World Mental Health Day 2020

Today is world mental health day and I just want to say I am not okay. I don’t need to share with you pictures of me at my lowest because that was last year and I managed to write to you all every week and pretend everything is okay.

That’s what we do isn’t it? Fake it till we make it? Social media is full of unhappy people trying to make other people think they are happy or that their life is perfect. Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Take my life for example….

If you take out the fact I’m ill give or take always have been and will always be ill, the fact 00Steve is always shattered from work, there is never enough hours in the day for me to blog/do my college course/work on myself my life is perfect.

• I have a loving husband
• two wonderful kids
• a loveable idiot of a dog
• a roof over our heads in a nice neighborhood and a lovely garden
• food on the table
• jobs to go to
• I’m well enough that I can leave the house.

That should be enough right? Well if so why do I wake up sad every morning? Why do I have such a deep seated hatred of myself? Sure I can manage to work through and find some good in every day and some days go to bed happy or less sad than I woke up which is the best I can ask for right?

I have tried therapy and one set of sessions I ended up self harming and 00Steve begged me to stop saying they were making me worse and it definitely wasn’t a case of “getting better before I got worse” I was only there to try and get over my post natal depression with Ra-Ra – which never got resolved and certainly impacted our bond but again I have to try and work through that too. The last time ended up with my attempting to take my own life because they were supposed to have “fixed” me and then I got no support after that attempted suicide.

So I have taken to shadow work the term which was created by Carl Jung and is about looking at the darker aspects of yourself or self examination if you will. So for me I have been looking at how and why I react in certain situations. What evokes strong feelings, memories and emotions. Now if you are going to look into this please don’t touch on abuse, rape etc without speaking to a professional because they need mediating through. It’s early days but since I dunno about June I have been testing the waters with it and some days my mind goes blank my body freezes and I feel nauseous. Other days I cry bucketfulls and I either want to curl under my duvet and let the world forget me or they are of true relief.

It is entirely okay to not be okay.

It’s okay to seek help.

It’s okay to not be ready to ask for help yet.

It’s okay to be up and down.