Unnerving. Never quite got that. I that "Un" meant opposite. Like unhinge was to de-hinge, the complete opposite of hinge. That sort of thing. Unnerve though. To unnerve is to cause concern. So is that the opposite of nerve, is to nerve to not cause concern? Ah, don't know. But anyway in my irrational mind I felt unnerved. The sun was so bright. Never seen it so bright. Our usually dark little room was illuminated and there was no escaping it. I had this sense that something was wrong. Maybe the sun had exploded some hours ago and what I was seeing was only going to get brighter and brighter. Never seen it so bright.
The kids loved it. A change for photos. White balance all to buggery. Everything was orange where the sun was in the shot. Even if the short was in the mirror. While I am ranting apologies in advance for the streaks. The kids were not long out of the bath. We have a small flat and a lot of steam plays havoc with the windows and any other glass. The bright light ensured every blemish and thumb print was exposed for all its worth. My wife would have a hairy fit if she knew I had posted these photos.
But as I said the kids loved it. Time for a pose and all that. Not in the least bit worried about why the sun might be so bright. Just loving the way it lit up the room. Loving shadow puppets with silly voices. Even loving the coloured spots you get when you look directly into a bright sun.
The only way to fix the white balance was to ensure the sun was out of the frame. In this photo at the side you can see how lit up my daughter's face is just off the reflection from the sun. It was quite incredible. Our little living room requires a flash because there is so little light in it. Even with all the artificial lights on it needs a flash to stop the blurring of fidgeting kids. Not here though. The room was lit up. Unnerving. Never seen it so bright.
Sun aside things have been a bit up and a bit down the last week. Some positives and some negatives. In terms of understanding I think I need to keep reading what I am reading and hopefully with repetition it will finally sink in. And in that aspect I have had some positives.
At the tail end of last week I had a really weird thing, maybe another epiphany. I walked nearly halfway to school with my wife and family then as usual headed home. But after a few paces I stopped. I looked at where they were going. And I got this strong urge to follow them. I had this belief in that moment that I could walk with them and could get to the school and more than that I had a feeling that things were going to be OK and with time I would get over this. It felt beautiful, it felt normal and I felt normal. But very soon the old habitual self doubt came crashing in with images of being unable to move at the school and wondering how the hell I could make it home and images of spending the rest of the day in torment because I had physically overdone and all that malarky. But I am thankful for that moment. I will push on with my plans and hope there are more moments like that ahead and that ultimately I will get there.
Right now at this time on a Monday morning which is usually the hardest time of the week on the anxiety front I feel positive. Its strange. If only I could keep a hold of that. If only moods were not everchanging. But they are. And anxiety is ever changing too. I got up earlier today and when it was time to wave my family goodbye I instead went with them. The plan was to go a little way as anything was a start. I didn't expect to go almost halfway but I did. I went as far as I have been struggling to go this year but all the better for doing it first thing in the morning at a time where I would usually still be waking up. That is what has me in a positive mood. I have been trying hard and I have to hold on to these little positives. Its the first time in 6 months I have managed an early walk. The last time I did for a few weeks then I got a chest infection and couldn't walk at all and after that just struggled to do it. So I am hoping this time I can maintain it but won't get carried away as its just one morning as it stands.
It was not as difficult as anticipated. That surprised me. This year though I have been approaching my walks differently in my attempt at graduated exposure. Its a two pronged attack in which I have managed only one prong so far so must work on the other. After looking at my walks for the 3 years previous I see a chart ful of spiky lines. What this says is that I push but cannot maintain and inevitably they start to ease off. This is eagerness. Eagerness to push and ignore the body so difficult to maintain. So this year I have been doing the walks slowly and building on that. Happy to maintain for however long it takes and then increasing slowly as the body allows. Now I am up at what my best walks of last year. The struggle now is to maintain but I hope because I have been building up gradually I will have a better chance of doing that.
The other side I have not mastered yet is mindfulness. I realise that on my walks I got out and push tensely on until I can go no furthe and then scurry back. Its all mindlessly done. This in the long term isn't going to go me a lot of good. I need to be more mindful walking and try to get into the habit of not concentrating on the actual A to B and back to A the whole time. Because that is how it is. I am thinking about getting to a destination, how I am going to get back and getting it over with as quickly as possible. This is not the way. Yesterday was good. A little breakthrough. Out for a walk and I saw an old man with shopping pass me and when I was coming back on myself he was walking in front of me. And I envisioned how far he had to go and started to question why I could not do the same and then I started to loosen and take everything in and try to feel in my environment and all of a sudden I felt "normal" again. I wanted to walk on. I did walk on a bit more and it was my biggest walk of the year as it turned out. I could even have walked more were it not for the returning self doubt of regardless of how well I felt walking I would feel shit after. But a moment. Its these moments I am looking for and the only way I will get them is my trying to be more mindful on my walks. When I start to walk further and stay out longer it won't be because of the distance I have covered previously but how I have covered that distance.
