Apologies for post ‘missing in transit’

 

‘Missing in transit’ basically amounts to me not having posted for a while.  I have half posts, just nothing finished.

I will try to get a few posts out over the next few days, otherwise I’ll become a dormant blogger – dormancy maybe good for volcanic activity, but not for bloggers.

Gauche

 

I’ll admit I was late to develop social skills.  In fact my teen years were pretty much characterized by clumsy, blush-inducing contacts with my peers.  I can run but I can’t hide.  It comes back to bite me on the ass at the most unwelcome of times.

Today.  Sister’s new boyfriend.  I just lost any semblance of cool, on the inside at least.  I’ve met the guy a handful of times, but always quite brief “alright, how’s it going?” exchanges.  They’ve been fine.  Then someone put the nail in the coffin for me, one of my sister’s friends, when they gushed about how good looking he was (from his photographs) and how she’ll be all stammery when she meets him because ‘ I get all embarrassed when I talk to good looking men’.  After she said that I thought ’shit.  Now she’s made an issue out of it I’ll be all self-conscious that he’s buff and grrr and *wolf whistle*.  I hadn’t really noticed before, probably because I don’t really see anyone my sister dates as an entity in themselves.  They are just ‘her boyfriend’.

Anyway, he came over to ours tonight.  He doesn’t usually, which has made me think he doesn’t really like me for some reason.  This has caused me a fair few ponderings on if that is the case, why it might be and other self-analyzing drivel.  That to one side though.

Tonight I felt like sixteen year old me again.  It’s not that I’m attracted to him.  It was just knowing he could be considered in the ‘very attractive’ league made me very nervy.  Ever since I decided it wasn’t a good idea to avoid every human being for the rest of my life (around the age of 20), I had to develop coping mechanisms for interacting with people.  One of these is being quite aloof until I’m comfortable with someone.  I’ll be friendly, but it’s a restrained geniality, rather than the more endearing Andrex puppy type.  The more threatened or wary I feel, the more off-hand I am with people.

Up until now I’ve carried off the mild-mannered friendliness pretty well, at least I think I have.  Tonight I got flustered.  My sister’s friend’s words rocked around my skull “This man is attractive! This man is attractive!  This man is attractive!”  It blasted round my head like a demented pin ball and quickly reduced me to teen gaucheness.

I ran around the kitchen while he stood, leaning, against a cupboard, all muscly and attractive.  Damn! that girl for putting this into my head.  My heart went racy, I talked about food I was looking for.  I talked too fast.  I opened cupboards maniacally, exclaiming that I was in need of a snack, not sure what, savoury I think, but, hmm, maybe chocolate, and couldn’t decide and then he was all ‘do you want one of these biscuits’ and I was all high-pitched ‘oooh no, I’ve had lots of cake today, can’t have those’ and then I realise I’ve never accepted food from him the few times he’s been at ours with food and if he doesn’t like me, that could be why, and so I’m like ‘oh, okay may as well’ and take a biscuit that I can’t nudge out of the packet because my fingers are all sweaty and anxious.  I say several really silly things before leaving the room.

The thing is I know I do this and I know there’s no point.  Getting anxious, I mean.  And, by and large, I’ve overcome the worst of it.  When people get to know me I’m myself and that’s fine.  But if I do get anxious around new people, I then also get anxious about being anxious, then I say daft things, or possibly off-hand things, depending who and where it is, then I worry about what I’ve just said.

The end result here is that now I have to retract any damage by being less of a garbly moron next time I see him.  That or avoid him.  And, in correspondence with the aforementioned policy of not avoiding ever speaking to human beings ever again, the second option is out.

So I suppose I’ll always have this Social Anxiety within me to some extent.  The positive I can take from it is that I now know that avoidance is misguided.  I know that if I can learn not to care as much what impression I’m making on people, the result will be better relationships.  And if I’m off-hand with people it’s usually because I’m feeling insecure and I somehow have come to associate making people uncomfortable in my presence with taking my power back.  This off-handedness isn’t intentional though; it’s more a distance I create until I’m comfortable letting a person ’see’ me.

