Emotionally depleted

I’m trying something incredibly counterintuitive right now.

I am suffering in a lot of areas in my life, I am hugely stressed and growing in apathy for almost everything and I am finding it hard to get the get up and go.

I am losing my fight.

So, usually, when under so much tension and uncertainty and sickness, people tell me to rest, take it easy, don’t overthink things, don’t do this and don’t do that and most certainly don’t start anything new – you need to calm down and rest up.

It would be natural to think I am crazy because I am going to do the opposite.

It’s based on an idea by Mel Robbins called “Bluewater”.

She took a glass of water and filled it to the brim and put dirt in the cup, lots of dirt and she mixed it up to show how a person looks when they’re feeling overloaded and stressed out.

She then explained how people then try to deal with each individual problem they have at a time, to try and lessen the load, she did this by demonstrating how people try to spoon out the dirt little by little and over a time, their cup gets emptier and emptier and this emptiness is representing the persons emotional health. 

Over a time, as you’re spooning out the dirt, you are becoming more and more emotionally depleted and burned out and the idea of doing anything becomes so exhausting you just can’t bear to do anything anymore and you lose yourself and you feel that you might never be happy again.

A dangerous situation for anyone!

She said the simplest thing to do at a time like this is to make yourself do something for yourself, something that you think you’d enjoy or if your apathy is so bad, go back to something you once enjoyed – force yourself to have some time in the week to yourself to do it and gradually ease more and more things that you like into your life – make the time to do some self-care and find yourself again!

So she showed what happens when you start adding more water into the dirty cup, it eventually cleans up, not entirely, there will always be a little bit of dirt, but as you add more and more back into your life that you enjoy, that makes you feel like you have some kind of purpose or soul again, your cup is going to get cleaner and cleaner and you will stop feeling so depleted in yourself and you will be stronger and healthier in the long run for it.

I’m trying to force myself right now into going into autopilot and doing some of the things I used to enjoy from the past, whether I am tired or not, whether I feel like it or not, whether I am currently enjoying it or not and no matter how bad the physical pains are in my body – I must do them. 

Because, maybe that’s what I am missing right now?

I’ve been encouraged to take it easy, stop and relax so much over the years that I have come to a virtual stop and any notion of doing anything makes me have this kind of feeling of MEH!

I’ve allowed peoples advice to make me lazy and I don’t like it!

I actually started about a couple of weeks ago.

I started to force myself to read 30 pages of a book again per day, like I used to a year back. 

I am forcing myself to write anything, no matter what it is, whether it intends to be published or not.

I am forcing myself to do some kind of exercise again.

I am practising art at least once every couple of days. 

I am forcing myself to take an interest in thinking about my future again and start planning things and maybe even start thinking about chasing dreams again, because around four years ago I gave them up.

So I am thinking about creating an inspiration or dream board again, I used to be a big fan of those but got out of the habit of it because Paul started pinning his things onto MY board!  He wouldn’t get his own.

I completely forsook any dream because I was convinced I was about to die at any moment!

Along with this I have been trying to remember to do the “High five habit” Mel Robbins also spoke about, but I need more practise with that and I am also trying to remember to count down from five when I am about to go back into a negative habit.

My memory has issues because I have been on survival mode and doing practically nothing with my life for the last eight years, because I have been recovering from bed bound sickness.

I have also had a scare recently.

I know as I am getting older, certain health problems, particularly mental health problems are getting much worse.

I came across a video online purely by accident, I wasn’t looking for anything in particular when I came across a video titled “loneliness is dangerous for your physical health”.

I knew it was dangerous for mental health, but not physical health.

It turns out people who have been isolated or lonely most of their lives have a hugely high risk of developing auto-immunity issues as well as memory loss.  Now that woke me up, because my memory is unreliable and scary at times and I have four different types of auto-immune disease.

Much of the abuse and neglect I had as a child was due to isolation, my mum refusing for me to socialise outside of tight family and friendship circles, even home educating me most of the time!

So I never really had a healthy social life that lasted, it always came in dribs and drabs.

Knowing this and knowing that people who have lived in isolation a lot are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s or dementia before they are 60yrs old, worried me a lot!

They did say though that reversing this can be very quickly done actually and socialising for at least 30 minutes week outside of your home regularly or more can put you back on the right track in not getting that type of dementia, as it’s a specific type apparently.

So there is a lot going on in my life and according to the Bluewater technique there really should be a lot more going on too.

