Spring
The warmth of the sun on my head
A light cool breeze brushing against my cheek
The sweet smell of wallflowers
The birds are singing
The sky is blue
A recent shower has made everything fresh and new
Daffodils and tulips sway in the breeze
Always smiling it seems
Blossom buds on the apple trees
With the promise of something sweet and delicious
A cat is sunning himself on a drive
Seeming not to have a care in the world
The bees are hard at work
Collecting pollen from the flowers
A few clouds overhead
Move around to create interesting shapes
A darker cloud in the distance
Threatens to send me indoors
But for now I’ll carry on walking
Taking in the sights, the smells and the sounds
For a little while life can wait
While I just live in the moment
And enjoy the Spring
Smiling
I’m a happy smiling person today
Apparently
I’ve had a good time in the shops today
Apparently
I’m fine
Apparently
I don’t need taking notice of
Apparently
I’m lonely
Really
So lonely
Frustrated
Poorly
Ashamed
Worthless
I just want to talk to someone
About anything
I might look ok
but today I’m not
hmmm
If I say I’m having a good day I’m ignored. Have a bad day and everyone runs to console you, unless its something they don’t want to talk about then they ignore you again.
Nothing like encouraging people to feel bad is there!!!
Just because I say I’m having a good day doesn’t mean I want to be ignored, it hurts to feel invisible.
People tell me I’m doing well or that they understand me when clearly half the time they haven’t even understood what I’ve written let alone understand the first thing about me!!!
I’m struggling and no one gives a crap really. Thats how it feels today. But because I try hard and achieve things people think I’m ok.
Really? I’m ok?
Well how come I think I’m stupid and incapable of doing anything? How come I despair because I don’t see how I can work ever again and I really want to earn money?
I’m fed up of being ill all the time, fed up of not having the energy to eat properly every day, fed up of having no job, fed up of feeling worthless and trying to convince myself that I’m ok. Fed up of feeling second best……to everybody. Fed up of being ignored, fed up of being me.
So it looks like I don’t have a problem on the surface? Scratch it and its obvious that I still do. If you can be bothered.
Eyes
Last week i went to the opticians because the computer screen became really hard to focus on and it was making working life very difficult. The optician said that I had convergence insufficiency. I actually knew this but its good to get a real diagnosis. So many things make sense now including:
I was rubbish at sports
I cannot navigate my way around people in the street
I cannot see magic eye pictures (always frustrating!!!)
I’m clumsy
I sometimes walk into people even though I don’t realise it, this has almost caused a fight before
I often find it difficult to read
I get vertigo
I get stressed if there is too much mess because I cannot navigate my way around it
I easily get tired when studying or concentrating
In all school pictures of me as a child and teenager my head is tilted to one side yet I remember thinking that I was staring straight ahead.
I’m wary of going up and especially down the stairs.
I don’t like going up and down ladders
Everything is so much more difficult when stressed.
There are many other things which I’ve noticed. I have an anxiety disorder which I think is related at least in part to this. When I was bullied at work I became ill in a very short space of time. I think maybe it was more difficult working under such stress that I just thought I wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t concentrate and ended in tears many a time because I didn’t think I could do my job.
There were also certain things I struggled to learn when i was a child, tying my shoelaces and knitting, I ended up teaching myself through trial and error. I don’t know if this is related or not. i didn’t have any problems with reading, i can also read music as well as i read a book but these days its more and more difficult, I cannot read the notes as fast as I used to so need to rely on my memory to play things.
For years I’ve wondered whether something wasn’t quite right. I wasn’t bad enough to fit into any specific learning disorder but I just knew that something was holding me back from achieving my full potential. Now I have the answer to my question I just need to work out how to fix it. the optician gave me exercises but the internet has told me they are no better than a placebo, great! Plus they are giving me eye strain and migraines so I have had to take a break and will be taking them a lot easier next time!
Happy Birthday
One whole year
Of friendship
Kindness
compassion
One whole year
of helping people to not feel alone
A place to feel safe
A place to be yourself
A place to rant and moan
No one judges
Everyone accepts
Experiences are shared
Both good and challenging
Happy Birthday SISNM!
& Thanks for all your help.
Agitation
so very agitated today. Spent a lot of time in the garden at the weekend, neglecting the housework totally. I did mean to put some washing on but doesn’t seem to have happened!
Last night was a very anxious night, dreaming and hypoventilating at the same time, waking up time and time and time again, most unpleasant. As a result woke this morning feeling rough and with a bad head and didn’t go to my voluntary job as a result.
You’d think with feeling rough I’d chill out a bit but no, I had the sudden urge to tidy my tip of a bedroom. took all day, with computer breaks in between! Sorted all the washing out, how have we even got that much stuff to wash in the first place? Been washing all day and still have 8 loads left! Mad!!!
So I thought that once my bedroom was don I’d chill a little. Nope, I then started on the lounge and apart from sitting on the computer I don’t seem to be able to stop myself. My OCD doesn’t normally take over the cleaning, plus it seems to still be busy worrying about the various pains that appeared over night. Yet here I am compulsively cleaning.
My brain is running as fast as it can thoughts buzzing around as if they don’t get in quick they won’t have a chance. I don’t feel focused but I am managing to get stuff done. I feel really agitated, not happy, just some agitated annoying energy bubbling away under my skin. I just want to relax but its not happening.
The other day I noticed that I was loving anything that was pretty, don’t know if I was just noticing stuff more or if the colours really were brighter, maybe just because things look better in the sun. I can see why I like spending money at this time of year.
