Sending my love and best wishes out there to everyone for whom Mothers’ Day brings pain or sadness.
To those separated by death.
To those who have never met.
To those who have to be apart for whatever reason.
To those for whom illness or addiction provides a barrier.To those who made a brave choice to end unhealthy relationships.
To all of you, whatever you experience this day, please know that you’re not forgotten and your experience is valid.
Take care x
As part of an Occupational Therapy group at my placement we are doing a topic on ‘care’; a member of our group suggested that we make notes to leave in books at the library and what a lovely idea that is! So today I’ve gotten really in to finding some nice messages and making some little cards up to put in there on Monday.
I’ve always loved the idea of doing something like this, thinking that you never know what little thing might brighten someone’s day. And who knows, maybe it will trigger a whole chain of small acts of kindness?
I’m having a contrary time at the moment.
On the one hand, I am feeling incredibly awful – dealing with dreadful anniversaries, and a whole host of guilt, shame, self-hatred and fear that go with them.
On the other, I had the most positive CPA I could hope for today in terms of recognition of the work I am putting in to my placement (& the intensive therapy that is part and parcel), the progress I’ve already made, and everyone’s hopes for the positive trajectory of recovery they are currently predicting.
This second point is also making me guilty that I can’t “just be positive” and focus on the blessings of the help and support I am currently receiving that led to as yet unheard of positivity from everyone at the meeting (including myself). But here I am feeling overwhelmingly sad for all I’ve put those around me through and struggling to cope with that guilt.
To try to help get through, I was searching for a positive quote to paint as a reminder for myself, and this one struck a chord…
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.
TRIGGER WARNING: overdose
Today has been a day of fighting that bastard of a monster who takes control of my head and heart. I think of him like this:
That monster convinced me that even by sitting with other patients or staff I would spread the toxicity inside me to them and even worse that I was having such a bad impact that I couldn’t even just avoid people but would have to die.
I found some tablets on leave. I grabbed them. I meant to take them to punish myself.
But that little bit of Molly somehow battled past the monster long enough for me to grab a member of staff I know and trust. And I wrote a letter explaining, handed it over, and then had a chat with her and a nurse.
The staff were lovely- truly- but I still don’t know if I did the right thing or if it was really selfish of me to not remove myself for the good of everyone else. I still couldn’t sit with my usual group of friends here after the talks and PRN.
A very sad, scared and confused Molly 😦
I move to an out of area inpatient placement on Thursday, 100 miles away from home. This has meant a week of almost non-stop ends of therapeutic relationships. Today has been bookended by particularly tearful goodbyes to my psychologist and the crisis team manager. And the tears have kept on flowing as I reflect on this incredibly touching poem the crisis manager left with me:
I am blown away.
It’s 2 weeks today until I move over 100 miles out of area to my new placement. Before Ieave, I wanted to show a small sign of thanks to the crisis team, who’ve provided such vital support in helping me. I know as time moves on I’ll get less and less able to organise things, so thought I should get on and put something together before my brain is nothing but mush (rather than 80:20 mush at present)…
…just a few well-deserved treats but I know how much they will be appreciated and how much some nice, energy-filled snacks/drinks are needed on busy shifts.
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 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.
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