Unheard…

Like a gentle breeze on a summer’s day, or the silken cobwebs that stretch across the porch on an autumn morning you feel my presence. To you it is a mild irritant, easily brushed away, forgotten in a moment. I enter your thoughts, your world for seconds but I am quickly forgotten as you move through your life doing what you want with little thought for anyone beyond yourself.

Though our lives are intertwined in so many ways, through our children, our shared living space, you give little of yourself. Generous with money, presents and material things you guard your emotions as a jailer guards his prisoners. You let no one in and are careful to not to let others know how you feel. You permit yourself short bursts of anger, you shout and mutter but do not reveal the source of the emotion.

This was once my way too, but as I grow and learn I find that I cannot live in an emotional vacuum, repressing my feelings,  but you refuse to listen to or acknowledge how I feel. You tell me all the things that are good in my life and that I have no right to feel as I do. For too long now I have suppressed my feelings, the hurt, the anger, the resentment, emotions that bottled up have led me to a dark, dark place, a place I never want to visit again.

I want to be truly alive, to be able to experience my emotions fully, to express them and in doing so to learn who I truly am. To you showing emotion is showing weakness, you are embarrassed by emotional displays whether they be of anger or affection.

It takes strength and courage to allow others to see your vulnerability, it allows them to know you, who you are and what you are. You are willing to discuss your hopes and dreams, your passions in life but have neither the time nor the patience to listen to mine, and I wonder why this is so. What are you afraid of?

I am reluctant to share my thoughts with you because time and time again you have told me I am wrong to feel how I do, that I know nothing of life and loss, and because you do not listen you do not understand. You think you are the only one to experience loss and that loss comes only through death, I have experienced loss through death too but you dismiss it as I was young.(http://wp.me/p1GBe4-2m)

I have not lost my parents as you have therefore according to you I have not truly experienced the loss of a loved one. But we are all individual and the experiences we have are what make us but you want to mould me to make me what you wish me to be, to be subservient to you. I feel that to you I am not important, just a small cog in the machinery that makes your life work smoothly, here to keep your house clean and bring up your children. My opinions are dismissed or rubbished if they do not coincide with yours. My feelings do not matter to you and as I sit and write this I question not only why I am here but why you asked me to be. For if I am not allowed to be who I am in your presence why would you want me in your life?

Maybe it is because you have a need to control others, by making them feel insecure, unwanted, unloved, occasionally deigning to let them know they exist thus ensuring they come back for more. Of course this is a guess on my part and you will not tell me what you feel so I am left with only my intuition and hints from your behaviour.

All I know is I cannot go on like this, if we are to share our lives then we need to be prepared to share everything from our material goods to our emotions, the good times and the bad. To be prepared to listen to one another and to accept each other’s faults and rejoice in our strengths. If you are not willing or able to do this maybe we should not be together.

Though I know you will not read this, and I cannot tell you as I feel you will dismiss my feelings I am writing this as I need to. I hope one day I will have the strength and courage to either speak these words to your face or to finally make the break.

 

Actions speak louder than words.

Words they can mean so little and say so much. Something I may say can strike a chord with one person, make another cry, yet leave another speechless at my insensitivity. Today on a training course where we were learning how to communicate our faith to children with S.E.N. I was struck once again at how effective a simple word can be. At one point I almost brought to tears by a story of a boy who used only one word, grunts and winks to communicate, yet he was able to express his joy in life through his smile, through his actions and touched all those who came into contact with him. I was reminded of a boy with Down’s Syndrome whom I had the privilege of “helping” in school, he taught many of us to love, to share, he brought a sense of fun and joy to our days just by being in the same room, he could not speak but somehow he shone, he was a gentle child but had a radiance about him that made all want to be near him.

I love words and use lots of them, often finding new words to include in my speech and writing. Words generally come easy to me, I have never had problems being able to spell or find the right word for a given situation. I am blessed in being articulate in most areas of my life with exception perhaps when it comes to discussing my innermost thoughts and feelings or speaking up for myself.

Today I find myself wondering about words and whether they always mean what we want to say and how sometimes those words are so easy to say, yet following them up with actions is difficult. That, I think is where those who cannot speak can do far better than those of us who can for they have no choice but to act, for it is only through their actions and reactions that we can understand them, what they want and what they mean.

I am good at words, I know how use them to pacify , I know how to promise, where I often fall short is carrying through with that promise by acting on those words.

Tomorrow I think I will talk less and do more.