What I haven’t mastered yet, as tonight has emphasized, is how to feel anxious and appear anxious without hating myself for betraying my anxiety to another person.

I actually don’t know for sure how I came across.  I just felt like an idiot.  I guess that’s why I feel more comfortable when it’s obvious that someone is trying to befriend me, rather than the other way around.  I also get annoyed with myself for feeling like this.  He should be trying to get me on side, not the other way around.

I must go to bed now and get some rest so that I’m fresh for more embarrassing scenarios tomorrow.  I thought I’d post this because I don’t often post about Social Anxiety.  The reason I don’t mention it much is, firstly, because it’s much less of an issue now and only kicks up in very specific circumstances.  Secondly, I find that if I attach myself to that label it actually increases the idea that I will be anxious in a given situation.

Medicalising unhappiness – Post-natal Depression

 

edit: I’ve got a bank of drafted/half-drafted posts that I’ve just decided to try to either post or delete.  This one was written 30/07/09 

This question, “Are we medicalising unhappiness?” has come up in two separate programmes I have listened to recently.  I’m going to talk about one, from the Radio 4 series Am I normal?  The specific programme was on Post-natal Depression.  You’ll find a link to the programme (programme number 2) here.

This radio programme looked at the experience of giving birth and asked whether we are over-diagnosing PND.  It notes that it’s now commonplace for new mothers to have visits from a health worker after the birth and that they are given forms to fill in with questions and tick-boxes.  Don’t we all just love a tick-box questionnaire?  Ahem.  However, some of the questions are along the lines of “Have you ever felt overwhelmed in the last seven days” alongside the more serious questions of “Have you thought about harming yourself or your baby?” 

The problem with such forms is that a new mother is very likely to answer ‘yes’ if you ask her if there are times she’s felt overwhelmed, if you ask her if she’s doubted her ability to cope with the new baby, if you ask her if she’s lost some enjoyment from life.  She’s likely to answer ‘yes’ because most new mothers at some point are likely to feel sleep-deprived, anxious, weepy and exhausted, unless they have exceptional support networks i.e. are Madonna or Angelina.

Whilst it’s a given that new mothers should be monitored for signs of not coping, it seems that we are jumping in a little too quickly to offer treatment for PND (which would probably be an SSRI and/or talking therapy).  The thing is, we’ve all heard the cautionary tales of women who’ve been unlucky enough to suffer a bout of Post-natal Depression, perhaps with psychotic features, that has resulted in their babies being harmed or killed.  So it makes sense to have a means of monitoring any potential signs of this condition, catching it as early as possible.

The Problem?

It seems to me that the problem with the aforementioned questionnaire approach is that it is all about how the midwife or health visitor explains it.  Some women might be within the parameters of normal post-baby stress e.g. feeling exhausted at times, emotions up and down, worrying a lot, but looking at a set of questions that list a lot of their negative feelings could be quite scary, unless they are reassured that most women experience such feelings and that, for most people, these feelings will pass within the (probably variable) period of post-birth adjustment.

I’m not convinced that anyone veering towards psychotic depression would answer  a question like “Have you had thoughts of harming your baby?” truthfully, as there is probably a feeling of shame attached to having those thoughts.

These are just some musings I had whilst listening to the programme.  Perhaps there is a high success rate, using questionnaires and medical experience, for separating ‘normally stressed’ new mums from dangerously depressed women.  I don’t know.  I do, however, suspect that Post-natal Depression, as well as ordinary Depression, are now over-diagnosed, and I can’t help thinking that what most new mothers need is probably time, time, time, support and encouragement and…time.

disclaimer

I am not a mother so this is nothing more than my response to an interesting issue raised in this radio show.  I’m quite happy to accept I could be talking out of my arse because I have neither a baby nor medical training.  The topic for the show happened to be Post-natal Depression, but the underlying question “Are we medicalising unhappiness?” remains an interesting debate.