Unfortunately right now I am feeling very unsettled, I can go from feeling like this to quite down and anxious in a matter of hours, something I usually experience in the autumn. Wonder if I’ll ever make sense of what causes this, or even what’s happening. all I can do right now is write it all down, I’ll try to make sense of it later I suppose.
Sunshine
Much a I love the warmth and the nice weather I don’t remember ever having problems with it as early as March.
For once I’m going to record it as I see it now, otherwise I forget and the rest of the world thinks I’m making it all up anyway!
I don’t think I have ever seen so much perfectly blue sky in all my life, its beautiful and at first it felt great. Sadly now its getting a bit much. Last wednesday it triggered what the doctors think was a migraine, mostly visual disturbances rather than headaches, worried me a bit to have vision problems just like that and since it lasted more than 30 minutes I didn’t think it could be a migraine so the first thing that happened were panic attacks, never particularly welcome.
I now have a hat and have found my sunglasses out and today my eye is a bit less annoying. The bright sunshine is, however, even with sunglasses on, really really irritating me. I spend most of the day wanting darkness. My energy levels are slowly creeping up and I’ve barely slept for the past week, finding it harder to settle down to go to sleep along with the normal anxiety induced early waking.
The urge to shop has started, I’ve gone from not being able to find anything to buy to wanting and ‘needing’ a lot of stuff. I’m not sure how I can control it when I feel like this as it makes me feel so good to have new clothes.
It seems strange that only 6 weeks ago I was trying to get as much light as possible and now I’m having to severely limit it. I also feel a bit cheated, I want to be outside in this lovely weather, I just can’t stand the brightness of the light, its aggravating my brain, making it rush around like a mad thing. What I’d quite like is to be able to chill out but I don’t feel calm. I don’t even feel happy, just very very unsettled.
Don’t know what to expect next as I don’t remember feeling so unsettled this early in the year. May yes, definitely but March and April have traditionally been more settled months, times when I can feel a bit normal and not having to wonder what is happening to me!
I am hoping now for some cloud, just so the sky is less bright, nothing too awful! The sun worshipers would hate me if I did a rain dance I think!
Here we go again
After having a very positive start to the month and even a positive weekend something has triggered my mood to go down down down, it is still falling, I feel dreadful, my body hurts, I am more tired than most people can even imagine and my brain has just given up trying to function, though I can still read for now which is something.
To give a bit of background I was bullied at work almost 3 years ago, had depression and really bad anxiety afterwards. Left my job for good just over a year ago after being off sick for a while then started to rebuild my life by taking in voluntary work, I have 2 jobs, one nice easy job and one a little more challenging. When I started the challenging job one of the supervisors made me cry the first time I worked with her so I explained what had happened before in the hope that she would be a bit nicer, I was aware that it could backfire but at the time I thought it was best to give her a chance to amend her behaviour. After not working with this woman as supervisor for a few weeks my confidence was growing, I am perfectly capable of doing the job and was even starting to enjoy it.
So on Monday the normal supervisor has a week off and this woman is standing in. I knew that but didn’t think it would be a problem. It was a very big problem, she was putting time pressures on me, something which I don’t get from anyone else there at all, I am still learning after all it will take me a bit longer to do things. then when I went to check what I was doing which I have to do with each case she would fire of a round of questions, some of which I had the answers to some I didn’t. It wasn’t so much the content of what she was saying rather than they way she said it, she could’ve said could you ask this or do we know that but it was basically questions like does he have an apple, does the banana need our help (obviously those weren’t the real questions!) which made me feel completely inadequate and stupid even though I had the majority of answers there. She carried on with the pressure of timing, I felt really uncomfortably stressed and started to feel guilty going to the toilet or having something to eat. At the end she sat there and said ‘we only answered 40% of calls today thats not very good is it’ How to make someone feel even worse! I thought we did really well to be honest as it just didn’t stop all morning!
Later that day I felt really anxious and on edge so I decided to do some hypnotherapy as that helps in so many ways. It did help me to tune into what I was really feeling and by the time I went to bed I was in tears. The next day I was really struggling to get myself to go, not a good sign at all but I went in because Tuesdays are normally better and that woman is not there. Unfortunately there was only one supervisor working instead of 2 which meant I had no backup on tap which made me feel a bit uncomfortable. I took my first call, my concentration wasn’t good and I was struggling to understand what the person was trying to say. Felt that I’d done a terrible job and burst into tears. I made some excuse that I wasn’t feeling well and went home, via the shops!
Since then my mood has continued to drop. I am having flashbacks from when I was bullied and all the difficult things I had to endure. I am also seeing the world increasingly as a very very bad place right now. Most people are cruel and uncaring. I’ve seen someone being called a baby and told to grow up for expressing emotion, being a human being and having a hard life. Life can feel very hard when you are constantly feeling that you are being picked on, when you try so hard only to end up right back at square one again wondering seriously whether there is any point in living.
I know that there are good people in the world, I know that everything will be ok one day, that’s the only thing that really keeps me going at the moment.
I wish people would understand a bit more what its like to suffer like this. Those that do are really kind and wonderful people but those that don’t tend to judge and make me feel like I’m not good enough just because I have an illness. Why can’t you do this? You are not trying hard enough, you’re not quick enough. They just don’t know how much I do put into getting better, I’ve sat on buses suppressing tears because I’m putting myself into some scary situations, I’ve got through it and I’m proud of that but I wish that I could take some time to curl up in a corner without feeling that I am being judged.
Wish it was the weekend again, I was happy then, sorting my garden out, planing my onions, enjoying the sunshine, who knew that happiness could be taken away so quickly.
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