But right now, I am trying to concentrate on solving a mystery in my life and getting my passion for writing back.  Because I haven’t felt passionate about anything for a long time!

Tell a white lie, I have, but then I quickly felt, what’s the point someone will ruin it…

So, yeah, that’s what’s up lately!

Thanks for reading!

Neurological problems

Why have I started to schedule myself so rigorously?

Because I would like to be more productive in writing my stories and actually sending them off for the first time to an agent for representation and to start a career as a writer, instead of having the lifestyle of an unpublished writer!

I am also doing this because I am getting scary neurological symptoms, which look likely that my ability to write, may not last long.  I know that may mean that agents will be very reluctant to take me on, because potentially my writing career could be short, but I hope that I get enough books out there, that I would have felt that I have at least done that.

What neurological symptoms have I been getting? 

The inability to realise I have said wrong words in a sentence and even wrote wrong words in a sentence.

I have also struggled to pronounce easy things and jumbled words up, for example, I have never had problems with literacy, ever, and it has always been my strong point.  But I may, in my speech say something like this…

“I waked to the ships today” instead of “I walked to the shops today”.

I am also making huge nonsensical writing errors, such as….

“They needed to zit down and drink about things” instead of “They needed to sit down and think about things”.

This is not too regular, but it is increasing in its regularity as months go on.  This started around 10yrs ago, but it was fun back then, because I thought it was just the odd spoonerism, but the odd spoonerism, which would happen around twice a week is now a three or more times a day thing on average.

I am also finding it hard to focus on conversations and answer questions quickly.  My son is causing issues with this, because he is impatient and bad tempered and he wants quick fire answers to his quick fire questions all the time!  I get muddled and I come across as offensive because I am confused.

For example he rambled off ten questions in the space of two minutes and then, my brain hadn’t caught up.  He told me he is upset with this life and he is becoming a bad negative person over it and he hates himself, then wattle on for a couple of more sentences then he said to me…

“Oh by the way, dad just said my test is negative, are you happy I am negative”?  I said that I wasn’t happy he was negative because he needs to find something to be happy about.

But before I could finish the sentence, Henry screamed and ran away and slammed the door, I was confused by this.  Paul explained that I didn’t understand what he tried to say to me, that Henry now thinks that I am not happy that he is Covid free and my god that felt awful!

But it is things like this, which seems to be making me feel like I am going around the twist!  It is one major factor as to why I am not writing as much as I used to for the blog.

I have noticed a lot of huge errors in past posts!

Thing is, my brain is changing so much that I don’t even recognise the errors even when I read after I wrote.  It can take one of my good days, when I am not so ill, to realise what I have done.

I am scared, but there is nothing I can do about it, because hospital appointments during Covid are almost non-existent now, even if the doctor has put me down for emergency scans and so forth.

I am scared because MS, motor neurone disease and early dementia are rife in my family on both sides.

Happy reading everyone!

Birthday poem for Nanny Howe

I miss you now you are gone

I miss your funny ways

Such as waking up at six O’clock to carboot it all the day

I miss your dusty, ashy house; I miss how you used to swear

I miss everything about you gran, I wished you was still there

I know a lot of people would call you crass and uncouth

But if you weren’t there every day, I would have had a worst youth

You showed me what normal should be like

You bought me down to Earth

You taught me nothing domestically

But you always had a warm hearth

Literally, like in the summer, we are all baking hot

And you will still put the fire on, killing us lot

I miss how you used to guzzle tea and mispronounce your words

I miss how you used to talk about the fights you had with birds

I miss all of your gypsy superstitions and your weird little ways

I miss you so much gran, I think I will always

Happy Birthday Nanny Howe

This poem was for you, you silly cow ❤

For those who don’t know my gran, she really wouldn’t have been offended by the last line, it was more or less something everyone said to her and she was so confident in herself she literally rolled her eyes and ignored us.

If anyone wants to know what she was like, I am telling you now, the likeness of personality between her and Catherine Tate’s Nan is amazing!  It is almost like Catherine Tate knew my Nan herself!

