Light at the end of the tunnel!

This is the first post I’ve written in a while. So much has been happening, and I feel as though I got sucked out of my usual orbit for a good few weeks. I’ve already written about that, and I don’t want to go back there. All I will say, is that it is behind me and I seem to have come through relatively unscathed and, dare I say it, with greater ability to handle the symptoms which were previously giving me grief.

The last couple of weeks have been good, they have been really flipping good. Yet, I am so eager to leave the negative aspects of the symptoms behind that I am hesitant to even write about them for fear of jinxing my forward progress somehow, or upsetting what feels like some complex and weighty mental/psychic balance.

But I know I need to stop thinking in this way: thinking in this way is silly.

I am getting better: I am leaving the delusional thought processes behind. That is a fact; and I can write about it all I want, and conceptualise it however I want. I need to stop imaging that my recovery might be halted by something as flighty and insubstantial as voices echoing in my head or a black cat passing in front of me on a shadowy evening walk home.

Recovery is real, it is tangible and it is realised; and although it comes on slowly in drib’s and drab’s which are sometimes hardly noticeable in the particular moment, it is happening for me. I’ve noticed hundreds of moments in just the last week, where something has gone more smoothly than it had done previously, or I’ve handled something instinctively instead of freaking out and having to analyse each separate part of a thought process individually. Thought/emotion bombs have loomed, and I have been able to divert them or focus over them.

I have been working on all these aspects of handling difficult emotions and thought processes for so long- it would appear that the fruits of my labour are finally beginning to materialise. This is an amazing feeling, and really sums up the whole point of the book I’m writing:

“Recovering from paranoid schizophrenia, bi-polar or any other serious mental health condition will probably be the hardest thing you will ever choose to do. It will take years of hard work, courage and gritty determination, but- it is possible, it is real. Moreover, once you do emerge from the confines of your mind, you will remember that there is a whole wide world out there just waiting for you to meaningfully reconnect with it again.”

I feel as though, in the last couple of weeks, I have left a lot of the uncertainty this condition creates behind. I have left behind the rage this uncertainty created in me, and realised that the things I know are not going to change and be affected by voices muttering away in my head. I have learnt to avoid things which aren’t worth my time and energy, and laugh about about them rather than letting them get me down.

I wrote something last night which struck a chord: “something does not become real for you, until you feel it for yourself..”

It’s like, if you’re feeling down and depressed and somebody says, “you’re doing well, you’re getting better!” You know the words themselves are true, but unless you can connect to them meaningfully, i.e. feel the truth behind the word which were said, they may as well have been spoken to you in Japanese.

This is one of the horror of mental conditions, they strip away your capacity to connect with positive truths. I know this isn’t only confined to people suffering mental health problems, and it can generally be really hard to take a compliment on board when you’re not in the right head space. But with serious mental health conditions it’s often the really basic truths which start to lose meaning, and then make it bloody hard to go about you day to day life.

But, I am starting to digress! I will stop writing here, because I need to start filling out an application form (more on that later). The day so far has been good, and I can’t wait for Ru to get home and for us to start the weekend!

#lightattheendofthetunnel

🙂

 

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