How are Things?

Tag: mental-health

  • Tuesday 5th August 2025

    How to live a good life is a question almost tired, it has been so explored. But for me, the rebirth/requestioning that is taking place is so new, and so unexplored, that really asking it is not a failure.

    If I was to meet myself in five years, and was to find I was living a perfect life, what would I find? A healthy body, exercised and with no problems or stresses. A mind happy and joyful, again capable and with skills, still willing to learn. And a spirit in touch with compassion, aware of the remarkable and the spiritual, connecting with others and with a greater good.

    To have joy, one must work.

    A healthy body can only be arrived at by exercise, regular and routine. So I will have to go swimming and weight lifting several times a week.

    To have a happy mind, I need to take on study and learning. I need to take up a new skill, or skills, I need to practice new disciplines. I also need to take up mental discipline; perhaps Stoicism, though without the frequent foray into a masculinity that romanticizes the hermitic life. (Come at me bro!)

    A spiritual life is one that thinks of others even when it is not necessarily in one’s first interests.

    So lazy! I have more to write and it is so late, and still I dawdle!

    Today I saw my business coach again, and we spoke for an hour and a bit. I left with a notepad covered in notes, but a summation would, should, include;

    Research a particular business topic that will help me guide my team.

    • Rethink the problem and the dialogue surrounding it.
    • Reclaim the space of the problem and add my own successes to it; in some areas of work I have made huge progress, I need to create that energy to this area of work.
    • How do we create a climate of safety for our team?
    • And also, I am responsible, not guilty. I need to take breaks, set boundaries, take the time to learn, and to work well, not more.
    • I need to communicate, and to have the deep fear of not being worthy, of having no right to be here, fade away. Like a smoker needs to examine the emotion before the impulse to smoke, I need to examine my own self doubt before giving into it.
    • I have for some topics passion, intelligence, and am willing to give real support, at times I am almost an evangelist. That is what I should bring to work.
    • Spock is a thousand times better than Kirk (but you already knew that).

    Dear friend, thank you for reading my late night ramblings. I will continue tomorrow to examine these fruits of my thoughts.

  • Thursday 31st July 2025

    If you’re reading this, you are probably imaginary. No one is reading this; the stats remain flatlined, like the heart readout of a patient in a TV ER show. “I’m sorry, Doctor … we did all we could.” So you reading this, are all in my head. A busy bespectacled professional, hoisting a leather notebook out of a satchel, wondering how my day went today. A mom with the sound of happy children coming from another room. A wise old woman, long silver hair in plaits, patchwork quilt to work on as my words go on, a view of old trees outside the window.

    The last day of July. Here comes the commencement of the march towards Autumn, and what I suspect will be a very hard winter for the world. How has my July been, and this rare, unique time that I now exist in? My son is away from the house, with his father and the man I do not like to think of, not least as my ex-husband. I get more than four hours sleep. I exist in a schedule of my own making. I am rested. Unrushed, for me.

    I think that it has taken me days to get to this state, where my pre-frontal cortex is alert enough to contemplate and reflect properly. I need to use this time to think, to really think, and to remind myself of who I am. Who I want to be.

    There is an art to strategy, to ruminating, and it is about time I got back to it. I should sit in the back of the cave and think for a while, the choice to do so won’t be given to me forever.

    One last thing to think tonight; going without sleep makes you stupid, upset, and unable to plan. Get more sleep.

  • Wednesday 23rd July 2025

    Right, well, here we go. No jazz concepts to calm the soul tonight my lovelies.

    My son has special needs. He can’t spend his summer at Summer camps as so many places won’t cater to him and he thinks they are rubbish in any case. So, there is a scheme where you can hire a qualified person to come to your home and take care of him, for a maximum of 40 hours over the total summer. It is a tiny thing but it is there. You fill in a form, you send it off, you get approved, you’re good. My son has a favorite person who has come to us several summers in a row, and it was all going like clockwork.

    She asked me today about the form, and I should have received confirmation way back in June about it. And I didn’t. I hunted through the items in my inbox, and on my desk, and true to form, there was the fubbing form untouched in the envelope his school had sent it home to me. I think I got it late April but maybe May, and had all of that month to send it in and then June as well. And I ruddy well forgot!

    I now owe this woman three figures that she has more than earned and I have to hand it over straight away, as in, tomorrow. How can I be so stupid? My first reaction in such moments is that I’ve discarded the right to live, I’m so stupid. And I have no one else to blame!

    There was a dreadful moment last year, after we were evicted and living in a city center flat, where I let getting the electricity set up go too long. It was absolutely my fault, I just let weeks go by and didn’t do it. Then they shut us off, and I had to get it back on pronto. It meant paying a reconnection fee, and dinners for my son in McDonalds. I was lucky, I still had a membership fee at the gym so we could go for swims, take hot showers, lunch in town… I was privileged. But it was completely unnecessary, just being too delicate to deal with the realities of life! Lying in the dark that night, I felt that a lesson of life had been shown to me; suffer the pain of practicalities or suffer a greater pain in their absence.

