How to stay moderately less crazy....

[annwfyn]

So, recently I wrote a piece on social media for #timetotalk2017, in which I talked about my mental health, and mostly ended up talking about recovery. A couple of people were terribly nice and said they were impressed by the extent to which I seemed in control, and how far I’d come

Comments

[annwfyn]

Yeah, I guess this is a fairly long list, and it's all stuff I didn't start out doing, and worked out over time as a good way of managing stuff. I didn't do it all at once though.

1 - work in progress, slowly coming together over the last five years. And I think it always will be because I hate taking pills.

2 - work in progress, although I think I started doing that in about 2004 when I was having a particularly bad period of panic attacks/sobbing/self harming/more panic attacks on a daily basis. Looking back on it, it was probably the longest and most sustained depressive episode I've had. God knows how Jez survived it. I started trying to break down my issues and working out what had really caused something, just to get a handle on it. Totally self preservation. Insisting all those coping mechanisms be not reliant on others slowly got added in over time after several incidents of me getting irrationally and unfairly angry with people for not helping me. No idea when I started but I remember the original variation of that mantra - "you can't take what someone doesn't want to give" hitting me with remarkable force when I was living in Edinburgh, around 2003 ish? Just before I left (when I was also v crazy).

3 - this has only emerged as being as totally essential as it is since I moved to Glasgow and suddenly had the space to do that. And it was a revelation. My sitting room in Ripon Drive was the first totally ordered space I'd had since I left home and HOLY FUCK it made a difference. So, that's from the last two years.

4 - I can't remember when I started doing that - I think that's in the last 5 years too. I started doing them when I was just out of hospital and working with my lovely CPN in London, Sam, who I miss daily.

5 - I've done those for years. They have kept me back from both suicide and homicide at times.

6 - this is a work in progress. I am sometimes better at it than at other times. I've worked very hard to get this right in the last 5 years or so as I had some massive slips in the few years before them of trying to vilify people or justify my own behaviour based on very shonky emotional responses. I am still not all the way there, but I'm working on it.

7 - In the last 18 months I've realized how important this is. A job that works for me makes me remarkably sane. Sadly, a job that doesn't makes me remarkably crazy. I have a whole frustrated rant somewhere about the current benefits system which says you can either not work at all, or work full time, doing any job. And I don't think it works that way.

8 - I've known I do this for years. It was literally this week that jez pointed out how core it is to my sanity and how I reliably develop weird caged animal responses if I don't have it.

9 - This is all stuff I've realized in the last year. Never did it before then.

10 - I've done this for years and years and years. All my life. I think it's the reason I got as far as I did without being sectioned - I use words as a control mechanism constantly - how to understand, how to interpret, how to make real. It is the basic form by which I give reality structure and turn my dragons into newts.

[sienf]

I think the words part is actually a relatively uncommon, but incredibly good strategy. Uncommon, rather than unusual, as I see a lot of advice to do with writing stuff down and putting it out of your head and so on...

I think it's very easy to think you know exactly what you mean in your head, but not finding the actual words until you put them out (that might be me, as I find a lot of other people think directly in words?) or, more importantly, being able to ignore just how unreasonable some of The Crazy is while it's still in your head.

I should write more, even if it's never saved anywhere; it's a good method to slow down and think and process. Thank you for reminding me.

[annwfyn]

The words strategy is staggeringly helpful for me, most of all because it really helps me pin down and understand what is really upsetting me. And, in general, if I hunt through the hugely irrational emotions (stage one of the words strategy normally involves me realizing that I am overreacting) I normally find there is a root cause that is real and can be addressed. I mean, sometimes that root cause might be something I don’t have a totally objectively justified reason to be feeling wobbly about, but at least I can recognise it.

And I also feel better for getting stuff out and writing it down. One thing I used to do (when I had a LOT of IoD characters and did a LOT of scening) was to randomly project my emotions onto a character and write about it. So, I might write a werewolf story about ‘sorrow and loss’ in which I got all the feelings out but through a fictional channel. Weirdly, that had about an 80% success rate in clearing up mental junk. So sometimes I think the words strategy is helpful just in that it gets feelings outside of me and onto paper.

That definitely may be me being odd though.