Cabin Fever

 

The snow has been, at times, many things.  Unexpected, exciting in the first flurry pre-Christmas.  I’ve been giddy, enjoyed the crunch underfoot and the dazzling brightness it has cast over my surroundings.  Then I’ve felt hemmed in, annoyed, worried over journeys I might be prevented from making.  Other times indifference has reigned supreme.  Watching the news always makes one aware that one’s outlook is also going to depend on where you live and where you work.  Travel disruption for commuters must be, at times, a miserable forbearance.

I’ve had a couple of days claustrophobia, wanting to be out ‘doing’ but unsure if I should drive.  There’s always the walking option, of course.  I had a minor car bump in the icy conditions a few days ago, trivial in itself, but it actually knocked me mentally, due to a long-winded argument that developed in the middle of the road.  I’ll get that off my chest in my next post I think.

This post is really just a silly little post to occupy five minutes of my time.  Two things.

1a) I didn’t realise we could run out of ‘grit’ for making the roads safe.  It’s been on the news a lot.  I really thought grit was just another word for gravelly stuff and was perhaps interchangeable with sand, salt or anything ‘gritty’.

1b) My silly head keeps coming up with the noun ‘determination’ every time they mention grit on TV.  And they mention it A LOT.  They say ‘grit’: I think ‘grit and determination’.  I can’t help it.

2) Another association – whenever my computer is in sleep or hibernate and I bring it back to life, as it were, this happens: computer makes buzzing, turning on noises, screen flashes and written across the bottom of my screen appears the phrase “Resuming windows…”  The dot dot dot is me transcribing, not me indicating other words I’ve left out of the quote.  Anyway, EVERY time this appears My Silly Brain comes out with “when I’m resuming windows…” in George Formby’s exact nasally tone when he sings THAT song.  Oh dear!

Postscript: The second quoted “…” you can take as the normal grammatical device for indicating extra words left out or unknown.

Paris and Snow

 

Two separate topics really.  First an update on my recent trip to Paris (I was there three nights, including New Year’s Eve).

I was stressed to hell before I went to P.  I was fretting and worrying and wobbling all over the place.  I had sort of decided that I couldn’t do much more than ride out the expanding wave of anxiety.  I came to see it as somewhat inevitable, given that it was something I’ve not been well enough to contemplate doing for months and months.

I won’t go into every detail; just a few things of importance for me.  Firstly, I survived!  Yay!  I got through it one step at a time.  I was not half as bad as I thought I’d be on the fatigue-front and I was able to take several time-outs when I needed to.  One example of this is when the rest of the group decided to visit the Moulin Rouge and I opted out because I’d had next to no sleep and felt like a bed was far more inviting than a French tourist site.  Talking of beds, though, I’m not sure I’ll ever use a hostel again.  Check it out:

I actually couldn’t sleep on that top bunk because when I climbed up there the whole edifice creaked and wobbled so much that it scared the shit out of me.  I decided pretty sharpish on the first night that I’d be hauling the mattress to the floor each night to sleep on.  That worked out better.  For my still intact limbs, anyway.

Something I noticed about anxiety whilst I was there was that everyone was anxious at some point.  With me it was mainly about packing (energy drain), being on time and not having to force myself to do too much once I was there.  I was very nervous about my CFS and handling that.  My bunk-mate was stressed about flying, not something I’m too panicky about, and other people were anxious about stuff like how we could organise taxis, not get lost and that sort of thing.

There were some nice moments, like sitting in a cafe/bar watching the world go by whilst sipping wine.  Then there were some appalling moments, like getting separated from the group on NYE with just one other girl, both of us not great at map reading and walking the streets of Paris like a couple of bedraggled strays, a Taxi or Metro out of the question after midnight. 

All in all it was good for me, it has lifted my confidence, which inevitably gets dented with lack of practice at such things as trips away.

I really wanted to see Notre Dame and I was able to do that, all be it the exterior only.  Here’s one pic I took:

Now a quick word about the SNOW.

