Dishing out advice is so much easier than following it…

As someone who yesterday wrote this: Today I’ve struggled not to dissolve in to tears about the mess of a person I am and the mess of a year I’ve just had. Whether it was comparisons with others (the achievements and lives of my friends, people I went to school with, people I’ve been in…

Monstrous Mental Illness

is a painting I did last week when really struggling; I just needed to get what I was feeling out so it is a rough, emotion-filled picture with no fore-thought or plan. It depicts the dark, overwhelming monster of mental illness feeding on despair and blocking out the colour of the world and vibrancy of life. It can feel like the very substance of ‘you’ is being sucked away, becoming more and more faint, dominated by this inexplicable darkness…yet you know that just out of reach is a colourful, textured and varied world.

A day summed up by a single eye

Sometimes words aren’t required

Help with Emotions

Emotions are tricky little buggers. They really are.

And for some of us they feel down right impossible to cope with, understand, recognise and even simply to have. I struggle in many ways with emotions…others’ but mainly my own. I also give myself a hard time about that fact and expect myself to ‘do better’ or ‘feel the right thing’. Knowing this, and knowing that I’m facing a particularly turbulent time*, last week the crisis team manager had me do an exercise where I stood in the middle of a room surrounded by different sized pieces of paper and alotted emotions to those pieces of paper according to how much I was feeling them at the time. We then went through several different scenarios and changed the emotions around accordingly. This was to show me that even if I was being hard on myself and expecting to feel the ‘right’ emotions (e.g. happy or relieved that the placement is definite rather than scared or anxious) or feeling that I would feel one emotion forever, in fact recent history shows that emotions fluctuate massively in their presence or size and that I can feel many things at once without invalidating anything else that’s going on.

I found the exercise incredibly helpful (although it felt quite painful at the time) and today decided to recreate it in a portable and reusable form. I already have benefited from this – working out what is actually going on inside me rather than just a broad ‘overwhelmed’- and thought it’s a concept worth sharing in case anyone else wants to give something similar a go in any of its forms.

So here is a concept borne of the crisis team manager’s work with me:

This is in my visual journal but could be on a standalone piece of card or inside a diary or something similar, with very basic boxes drawn on the page, and colour-coded emotions cut out in card and blue-tacked to the appropriate box at that moment in time.

Let me know if you’ve used something similar or gave this a go!

*in the latter stages of preparing for a long-term specialist hospital placement, hours away from home/family/care team, in a locked and mainly unknown environment, after my last placement collapsed for financial reasons with just 28 days notice and after not fulfilling their promises/purpose

“I’m Fine” – Art that shows the reality behind that phrase

I had my first session of art therapy for around 8 months today and was so glad to get back in to it. There’s a lot going on below the surface that I’m struggling to express at the moment and I feel like I was able to connect with that through paint.

The reality of looking and saying “I’m fine” when struggling with complex mental illness and acute crises.

Demon of Unworthiness (Visual Journal)

Current state of my brain (Visual Journal)

Days From Hell Approaching

Tomorrow: 11am Commissioner coming to gather evidence and talk to me to assess if they will keep funding my placement 2.30pm Meeting with CCs, placement psychologist, placement manager, senior keyworker and ODM of the company to review/assess/gather evidence ahead of funding panel Tuesday: 9.30am Funding panel that decides my future 11am Therapy, last before psychologist…

A Particularly Jam-Packed Day at a Placement for Complex Mental Illness

Tomorrow has become a bit of an unwieldy beast: 11am Review with Senior Recovery Worker 1.30pm House Meeting 2pm Interviewing New Staff 2pm Session with in-house OT Hoping that overnight I learn how to split myself in to 3 😂 times will be changed but that itself is panic-worthy! ALL THE STRESS in one day.

Just Bee

What my Occupational Therapist is trying to convince me to do

Not Coping

Inside My Head – Overwhelmed and Terrified

Too much. Can’t cope.

A Befuddling Day

Trigger warning: discussion of suicide.  I was supposed to die today. My plans were firm, my reasoning was definite in my head, I’d found ways to say goodbye without actually saying the words. I was meant to be dead.  Then, in a frenzy, I had a phonecall from the crisis team manager who didn’t have…

The Monster in My Head

An Example of Crisis Team Excellence

TRIGGER WARNING: DISCUSSION OF SUICIDAL IDEATION This week has been horrific. So many horrors, for so many reasons. An all-c0nsuming urge to end my life, fed into from different triggers and factors.  But this week I have been so impressed by the response of my local crisis team to me. On Thursday, for the first time ever,…