 

An update, today someone’s actions spoke far louder to me than the words they said!!

http://givemetherealstuff.wordpress.com/

 

SUICIDE : the most selfish act you can commit…

So speaks the teenage voice, a young friend of my daughters made this pronouncement during a discussion about voluntary euthanasia in an RE lesson. My daughter comes home still incensed. Not that she has ever been in a frame of mind where she would consider taking her own life but she has to some extent shared my journey through depression over the last year. She has witnessed the low points, the days when I have not been available to them emotionally when the darkness has all but swallowed me whole leaving little left over for others. The times when I can just about function as an automaton, cooking or cleaning but anything that requires thought or reason was beyond me. I rarely discussed how I was feeling with the children but somehow they sensed it, tiptoeing around me, scared to ask for anything in case it all becomes too much.

I am surprised at my daughters reaction and her considered thought on the subject and without admitting that I have been there we discuss what it must be like to feel so bad that death is viewed as the only way out. It is not that I actually wanted to die, at least from my perspective, more that I wanted the pain to stop. I could see no end to it there was only one way out. I was never brave enough to actually try to end it all. I have, thankfully, a very healthy aversion to pain, don’t drink and hate swallowing tablets.

My daughter is saddened by the idea that someone could feel so unloved and unworthy that death seems like the only available option and wants to know why they can’t tell someone, why they would attempt to take their own life without talking it through. I tell her that isolation is a huge part of the problem, the person affected feels so lost and alone they don’t think anyone else will understand. How do you tell someone else you want to die? Especially your loved ones?

Unless you have been there you cannot understand how it feels, to be locked in this place where there is no escape. The thoughts going round and round in your head, echoing and reverberating, every waking hour is agony. You feel so useless and unworthy, you come to the conclusion that you are an encumbrance to all those in your life, that they would be better off without you, that by dying you will also be doing them a favour relieving them of the burden. You long to talk to someone, to pick up the phone to tell them how you feel, to ask someone to save you but then the fear creeps in, the fear that they won’t understand. Or worse they will tell you that you are being silly… and that is what stops you picking up the phone or talking to someone.

The fear and the isolation keep you trapped in a downward spiral, the more isolated you become the larger the fear grows, to the point where you see no way out. You don’t really want to die, but you want end to the despair – and so you commit the deed hoping that someone will notice you before it is too late and that attention will bring you the salvation you crave.

I was lucky, for had I a friend, who recognised something was not right, who never gave up but kept chipping away at my defences until I broke down and confessed to how I was feeling. For me that was the breakthrough I needed, the catalyst to get help. For there is help available, and I have since discovered lots of other people going through the same thing.

Although we like to think of ourselves as a civilised and enlightened society there is still a reluctance to talk about mental illness, to admit that you or anyone you know is suffering. If you break a leg skiing or lose your hair through chemotherapy you can wear your plaster cast or baldness as a badge of honour, you have a bona fide illness but if it is all in your mind (be that it may have a physical cause) no one can see it so it can be ignored.

Living with depression is not easy, whether you are the sufferer or someone close to them but refusing to talk about it or acknowledge its existence does no one any favours. The current economic climate puts us all under severe stress and increases the likelihood of mental illness as we struggle to cope with losing jobs, keeping a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs, but the more we recognise the strains we are under and what it can do to our physical and mental health the better we can cope. The more open we are about this the better for everyone, the less likely we are to be trapped in isolation to feel that we are the only ones suffering, that somehow it is wrong to be “depressed”. It is an illness just like any other, it can be treated and the good times can roll again but silence will kill not only the steps we need to take to move forward as a society in treating it but also its sufferers.

http://www.mind.org.uk/

http://www.samaritans.org/

http://www.llttf.com/

http://www.drsobhe.com/suicide.html

 

What comes after Hello?

We live in a world of instantaneous communication where at the press of a button (or two) we can tell the world where we are and what we are doing at any given moment. You can no longer walk down the street without encountering someone talking into their mobile phone or bumping into you as they try to text and walk. In the middle of the night my husband’s BlackBerry beeps with an incoming email.

And yet all this seeming wealth of communication devices have left us (well me at any rate) bereft of any real human contact. The only people I have had face to face conversations with over the last four days are the Sainsbury’s delivery man and the school secretary when I arrived to pick up an ill child.

Depression is an illness which encourages you to isolate yourself and the lack of real contact makes it all the easier to do. In recent months I have gone from a reasonably chatty outgoing person to being absolutely tongue-tied when faced with a real person. I have no idea what to say to people, even those I have known for years, I know all their news, where they have been today, and what mood they are in, as it is all there on Facebook for me to read with constant updates detailing every moment of their lives. What to use as a conversation opener? Do I allow them to know that I am an avid follower of their posts, that my life contains so little I sneak looks at Facebook every few minutes or so just to prove to myself that there is life beyond my front door; that someone somewhere is having fun, or at least a life? Or does that make me something akin to a stalker?

I can only follow others’ lives because I am too afraid at the moment to live my own, I can just about get from one day to the next, but thinking of the future beyond leaves me quaking. I have not yet found the courage to voice this fear to anyone, well most of the time I can’t even get beyond the “Hello”.