I do think we were really lucky to travel back within days of this awful snow storm we’re having at the moment.  In the spirit of gratitude I have to be thankful that we weren’t unable to get home, nor did we suffer any major delays.  That said, I’m feeling like a caged bird today.  The snow just seems non-stop and I hate this feeling that I can’t go anywhere or do anything.  I was hoping to get to the cinema today but it would have been virtually impossible after the road and motorway closures.  I think I may be a little pre-menstrual because I don’t always feel quite so agitated by things that I can’t do anything about.  Today, though, it has been hard to stop myself from bouncing off the walls.

Anyway, I’m hoping that now Paris is under my belt and not looming like some shadowy figurine outside Notre Dame, I can move forward a little.

Teen suicidal thoughts linked to sleep

 

Firstly, I was struck by this article about the correlation between teens not getting enough sleep and having suicidal impulses.  Let me see if I can find it for you… ah, here it is.

An extract:

As well as the higher risk of depression, those who were set a bedtime by their parents of after midnight were 20% more likely to think about suicide than those whose bedtime was 2200 or earlier.

Those who had less than five hours sleep a night were thought to have a 48% higher risk of suicidal thoughts compared with those who had eight hours of sleep.

Now, this being a bbc article and all, I’m not saying I expect in-depth analysis, but such surface-brushing of a potential issue seems lazy to say the least.  I mean, how on earth can you take those two sets of statistics 1)adolescents who go to bed later than 10pm and 2) adolescents who go to bed before 10pm, and draw from that, unfounded conclusions?

The article seems to me to reveal nothing whatsoever about the correlation between young adult bedtime and suicidal thoughts.  It’s glaringly obvious that the depression itself may be keeping those stayer-uppers up, as sleep disturbance is a basic symptom of depression, which, in turn is a major trigger of suicidal thoughts.

I just hold my head in my hands sometimes with these types of reports.   Either the reporter is being lazy in their analysis of the findings or the study is completely unequipped to deal with the variables and intricacy of the relationship between depression, age and suicidal leanings.

Christmas/New Year

 

November plummets

December activates

January bemuses

February inks

March looks up

April scratches her arse

May flutters

June blood.rush.heat.strip. now

July getting hotter

August around the melting end of July

September tones

October is

November fleeces

December dominates.

Stress/Panic/Calm/Blues

There is a model of how people cope with grief:

DENIAL

ANGER

BARGAINING

DEPRESSION

ACCEPTANCE

I think the Christmas/New Year period could loosely fit into that model if we adapt it a little.

DENIAL – “oh it’s ages off, I don’t need to worry yet about the presents, the parties, the clothes, the credit card bill next month”

ANGER – “crap, it’s actually going to happen.  I can’t believe I’ve got to stuff a turkey, buy the sprouts, prepare the food, attack the shops at the least hospitable time of year, see my family (some whom I love, some whom I’m indifferent to and the odd straggler that I can’t bloody stand) and just generally enforce joviality with a smile on my face”

BARGAINING – “OK, well, I probably do need to buy some presents, but maybe I don’t have to write out that pack of 30 Xmas cards I bought?  I mean, it’s all a bit pointless sending cards to a list of people, some of whom I don’t hear from other than when their Christmas card drops through my letterbox with a weary kerplunk.  I’ll just write the ‘main’ ones out.  Save some rainforest.  I’ll buy some presents, but just the really essential ones.  And Christmas Day?  Well I’ll just have to see how I feel.  If I feel rotten on the day I can always come home early, can’t I?”

DEPRESSION – “This is fucking boring.  I’m sat with these people, having a marathon eating session, cooped up in a confined space with no legitimate reason to leave and trying to either make conversation with people I have nothing in common with or field questions about my life – love, money, career – that, frankly, just makes me feel dispirited and sad.”

ACCEPTANCE – “It’s just one day.  One meaningless day you have to get through and soon enough things will go back to the way they were.  Loads of people don’t like this time of year, I’m not alone.  I need to get through it and no more.  After all, at least I have a family and am lucky in very many ways.”

