A State of Mind: Part 3 - Slaying Demons

 

So.....another update.

I've received some good and helpful advice from various people - a  lot of it common sense, but also some helpful links and questionnaires/workbooks from specialists.  It's all good - the information sheets that came with the workbooks in particular gave me a lot of information that has eased my muddled mind, though the workbook stuff and assorted advice over creating mood diaries and so forth is a lot to take on board.  I have to confess I've not made any practical steps to start working through all of that - whether rightly or wrongly I'm not sure yet.

Partly that has been down to time.  Despite all the stuff I'm trying to work through, I still have all my everyday things to do, and despite being notionally retired, a house husband and father, there's a lot of it.  Shopping, cleaning, sometimes ironing, cooking, walking the dog - it all takes up time. Add to that keeping this blog running and responding to the comments I'm getting nowadays (MORE please!) and working on the other writing projects I have underway, my days are quite full.  Come the evening, by 8 or so, I find myself nodding off - which I find incredibly annoying and put down to some kind of Covid hangover still plaguing me, as I am generally sleeping better than I was when this thing first hit me.

I'm not complaining - all the time I have these things to do, I'm keeping focused on something and my mind isn't wandering into places I don't want it to go.  It's also helping me physically too: my dodgy arm, though still not right, is a lot better and not really a handicap anymore (though I still have to be careful); my hips and knees are no worse than they have been for years - at least most of the time - and the exercise with Lulu is helping that.  I'm looking forward to spring and better weather when I can ramp that up and get the bike out of storage.  And finally, after three years of often interrupted effort my weight is close to where I want it to be - in fact, one day last week it even dropped a bit below my target.

So all in all, I'm feeling more positive than I have for several months.

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There is still a way to go, though.  

The thing I realized at the outset of this journey was that, like most people, there are demons, ghosts from my past (back even to my childhood perhaps) that I need to exorcise.  In the first conversation I had with someone I trust, who has experience with these things both personally and professionally, I listed maybe a dozen issues that were weighing heavily on my mind. There may well be more that haven't come to the surface yet, but will eventually, and will also then need addressing.

The obvious way to do that is through regular sessions with a psychotherapist of some kind - as I wrote in my last update. The same points raised there are unchanged: finding one here is difficult and no doubt costly, so probably not within reach, at least right now.  Similarly my support network is little changed - although I am now getting more interaction through this blog, which is helping, and interestingly through participation in my football club's fan's forum helps too.  I'm on it most days, and although I know not a single person face to face - they are simply user names and avatars - talking football and sometimes politics, music or whatever, despite the piss-taking and sometimes vitriol flying about, I find a great help.   So, my thanks to all those people who take the trouble to read my stuff and interact - it's a great help and encouragement to this old Traveller.

None of that is going to help exorcise those damned demons, though.

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But now I seem to have stumbled across something that might.  

For the past year or so, one of my writing projects has been revising and tidying up some short stories I wrote donkey's years ago into something like book form.  I've also added a couple of new ones.  Whether they're any good or not is for someone else to judge, perhaps, one day, but I think they're ok.  Anyway, I kicked off one new yarn back in the summer (like all of them very loosely based on a minor episode from my life: this one doubts over a potential career change) and got about half way through in a week or two - not writing every day, as is my way - when I hit a creative brick wall.  Not uncommon as any writer, no matter their quality, will own up to.  

I left it for a few weeks then had another go.  And again....perhaps three or four times up to Christmas.  During these break times and the holidays I continued thinking a lot about my problems, trying to sort them out into some kind of rhyme or reason to plan around, as well as what to do about the damned story.  Last week, I came back to it and re-read the story so far. A light-bulb went on in my head.....and I recognized that the story, completely unplanned, had morphed into one that in a roundabout way addressed one of my recognized problems.   In two writing sessions the story was finished, and the added bonus for me was that the thing that had been nagging at my subconscious for 50 years no longer mattered to me.  The writing had clarified my thinking, and the resulting dialogue in the story, although completely and utterly fictitious, had made me understand that my worry, my guilt over the particular issue, that I had been carrying all these years was, frankly, bloody stupid.

It was a weight off my mind.  A small one perhaps, but still - one demon slayed - but many more to go.  All I have to do - perhaps! - is think up some more stories that can perform a similar trick on one or more of the other things that are bugging me,  It won't be easy, I know that very well, and it may not work, but in terms of therapy it should at least help me think things through more clearly - I always find it easier to break down and address any serious problem through the written word rather than verbally, and always have.  It's the way I am.  And I might even get a decent book out of it, one day.

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So to start with, I need to sit down with a pen and paper, and write a list of all this stuff - Document my Demons if you will - that I can then edit as and when they go.  Manually on a notepad would be best, I think, rather than word processing it on LibreOffice.  In another small way, it's taking back control of my mind and tracking my progress in a more direct way.  I think it will be more meaningful to then do the list editing by taking a thick black felt pen and drawing a line or two through each entry as I kill it off, rather than just lining up a cursor and hitting the Delete key on here a few times.

I can perhaps list them in order of the amount of grief I perceive them to be causing me, or perhaps how easily I think I can deal with them, or for that matter just list them randomly as they come to me.  I'll have to think that one through a bit, as I'm not sure which will prove easiest to manage.  But either way, if setting goals is a recognised way of dealing with Depression - and that certainly is the case, based on everything my confidantes and the workbooks have said - then I will have a clear list of things to achieve and measure my success at doing it.

Which must be a good thing.