Its been a tiring week so far which has paved the way for a return of that horrible melancholic state. It seems to be a combination of tiredness and anxiety. Tiredness because after a two week Easter break the kids are back at school again and the body clock which has drifted into longer nights and later starts must suddenly try to adjust again with the new routine. Its not an anxiety thing, my wife feels tired the first week too and the kids also. But all that said it has been a good week. Anxiety fairly low and working hard on getting on top of it. I hope to continue that into this week. When I am getting out and about more I feel my mood lifts some as it gets me away from ruminating indoors. We may even start the car journeys again soon and that would give me the opportunity to take my new camera outdoors somewhere.
I've also been getting out more with the kids rather than on my own. My daughter had great fun on the photo above. They are resurfacing the roads around my way so roads are blocked off and my daughter loved the opportunity to go walking on the new surface where normally its busy with cars. I'm sure there is a metaphor in there somewhere, probably.
My grandfather was a cyclist, he died while cycling before I was born, so I have nothing against them but I fail to see the purpose of the council's latest venture. While school buses and free water in school has been cut the council have decided it was time to spend money on cyclists. God knows the expense of these things. Where this sign stands there used to be a ballard like the one next to it. It took a couple of weeks and lots of mess and expense. First a team came to dig up all 4 ballards leaving all their signs and eqipment behind which by the time the next lot came were strewn everywhere. On another day someone arrived and took a ballard away. Another day a crew arrived and reseated the remaining three ballards- changing the previous spacing. Next it was a crew to tarmac that stretch again. A long drawn out process.
It left a gap. They left more barriers and stuff which disappeared into gardens and such like. That gap it turned out was large enough to fit a car through. And so the no through road became a through road for a couple of weeks. We had to be very careful with the kids as the road is right on our front door and cars were flying up and down it. Finally they are arrived with this and planted it. What a palava. I could easily and went over and drawn a bike on the ballard that was there and saved them the trouble.
As well as this they have been blocking streets painting cycle lanes and levelling out roads so the cyclists don't wobble. All well and good. The irony is the bloody cyclists never used the road and still don't. Its the footpaths where you are most likely to be struck by one. Bikes, skateboards and scooters. OK serious cyclists use the roads but I see hardly any of them and the few I do see pass along the main road but up and down streets. I really don't see the point.
Anyway, rant over. Just a little bit of irritation in my life at the moment. Much like I could say about anxiety which I haven't talked about for a while. With good reason too: there is only so much you can say about it. Instead I look for other ways of expressing it. But its very hard for people to understand unless you have experienced it. Anxiety is one thing, panic is another however much the two are linked. Panic is very hard to describe. You can describe the physical symptoms that come with it and say that the fear is terrible but no one can understand that. Its more. No one can really appreciated that horrible ambiguous feeling of sheer hopeless terror in the peak of panic unless they have experienced it. And it is that hard to describe thing which keeps an anxiety disorder going for fear of it returning.
I've been doing some CBT at the moment. I get it but can't get it to stick at the moment. Like all self help for anxiety they say its important to know you are not in danger and this helps ease the fear. Well I don't quite agree with that. I know I am in no danger but it doesn't mean I don't fear more panic or hate with a passion constant anxiety. Is being frightened out of your whits any more reassuring when you know it will do you know harm? Afraid not.
But panic is the worst of it and the most frightening and thankfully the shortest lived. That doesn't mean the anxiety is easy. With anxiety disorder its not a constant but as good as and its self perpetuating. Worry, fatigue, more worry, more fatigue, etc. So you wake up fatigued and then soon the worry machine kicks in and although there are spells where you find peace you are never refreshed and worry is never very far away. So the agoraphobic goes out and soon finds they can go no further and is unsure whether its mental or physical because as well as rising panic the body is so fatigued that it struggles to go on.
But then its only worry isn't it? Why should that be so bad? Why not just ignore or think of something else? Its hard to explain that too, it just is. More and more I see things in books or on TV where there are panic and anxiety parallels be it intentional or not. Lately its been in the strangest place- kids TV. Ive had that for 9 years and one aspect of the kids getting older I am looking forward to. So a bit of light-heartedness to end this post. One of these anxiety parallels, an unintentional one, comes via the kids cartoon Kick Buttowski. In the clip below Kick is having another fight with his brother Brad and enlists the help of Luigi Vendetta to help him. Luigi Vendetta sums up anxiety for me to a tea. Its a perfect illustration of it. I hope you get it.