So, Christmas was okay.  Nothing spectacular.  New Year, on the other hand, was different.  I’ve never been away for NYE.  It was a wonderfully topsy-turvy trip that I got through better than I thought I would.  I wasn’t bored as I was doing something new, seeing a new place and, although some parts of the trip went severely tits up, for the most part I was okay.  I coped.  I enjoyed.  I’ll do a proper post about the stuff that I did and about New Year’s Eve, which was a disaster, but all the more memorable for it.

On another note, today I’m a bit down.  It’s nothing, really.  It’s what I would call ‘back to work blues’, which I believe is endemic when people have a flurry of activity, socialising, stressing and chilling at Christmas and then have to go back to work.  I don’t work but I do get the same vibe.  It’s a sort of change of gear, a realisation that the time for sorting ones life out is nigh.

I’m doing a little reading.  I was given the Twilight books for Christmas and am trying to read a bit more.  As the books are written for a teen audience they are also very suitable for someone with a dodgy concentration span.  I never thought about trying teen books before when I struggled with fatigue.  Any kind of impairment requires these little modifications to make life easier.  It doesn’t matter if you struggle mentally or physically or both, you have to adapt your life to live with a reasonable level of control over symptoms, whilst keeping quality of life as high as possible.  ’tain’t easy!

Panic at New Year’s plans

 

I’m absolutely cacking myself.  My anxiety has grown from a clenched shoulder muscle this morning to full-blown panic.

It’s because I’m going away for New Year – Paris – and I know, in my head, “this is a good thing”, but I can’t turn off the irrational side of my brain that’s going

“arrrrrrgh! fuuuuuuuck! what are you doing? have you any idea how much you have to do? your to-do list is longer than your arm and you know how tired you get. did i mention that you haven’t even started packing yet, have nothing to wear when you get there, if you get there, i mean you’ve heard the weather reports, right? and insurance, you didn’t get insurance, you numb-nuts, and now you’re all worked up, heart racing at 100mph (you’ll have to convert that to km/hr when you get to France, they’re all metric, and, oh that’s another thing you haven’t done – no euros) and it’s all pointless anxiety because you need to be calm, not waste energy on muscle-clenching, gut-churning anxiety.”

I’ve done most of the sensible things I can think of to allay this abject fear.  I’ve tried breathing deeply, tried talking about my panic, tried distracting from it and tried to spear it straight on like a sword in the chest, by engaging with the problems in the form of a ‘to do’ list and slowly working through it.

I wouldn’t say none of it has worked.  Some things have distracted me or calmed me for a few minutes.  I’m just still very, very anxious.  I am wondering the best way to get through this.  I’ve considered accepting that I’m a vessel for cortisol at the moment and just waiting for it to pass.  I can’t think of any strategies that I haven’t already employed, beyond resorting to wine-drinking and other non-healthy coping mechanisms, which I don’t want to employ.

I put myself up for this trip as a marker, a sort of challenge, as well as because I didn’t want to be in the same place with the same bottle of Corona come NYE.  So as it’s the biggest thing I’ve taken on in months perhaps I am so anxious because it is anxiety-provoking.  Maybe I’m making myself extra anxious by telling myself that I shouldn’t be anxious.  Other people might be able to take a trip away in their stride, but this is big for me.  How I handle my CFS tiredness is the biggest worry, as well as the logistics of getting to the airport, getting along with the other girls going and being away from my ’safe’ home zone for a period.

Sorry about this garbly post.  This post was one of the last things I could think of to try to diffuse the bomb ready to go off inside me.  Another coping strategy.

Pu’dem’up Day (aka Boxing Day)

 

Blimey, the internet is slow today.  I don’t know whether to risk writing anything in case I can’t save it.

Go on then.

I have all these vague bits of information wandering around my brain and today, Boxing Day, has highlighted that for me again.  I am constantly thinking “I heard/read/learnt somewhere something about…[insert random stuff]“.  I never seem to have a clear notion of these things.  They are ephemeral shadows hop-scotching round my neurons.

