles that I have: writer, artist and dog trainer (not necessarily in that order and with no qualifications whatsoever for the latter).

I’ve had holding ‘roles’ before, that were part of my development and needed to be, but they have all led up to this, and the work I do now, with words, with clay and with my dog.  

Day 3

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Continuing the story of Lydia and Me

Last year I was given a great gift.

It was wrapped up in special packaging: a teaching and meditation morning at a Buddhist centre.

The teaching carried in it a message that helped me to put to rest something that I’d been struggling with for decades.

I’d thought, for a long time, that I would never be able to put right mistakes that I’d made in the past because they were too big; too major.  I thought that I’d fallen and failed early on in my life and all my efforts to rebuild had failed too. Despite doing my best to push through on positives for a long time, it had never been enough.

Then, suddenly, there it was, in the teaching that morning.  It was possible for me to put the past behind me and be happy in the present.  All I had to do was develop a calm and peaceful mind.

That teaching gave me hope, when I needed hope, and I’ve been building on it ever since.

That doesn’t mean that I am suddenly happy and joyful all the time.  You don’t go through a lifetime of struggling with complex mental health and emotional difficulties without that struggle alone taking its toll.  But I now allow myself to feel lighter, have stopped berating myself, stopped feeling responsible for everything that goes ‘wrong’ or has gone ‘wrong’ in the past.

For a long time, friends have told me that I deserved to be happy, but there was something so badly hurt, and at such a deep level, that it’s taken a long, long time for that place of hurt to be finally exposed to a point of healing, and for that healing to start taking place.

Tonight is a meeting of the Buddhist group that I go to, which is an outreach from the Centre that I went to last year[i].

I’ve already had a good day today, and I have that to look forward to this evening. 

Some gifts just keep on giving.

[i] Madhyamaka Centre, Pocklington, UK

Rules, Rhymes, Recovery, Recipe, Random – Glad About Life: https://amzn.eu/d/6Ptwe4S

Woman, a Dog & a Blog – Writing into Life: https://amzn.eu/d/63qIYzR