The Easter period has passed and a rather sinister looking Easter Bunny about sums it up. Not the new camera I may add which still sits there gathering dust. This was the wee compact and taken last year. Or was the year before? Can't really remember. My mind has never had much of a scale of time when it comes to memories. In this one my youngest daughter in a bunny mask.
Not actually from Easter I might add. I do know that however much my mind falters. I know its not Easter because every year since we met my wife has gone to her parents where all her family spend Easter Sunday somewhere having a picnic. So I know this wasn't Easter. I used to go. I actually used to enjoy in a perverse kind of way because there was little to enjoy. It was good to be out but not on a Scottish April Sunday. We'd be sitting in some area with a spread of food on the ground or on a table sipping wine from paper cups while getting blown by gales and/or soaked at the same time. But it was the meeting up and getting out that was the best part. So that is why I know it wasn't taken on Easter because the last Easter Sunday I woke up beside my wife as before my youngest girl was born. Must have been 2005. Possibly not. Possibly 2006 but no later, definitely no later. But had it been in 2006 she would have been 9 months old and certainly not that here. Anyway, what the hell am I waffling on about? Its clear to me its taken in my living room so certainly wasn't Easter Sunday.
No. This is my sixth or seventh year alone at Easter. Not that it should matter. As it happened it also landed on my wife's birthday. And birthdays apart there are other events I spend alone like Christmas. So nothing new there. And rightly so to. Why should everyone else sit at home with me because I cannot go where they want to go? Why spoil it for everyone. So I am more than glad to be left behind like the old cat.
I don't usually think about it. This time though was different. This time I found myself dreaming of being there among them all with a smile on my face, a cup of wine in one hand, a soggy sandwich in the other and running about with the kids. And I saw myself with my new camera taking snaps. Lots of new things to make stills of. A joy in my heart. A longing. Yes I wanted to be there. Yes I missed it. No about missing out for the sake of missing out. To be honest I do well enough left to my own devices and find plenty to occupy myself with. But it was a craving to be somewhere else and around people rather than stuck at home for another year between these same 4 walls. A hunger to get well. A frustration at not knowing the best way to do it and an annoyance at my own impatience to stay the course for lack of perceived progress. An anger inside that someone cannot say to me what I need to do and an anger at myself for not after all these years being able to discover it for myself.
When I get like this I push myself out the door. Push myself throw the growing panic and growing fatigue. Past the point where I feel safe and into the point where I feel vulnerable. Then at some point the anger vanishes and I find myself naked and scared seemingly far from home. It is then the tormented journey starts of exhaustion and mental pain all the way home with my tail between my legs feeling I have failed once more. I know I need to "get it". That is all it is. "Getting it" is readily available. I've had it in my hands a few times but its a slipper bar of wet soap. It shoots out the hands leaving only is soap residue. In that moment its there the journey ahead looks clear and I tap right into that inner strength feeling bigger and stronger. But it vanishes all too soon. That is the constant futile inner turmoil of knowing it but not being able to keep hold of it.
Ah well. Such is life. People tell me I will get there so I can at least hold on to that no matter how long it takes. Lots of events missed but no need to salvage them as the best of those may be yet to come and if I can get there then it might even be worth it as I will probably appreciate them more than all the mindless folks around me.
For now I will just sit here happily thinking of times to come, better days, munching on my Cadbury's cream egg Easter egg in solitude.
Oh yes, I do look like a scruff but that will be sorted soon I can assure you. Its going to be my first attempt at self haircutting and may well end in disaster but I have hats for that. Out and about. A rare occurrence captured. I am pushing, really I am pushing hard. Pushing hard to free myself from the situation I find myself in. I am getting it all ways at the moment and the fact that I am is testament to my complacency since this started and in the last 18 months at least.
The idea was for this next post to be filled with photos with my new camera. Unfortunately I have used it rarely. An expensive ornament at the moment but I hope that will change this week. Its the Easter holidays and the family as always are leaving and in that time I hope to get more familiar with the camera. Here I was out with my oldest daughter which is unusual nowadays but used to be a regular occurrence. I was letting her take photos of things with the old compact and trying to teach her along the way. And also, of course, taking lots of pics of her as she found new situations to be photographed in. Then a thought. I am never pictured out. I think there is one from 2 years ago and I do get out. So in a spur of the moment the above.
As I said I am trying hard. Very hard. I feel like its last chance saloon. I am putting every effort into getting myself righted as it were. Trying to find as many glimmers of hope that I can to keep me going. Just sick of where I am and missing where I want to be. Just keep pushing on. At some point I will meet that point where it will either make or break me for a period. That is where I run headlong too.
