Just Random Thoughts

I don’t have a central theme to this post. It’s just a musing or a ramble. I like many others have been in lock down and suffering from mental helath issues. I have fourtunately had a good mental health team around me and they have ensured that I am getting medication. The difference a set of good eds makes is unbeliveable. This time last year I was struggling to get up in the morning and then spent the day struggling to think.The meds made me sluggish. The new meds have allowed me to be more motivated and helped to focus on getting stuff done. Like getting on with my coding learning. I had a hiccup with the meds last week and the difference is striking.

I have also cut a lot of social media out of my life as well. I still have profiles, but I have deleted the apps from my phone. This has resulted in me haveing no clue about whta is occuring outside of my curated instagram feed. I don’t get embroiled in any agrugemnets that my head can’t let lie. I feel a sense of guilt I guess because there are things occuring in the world stage which are huge like the ‘Black Live Matter’ demonstrations, the covid response , and lifting of the restrictions. I feel like I should be more vocal about these things and recognise thaat my ability to just turn off socail media, speaks volumes about the level of my ‘priviledges’. Lots of people don’t get to just ‘turn off’ these issues when it gets to be too much.

I don’t have much to add to any of the debates as I don’t know enough about the problems. So I’m reading and listening to podcasts, in order to better understand. I try to amke my kids aware of the inequalities in the world, but I worry that I’ll bog them down in the rot and not have anything positive to show them. I’ll bumble and ramble along I guess and make a mess of things here and there, but I hope I remeber to tidy upafter myself and that my actions cause more good in the world than harm. I want to do more than hope. I want to make the world around me, and that spreads out from me a better place. It’s overwhelming the amount to be done. But I will try to take it on piece by piece. I feel that my major contribution will be in how I bring my kids up, and how they then influence the world.

I’ve rambled enough here. I’ll shush and things.

something about logic and emotion Part 1

To write this safely, I have had to use a lot of my therapy tools and hand write it out, to slow and focus my mind. 

One of my core strengths is my ability to generate a zabilliion and 5 ideas and scenarios in my mind extremely quickly. I'm not saying I'm better at this than anyone else, its just one of the things I do well. My logic and creative mind kicks in and takes my mind whirling through thoughts at speed, its too much too quickly. So a technique I developed is to vocalise my ideas this forces my mind to slow down. It focuses my mind on 1 or 3 ideas which my mind will chase and flip between. Generally from talking to my therapist I think it's fair to say that ideas cause emotional responses. Like thinking about a bungee jump conjures feelings of fear, excitement and so on. These emotional responses cause physical responses. Fear can get the adrenaline pumping and so on. This all helps us identify and respond to risk levels. 

My mind is great at generating the ideas, but it a bit addicted to the rush of new ideas and chases each idea as far as it can before jumping to  another tangential idea and running with it. Its fun, honestly it is. (If you've spoken to me after I've been painting I'll complain of a head ache, being tired and yet I  will talk about lots of ideas that my work will lead on to and where that can lead and where that....... (yawn) but I'm also quite manic in my actions being a lot more active. 

Unfortunately my emotional mind is not as quick to keep up I think. All the emotions get pushed to one side and don't get dealt with. This would not be an issue, but for life and it's general demands; I have to react to events, and the emotions from the whirling mind don't get dealt with. (I should point out that my mind does this even when I'm not  painting). I guess I use to be able to just push these things away or down and deal with them somehow - I honestly have no idea how I did it. But since the start of 2016(?) 17(?)  something has given way. And the thing I did -what ever it was- no longer functions. So instead all the emotions sit there stewing unprocessed, unlabeled, unacknowledged until some stress or event triggers the dam to burst.

This next bit is hard to write. It's how my body reacts. I've had over the past few nights this happen hourly or so -  I was really grateful for sleep last night. I'm not sure if they are panic attacks, but that's what I'm going to call them. When it kicks in my right hand starts to shake and twitch. Then I start crying randomly. It stops and starts over the course of 30 minutes or so. Sometimes that's it just uncontrollable crying. Other times it gets more extreme. I curl in to a ball, my anxiety peaks and I lose the ability to form words, both in my mind and physically. In my mind it rages.
 I have no idea what it is but it causes at its worst my throat and chest and all muscles to tense. I make a horrible tortured noise and then it reaches its peak where I can't even breathe. I become a tensed up ball of bone and flesh. My thoughts are wordless and too, too fast.

Then my body releases itself and I hyperventilate to get air and the cycle repeats. This can go on for 10 minutes until my body is sore and exhausted. At it worst I was having these for 30 minutes with little break in  between( thank fully the rethink team were there for me). My body might be exhausted but the anxiety is still there. This is conjecture, but at this point my logic mind is broken and I'm just reacting, not thinking. Maybe I see my self as a threat I don't know, but it can lead to self harming. I'm impulsively hurting my self. The unwanted thoughts of suicide will crash in again and again. It seems to be the only solution to end the nameless and formless torment. If  I fight that urge off I can end up in the panic attack mode again. Then suddenly it stops. I might get lucky and that is it for the day. WOOO!
Mostly it cycles (i'm not sure of the timings) pretty much every hour for whatever length of time. 

This is about as much as I can handle right now. My hand is letting me know I need to ground myself.  In my next part I'll be using metaphor to get ideas across. 
 

Something about renewal and fresh starts

Blimey 2017 was a year! I've had mental health issues and the world seems to have not faired that well either. I have learnt a lot about myself this last year, but I'm not here to talk about that right now. I have neglected my website for too long so I'm going to redesign it and hopefully get a decent bit opf motivation to post here consistently. I do a lot from my  phone and the squarespace apps are not the best. I can never be certain that the post goes through. When it does images sometimes go missing.  

I can't remember the last time I was here. Lots of minor things have happened in the interim I suppose. I lost an old friend. Regret kicks in and reminds me of all the opportunities to talk we missed. We typed exchanges once or twice on social media but that's not really the same thing is it. The level of interaction and, I don't know depth(?) are lacking.  
They formed a large part of my teen years. Three friends who unknowingly helped me through a great deal of crap growing up. I don't know what I'm trying to say here. I guess I just miss her. I can hear her laugh if I try hard enough to remember, but it' s faint and at some point I'll forget that too. 
I'd wish her well and peace only I don't believe in an afterlife. So instead I pm my care to those who miss her too.