But my gran physically looked very different, very exotic to some.  She had dark olive skin, thick black tight curly hair like an Italian style, she always said we had Romany gypsy in us, Italian, Chinese, Hindu and black, but no one ever believed her.  I was told to ignore her, but I never did, I always felt she was the most honest person I ever knew.  As it turned out, two years ago I discovered she was right about certain things genetically.  I found it wasn’t a Chinese man who was supposed to be her great grandfather, it was a Vietnamese man, I found out on GenesReunited.com he adopted the surname of his English wife to fit in to Victorian Britain.  I also found out that her great great grandmother from 1840 was born in Boston USA and was mixed race, her mother’s former owner was so kind about her situation he had her educated to become a teacher but something happened by the time she was twenty three which meant she needed to go to Gibraltar, I don’t know what, but there she met a sailor who was British, married him and went to live in Kensington London.

So my gran was right to attack my mum all those years about racism, she was right in saying “we’re not all white you know”.

I was never sure of the gypsy claims though, but I do know that she took me to Portobello Rd Market once and introduced me to Old Gypsy Lee who lived under a bridge and he recognised her as kin.  I do know that Nan was raised on a farm in Enfield and that gypsies in the olden days often worked for farms, so it could be true, the family do have a big love for horse brasses.

Haven’t found the Hindu bit yet, but there was something in her history which showed in the 18^th century that there was a Spanish lady who apparently was thought to be of Muslim origins, which makes me wonder about another claim gran had – the one about us being Egyptian somewhere down the line too.

I never forget the time that I was arguing with my mum about grans claims; mum was adamant we have an all-white and all British history that goes back before time, so I asked her to explain grans colouring and mum was quite offensive with her reply.  She said that she got her colouring for not being hygienic and washing enough, gran was there at the time and slapped her one, it was classic.

I got a slap too and was chased to my bedroom and threatened with all sorts of things by mum when I blurted out that she deserved that as it was a disgusting thing to say.

I believed gran more than mum because I have found evidence of these things a lot since leaving home.  I found out that gran was right about great grandpa Ernie being born and raised in a workhouse and he ran away aged thirteen and stole food from allotments to survive until someone employed him as an assistant gardener.  I found his workhouse papers on Genes Reunited; mum reckoned this never happened because she would have known about it as she was close to her grandpa Ernie; but mum fails to understand that before the 70s a lot of people didn’t like to dwell on a bad past because life was tough enough to go around wallowing in self-pity and many people liked to be private, so they never did talk about things, not even to family it was almost seen as a taboo to be nostalgically gloomy and my mum likens herself to being an avid historian – yeah right.

God I miss my gran.  I miss staying with her overnight, watching wrestling, horror movies and the shopping channel, whilst munching on fish and chips as she couldn’t cook to save her life, I reckon its why she visited us every day, because we fed her.  She wasn’t at all domestic, not the type to keep house, granddad did all that when he was alive, me and a couple of cousins tried to keep on top of it for her when she was alive, it was why I spent a lot of time with her.  Mum allowed that because it would keep me out of her hair and secondly it was to keep an eye on my dippy gran, as gran would do stupid stuff and that was normal even before her dementia.  She was in every way a bimbo and she knew it and she relished in it, because a bimbo can’t help it see, it works out good for her in a lot of things – to play ignorant that is.

It was a miracle my gran was alive at all, born in the early 30s with a heart condition and having a heart operation every 18 months her whole life and being on warfarin since she was in her mid-twenties, one of the first she claimed to get that medicine, coincidentally as gran was accident prone she was also haemophiliac which was scary as she was given a snappy jack Russell called Star.

You are probably wondering why I keep skipping from gran to Nan a lot when talking about her, it is common even when she was around, everyone called her Nan but I always alternated.  Her name was Doris-Dorina but everyone called her Dolly, which suited her bimbo nature.

I love you gran and wished you were still here.  But blimey gran, you’d be 88 now if you were. 

She died too young by today’s standards.  She died in 2006.  She was absolutely fine before she got ill; she got ill because of a car accident.  She had a car crash which caused her to have a head injury, like a fool she didn’t bother to go to the doctors and the crash was so mild that neither parties car was damaged and so she and the other party decided to not mention it to anyone and gran went home, she suffered migraines for a while and started to do silly things over a six week period – eventually we took her to the doctor as she was showing signs of dementia and a quick forming one too – turned out we were right and it the dementia was so fierce that within six months gran couldn’t talk anymore and would only stare into nothingness and needed to be forced fed.  Within a year of silence, gran died of a heart attack whilst at hospital waiting for a place to go into councils old peoples home.  She was living in a hospital for over a year waiting for some other old biddy to die so she could have a new home being cared for properly.

Apparently it can happen even to young people, a head injury in a certain way and within months you can become vegetative.

My gran hadn’t even retired when the accident happened, she was a cabby.