Heads & Tails

Heads and Tails

My early years were stable, loving and invested but then things happened and what followed was about 25 years of trauma. The bad things just kept coming like a Ninja Warrior course. A couple of years after things had begun to settle down I had my first major depressive episode. It literally wiped me out. I’d fallen off the course and was struggling to get up again. I was teaching and I loved my job, had great friends, and lived in a gorgeous flat with my new husband but I couldn’t feel the happiness anymore. Sometimes our heads are up and we can look forwards and other times our tails go down and we just want to slow down or stop completely.

I was referred to a counsellor and almost 18 years later I’ve just said ‘Goodbye for now’. He has untangled all the mess inside and pulled it out for me to see it for what it is. He’s helped me to build self esteem, resilience and acceptance and now it’s time for me to go and put it all into practice myself. It’s time for the big girl pants to come on. When I did Maths tutoring I used to support and explain to my tutees but it was always going to be the student who had to go in and sit the exam. Ultimately they had to do it for themselves.

A couple of months ago it was suggested to me that maybe it was time to stop seeing my counsellor. I was horrified. Why were they suggesting that I dropped my biggest support when I was only just coming through another bad period? But it laid a little seed that I’ve been nurturing and giving attention to until it was strong enough to go out to plant on its own. There is always support out there, it’s just not the same as I needed at the beginning.

It has been a long journey through therapy as well as the medications and diagnoses. From those first few sessions when I was also on anti-depressant medication for the first time, through to recently getting a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder and then trialling new medications. At first a diagnosis was really important to me. It was a label that helped me to understand myself. It was a missing part of the jigsaw that let me see the full picture. Now that I know what the picture is of, I’m ready to put it in a box and there’s no need to pull it out and inspect it piece by piece. I accept that mental illness is an illness. The body needs help to keep on an even keel sometimes and so does the brain.

It’s tempting to think of this period as a ‘good episode’. I‘ve been very low recently and maybe this is a good day or week, I fear that the down will soon follow. These conjectures don’t help. It’s better to stay in the present, enjoy the good days and accept the changing tides as they will inevitably come.

Part of my current support is a Mindfulness course. It requires a lot of dedicated time every day to practise and strengthen the muscles that will make the techniques come more naturally. In mindfulness there’s a well known metaphor for thoughts which describes them as clouds drifting. You observe them as they pass by in the knowledge that that’s all they are, passing thoughts. I’d always found this hard to apply to myself as clouds seem to drift and my thoughts usually race, until yesterday. I’d been doing one of the meditations whilst sitting in the Valley Gardens. It was long and I became restless so I decided to walk as I listened. The guide had talked about the clouds and on the way home I was waiting to cross the road. The cars went past, I watched them pass then crossed the road and left them all behind. Sometimes the road is really busy but the vehicles pass by, I notice them and then they move on and the makes and models aren’t relevant.

I’ve got some of my interests back, I’m writing and I’ve got a good routine to my week. It’s filled with things that I enjoy and that benefit myself and my family. It is time for me to sit comfortably in my own skin and stop fighting. I’m tired of fighting and I’m tired of talking. My friend and yoga teacher gave me the analogy of the marble rolling along and being subjected to bumps and turns but there is still integrity in the little marble, it is still what it always was. I don’t need to compare myself or strive for anything. I’ve cleaned up my diet and kept up the exercise so that front is covered too. It doesn’t mean that things won’t happen, I can’t control the forces around me and my counsellor will still be there when there are bumps that I struggle to navigate. ‘Whatever comes our way, it’s all just heads and tails’ as Banners sings. It’s all just Heads and Tails.