Back to the drawing board and beyond
Excerpt from
I have had three attempts at recovery. The first I got hopelessly wrong in my thinking and approach, believing I could do it on my own and within a very short space of time.
Becoming well again can take a huge amount of time I have learned and there are no shortcuts. Getting out of hospital was like getting my driving licence. I was only beginning to learn the ongoing process. My discharge papers amounted to the very start of my recovery journey.
In time, it best helped me to see the recovery process as a giant jigsaw putting the fragmented person and my life together again. It would only be done piece by piece and there would be several attempts at finding the right piece which felt comfortable for me at the time. Forcing pieces to fit was certainly not the answer.
Making the invisible visible
Excerpt from
My belief is that the only shame regarding mental illness is in a society or community which stigmatizes it.
My experience of mental illness is definitely not something I am personally ashamed of. In fact, on the contrary, it is the biggest adversity of my life and coming through it is a journey I am very proud of. I, like my peers, know what it takes.
Overcoming the internalised stigma was a huge part of the foundation on which my recovery could be built as it meant that I could accept myself and my illness like a chapter in my life story but certainly not the whole book. In going public about my illness and subsequent recovery I found that I could empower others with similar experience to talk openly and unashamedly about their lived experience.
Talking openly about such an unseen diagnosable illness seemed so logical to inform people about the reality in case it should happen to them or to somebody they knew. I decided to volunteer for the SEE ME campaign to set the record straight and speak from an informed position which is the huge strength of the campaign.
There are still some huge misconceptions surrounding mental illness and this is partly due to the fact that the public don't see you when you are at your worst and then when you start to get better and are visible in the community again, people can misjudge the stage of recovery you are at as we are not able to signal the healing still going on inside by wearing a plastercast on our heads. The unseen reality therefore requires verbalising for people without experience to gain an insight.
My recovery through Art
Excerpt
Art has played a very significant role in my personal recovery journey. Starting when I was still under section in hospital, art was how I first began to reconnect with the self I had lost to severe depression.
Walking in the hospital grounds, I found myself responding to Nature's colours, shapes and forms just as I had in the past. This was the constant rhythm in a sea of turmoil. I tried to capture them on film, almost as if symbolically trying to pin them down in case I lost them again.
Of course, what I was really admiring had never really disappeared. It had been my joy in living and ability to appreciate anything which had succumbed to the numbness of depression.
I have gone on to express my emotions through my poetry, paintings and photography and have found it very cathartic indeed as I move through the phases of recovery. It's a bit like a pictorial diary as I can trace the evolution in my thoughts process. I can clearly see that things have changed in my life as have my feelings about myself.
There is great potential in art as an expressive communication channel, opening up our healing energies to help us to respond to our evolving emotions as we embark on our unique journeys of self discovery, otherwise known as recovery.
When I began to dream again
Excerpt
Recovery from mental illness is many things, but it doesn't initially appear to be an option. When I began to dream again in a waking sense, it was a sign that recovery was a possibility and it was the most exciting discovery of my life. It felt like a rebirth, a chance to untap my true potential, taking myself back to my roots, my starting point of birth authenticity and growing again, taking into consideration for the first time in my life who I really was, a unique individual, and what I really wanted to do with my new life.
My illness had reduced me to a worthless existence without purpose but now I feel as if I have surpassed all my expectations by going beyond the person I was before. Confidence has grown gradually through taking steps, making choices and taking risks and opportunities.
When the fabric of somebody's life falls apart so drastically and you literally lose any sense of who you are and why you are here, it takes an enormous amount of time to heal, which many people fail to realise. It also takes an enormous amount of support from those who believe in you. In this respect I have to say that I have been extraordinarily lucky with my friends, who patiently waited 'in the wings'.
In my health professionals, I had people who were recovery focused too which made a huge difference to my chances. Hope, belief and positive energies are key to recovery when you are in that black hole of existence.
Looking back, once I was at the wonderful stage of feeling like taking the first shaky steps, all sorts of doors started opening which gave me more choices. Having choice back in life felt like such a privilege and was the first glimmer of recovery.
If I have learnt nothing else from the experience of my illness, it's that positives can emerge out of negatives and that I've had the chance to do things that I might never have done. Recovery doesn't need to be a fallow time. It is, in truth, only certain members of society who place that devaluation on us if we let them….
I have tried to look upon it positively as a time for personal growth and discovery. It may have setbacks but it's a matter of taking advantage of the windows of opportunity and wellbeing to achieve whatever it is that you want in life. Basically, from the negativity of illness can grow a whole new world of contacts, experiences, opportunities and perspectives.
The calm after the storm -
How Dru yoga consolidated my recovery from severe depression.
Excerpt
Whilst still in hospital I started attending, of my own accord, a weekly Dru yoga class in the mainstream community. Coming on my own, it was a big step to take but it was made far easier by the supportive and healing environment the class offered. Nobody but my yoga teacher, who was a good friend, knew of my circumstances.
In the early days of my recovery, it was a question of reconnecting with both the outside world and inwardly with myself, emerging from the cocoon of pain and darkness which had been my life's experience for three years. Gradually, good feelings about life and about myself began to re-emerge and make themselves felt in my daily life. There was a lightness to my day once more and I experienced a deep unity with self in the form of self-acceptance.
In the safety of the Cathedral chapterhouse where the class took place, I felt rooted to the earth, centred, balanced and stable. I needed to reach out and "re-connect" with the outside world beyond the clinical hospital walls and this was the gentlest way of doing that.
Dru yoga, a more spiritual form of the art, met the spiritual awareness in me that had begun to surface and in short seemed to embody all the qualities of my "new life": self-care rather than self-neglect, a sense of wholeness rather than fragmentation, self-esteem rather than worthlessness, calm rather than turmoil, positives not negatives, all leading to a general sense of wellbeing. It became my weekly "fix" as important as any anti-depressant I had been prescribed. The clinical and personal recovery journeys were running parallel as they should.
A Question of time - Never say never….
An Excerpt
Timing is everything in life as we all know only too well but all the moreso at times of healing and recovery. Many of the steps I took in the early days of my recovery were over ambitious. In my own mind, it was all or nothing then but slowly I learned to take smaller steps which left me more fulfilled rather than disappointed. Goals have to be realistic at the given time and now I trust my intuition or gut instinct more on that score. It has to "feel" right before I take that step. The seeds of what we want are always there. The secret is finding the right time to plant them so our crop doesn't fail.
Climbing metaphorical mountains -
from touching the emotional void to re-ascending summits of Joy
Excerpt
Undoubtedly the singularly most important thing you can do for someone suffering mental distress is to be there for them.
An avid mountaineer before the illness struck, I had experienced how friends support each other when they go out in the mountains because of their remote setting should anything go wrong and additional help is needed. They stick together when the going gets tough and sometimes in extreme conditions, it's a question of survival. During my illness, my true friends were never far from my side and when I was ready to reconnect, they gave me a welcome like no other.
After an absence of three years, climbing my first Munro, a Scottish mountain over 3,000 feet, felt like summiting Everest. The sheer appreciation of being there
amongst friends was almost overwhelming in a very positive way, as at my lowest ebb I never thought I would ever experience that shared enjoyment so unique to the hills again.
A year later I was out in India and reaching 12,000 feet with tears filling my eyes as we watched sunrise over Everest and Kanchenjunga.
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