    And yet here we are again! Things sliding off me like algae off the side of a stagnant pond; why am I so stupid?! Why?

    I am supposed to be amazing everyone at work regarding my marvelous skills, and I’m honestly wondering if I should be here at all. What a waste of flesh!

  • Tuesday 22nd July 2025

    And finally, the day is done. I have some jazz on, everything is lit by lamplight, and the cat is relaxing. Let’s go through the day, shall we?

    So I managed to get up and to get going earlier than I have been (though still much later than I had before). I made breakfast for myself, and was interrupted by my son, meaning I felt obliged to make sure he had breakfast as well. This sudden extra piling on of jobs irritated me, I’m sorry to say – I was focused on the large task in front of me, and wanted to keep that focus on.

    After I made breakfast I headed away as close to 8am as possible. By 9.30am we were all in the boardroom and set up. And on came the interviews. I won’t be so tacky as to go through each of them directly, but I will say we had a total of five candidates, and there were two that stood out directly. The others had an energy that that seemed much less desirable.

    I got through them and then got through 50 emails, and then picked up some supplies from a colleague while on the way home. I got home at about 530pm. My son was out with his childminder having fun, and so I got a rare and precious chance to sit for a moment. Then everyone arrived home, so it was back to making dinner, serving, washing up, putting out the bins and then an hour’s worth of ironing. I wish I could say I listened to something highbrow, but instead I watched a Korean Drama The Trunk. Then it was, it is, time to get some rest. No doubt tomorrow all will be well.

    I am not sure we chose the right man today. I hope I have enough energy and sanity to lead the team correctly. But I am running on fumes at present, and I need to reboot as soon as I can. I have an image of myself in the shower, my eyes closed, water running over my face as I finally reset…

    I wish I had profundity to offer you. Some well crafted statement or saying conveying the purple night, a reflective thought, a resonance within a soul. Instead, I can only wish you peace, and rest, and say tomorrow will be another chance.

    Goodnight, all.

  • Thursday 10th July 2025

    A confession; I am as white as boiled rice. The sun and all its works wring me out more thoroughly than linen on a washer board. Yesterday saw me moving across town, until I gathered my son and two of his friends to go see a movie. It went well, which was a relief; as a boy with autism friendship isn’t a certainty. But getting home by 6pm with the weather in the 70s saw me drained far beyond my capacities. I made dinner, and then I tidied up, and then I felt myself more empty than a dry gas tank. I was in bed by 8.40pm, and slept hard until 4am. I want to call it moral decline, but honestly it’s sadder than that; it’s old age.

    Today, with all my hours of sleep behind me, I still felt exhausted. But up and at it, at 5am. Not all things got done, but all things were attempted, even when I wanted to give up.

    I even managed to have lunch with my sister. We rarely if ever get together. Her daughter, my niece, has been through hell and back, and now has had her long term partner break up with her. The weight of the sadness I know she is going through… The gift of today was seeing my sister again, though. Salads and chats, and catching up. Plans and hopes for the future, especially when I thought once it might never happen.

    Afternoon, I had my online session with my counsellor. We talked over the week, my exhaustion, and possible plans for change. I have sought out so much change recently that I hesitate. I doubt myself. I would love new pastures, but only if they’re pastures, not battlefields. I want everything to be All Right. Which of us don’t?

  • Tuesday 8th July 2025

    I woke at 5am for some reason believing it to be Saturday. My brain is craving release. I managed to get up today and get some work done, then took my boy to art camp. Yesterday saw me hunt for him in the car park. He is 13, not a big deal, but today they ensured that no child from his group would be let out without a parent coming to pick him up. Of course I was the last one there, so I managed to cause a lot of delay for all the teenagers minding the place. Lordie.

    Today was the release of the brand new, all shiny, will-solve-everything financial system in my workplace. This thing will, and I quote, see the institution hopefully do away with lots of administrative staff. It was supposed to roll out at 9am. That became 1pm. At 2.30pm there was no sign, and I had to collect my son and make it home to work from there.

    At home in the afternoon, maybe it was the coffee, maybe the consciousness of the extra needs of my son, but I was alerted and somewhat agitated. I got as much done as I could by 5.30, then made dinner.

    By 6.30pm I and my son were online, playing our very first round of Dungeons and Dragons. The DM is a friend from work and there was a third person joining us. My son finds it hard to regulate his excitement, even his voice, so I had to tell him to ease up on the volume a few times. This was enough to see him upset, thinking that I was making him feel left out. Maybe I was. The truth is that I have no friends, no activities and no hobbies other than this, and the chance to do something, anything, just for me, is rare. And he didn’t like it. I hope we get to do it again, it was a good space for my brain to be in.

    And now, the laundry is out of the machine, the clothes are laid out for tomorrow, and I will be at my computer by 6am at the latest to see if I can sort out the financial issues of my unit. Talk to you then.