Yesterday was Christmas Day, a day which should normally be spent loafing on the sofa watching mindless TV and eating too much. A day of relaxation and self indulgence, of fun and frolics. Well to be fair that's the non religious British version of Christmas Day - no doubt true Christians view it differently!
My day was different then normal because I was ill with a horrible cold and I spent most of the day in bed. I wasn't in the mood to distract myself with food and I've found this years TV offerings to be dire. I ended up in a reflective mood and started to think about the past year and what I want for 2012.
My first thought was - crikey! It's been a heck of a busy 2011 and things have really really changed!
This time last year I was facing a serious mental health crisis. My undiagnosed OCD and generalised anxiety disorder held my better self firmly in its cold steely grasp. Over the previous decade and more I'd just about survived and limped through the days, but now I was really starting to struggle. The combination of not seeking treatment, not really seeing that I needed help and a combination of other pressures in my life were pushing me down the slippery slope to a complete breakdown.
Funnily enough it was Christmas 2010 and an incident with Christmas cards that got me to see that I truly needed help and needed to make some changes and at the start of 2011 I started on the path to get the help I need.
It was a painful and horrible path on which I have had to face many demons and make many sacrifices. The most painful and difficult thing was acknowledging that I was weak and that I needed to take time out to heal. It's here that I began to see that I'd internalised so many of the prejudices that our society has about people with mental illnesses. If someone has a serious physical illness no one thinks badly of them if they need to take time out to heal themselves. It's acceptable to retreat and focus on healing. However if you need to do this for a mental illness in many peoples eyes it's 'weakness'.
I realised that I am weak and that if I was ever going to get better I couldn't let the feelings of shame or inadequacy that others tried to impose on me from stopping me getting the help I needed. I needed to refocus my energies inwards rather then outwards and while I was healing I needed to focus what little energy I did have on the areas that mattered.
So over the next few months I retreated on many fronts of my life. I completely surrendered one volunteer position I had and almost completely gave up another; reducing my support down to the one thing I could do from my own home. I made the choice to give up working outside the home so that I could focus my remaining energy on helping my husband in his new business. I made the commitment to start treatment and to be open with the people in my life about my illness so that I wasn't wasting energy on hiding it any more.
Now that 2011 is coming to an end and I look back on these decisions I'm really really glad I made them. If I were to write an autobiography the chapter covering 2011 would probably be called 'The breakdown that never was' or 'How I stopped my self falling off the cliff into the abyss by the strength of my fingernails'.
I truly believe that if I'd continued with my life in the way it was shaped at the end of 2010 that I'd have had a full and total breakdown and possibly required hospitalisation. I just couldn't do it. I wasn't just at the end of my tether, my tether was fraying and about to snap in that very dramatic way it does in films when someone is hanging off a cliff. (Not like in 'Cliff hanger' though. That film was rubbish. Who climbs a mountain in a string vest for goodness sake). At best I would have limped on as I was limping on before, making myself and others around me more and more unhappy until some sort of crisis emerged.
As it was, cutting back and retreating helped to stop all of this. I guess its a bit like spinning plates (sorry I've run out of rope metaphors). I made the choice to keep a few key plates spinning and letting the superfluous ones fall to the ground. Doing this meant that I kept my life going and didn't damage myself or my mental health further. It meant that I could continue to take pleasure in the world while having therapy for my illness at the same time.
I think my Grandma could have summed it up best with a saying she loves. 'A stitch in time saves nine'. (That's practically a rope metaphor by the way, sewing thread is like rope only smaller).
Next time - Therapy and Baby Shaped Wrecking balls.
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