Today’s vagueness is regarding the meaning of Boxing Day.  Now I know this one isn’t obscure.  I know it’s well-known.  Yet I can’t remember whether the day acquired its name from something to do with boxing (fighting) or boxing (packing things away).  Both seem to make sense.  It could be that after the religious observance of Christmas Day people then went to watch boxing matches or sporting events as some sort of “let them eat cake” Elizabeth I-style thing.  Equally it could be harking back to some tradition where, for example, decorations were boxed away.  I don’t like looking this stuff up because, frankly, if I looked up everything I had a slight thought about I’d never leave my computer.

BUT, this being Christmas and all, I’ll look it up now and see if I was anywhere close.  Hang on a minute….

So here’s what Britannia says.

I was pretty off the mark there with all my hunches.  It appears it’s the day boxes, i.e. gifts, were given to the poor and needy, or, when workers received a bonus.  Well, there you go then.

Moving swiftly on….

I had very low expectations of Christmas this year and consequently I had a reasonable day.  It’s never going to be my favourite holiday, it just isn’t, but getting through a day of relatives, eating, boozing and hyperactive young cousins who have just been given an inordinate amount of ADHD-inducing presents and chocolate – well – if I can traverse that tricky course with minimal mental and physical scarring, I’m quids in!

I have a nice family.  I’m lucky.  I just don’t enjoy enforced confinement with them all. 

The best bits:

My uncle came in the car with us.  We picked him up carrying a 15-pack box of Budweiser.  Fair enough.  We drink a lot on Christmas Day.  Turns out the box in question did not contain the lager bottles one would presume.  No.  He’d brought a box of grit.  I found this endlessly amusing.  We have had loads of snow/ice so it made sense on a practical level.  On a visual level, however, presenting your hosts with a Budweiser-free box of grit, seemed comical in the extreme.  More so, perhaps, because his defense was “he (his brother) asked me for it.  He wanted to clear the path..”

Also a ‘best bit’ was the dinner.  My auntie is amazing at cooking fantastic Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, plus hosting, plus looking after the kids.  I couldn’t do it.

That’s enough best bits.

I don’t think anyone got totally drunk and disorderly, which sometimes happens when Uncle Dick Head shows up.  I hasten to add that Uncle Dick Head is not one person but, rather, a fluid concept that several members of my family have taken on in different years.  Actually I think I might have been Uncle Dick Head this year.  I’m not sure but I was certainly not sober.  Who was the most inebriated I couldn’t say as we all express it in our own special ways.  I do remember gabbling away at the table, using phrases like “it’s a zingy paradise” to describe an orange-liqueur mousse, and being offered a cup of tea, the national sign for “you’re embarrassing yourself, luv, sober the fuck up”.  I don’t really like being drunk around people who aren’t also, but I get bored at these things and, if indeed it was my turn to be Uncle Dick Head, I’ll take it on the chin.  I’ll find out when I see my sister, no doubt.

Because it’s Christmas

 

I am eating ALL the time.

Because it’s Christmas

I’m drinking cheap white wine.

Because it’s Christmas

I’m full of a cold.

Because it’s Christmas

I’m missing those who’ve moved on-

YES ‘moved on’ is a euphemism for dead: gone.

Because it’s Christmas

I’m watching Nigella

red-lipped, tit top pouting

stuffing the goose

‘anointing’, ’smothering’, oozing her wares

sexualising gravy-

culinary whore.

Because it’s Christmas

I’m amazed we have snow.

Because it’s Christmas

I feel hemmed in

snow, shopping, gifts not yet bought

too much time mired in thought.

Because it’s Christmas

I’m trying to glow

cheap tinsel happy.

Because it’s Christmas

I resent TV ads

asking for money for all kinds of woes.

Because it’s Christmas

I’m working hard to glide through it

here in body, mind.. elsewhere.

Because it’s Christmas

‘Fairytale of New York’ plays in my head

gravel-voiced Pogue and drunk violins

..”and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day”.

Because it’s Christmas

I am not as sad as I sound right now,

emotions and relatives play havoc.

Because it’s Christmas

I’ll be fine 

I’ll jacket myself in tinsel .