Me myself and me again

I will post a piece of art someday that I create just for here 🙂

Hi aeiou,

I'll check out the thread but just a qiqui reply.

Your story intro is amazing! I want very much to read this book and even that short bit beats anything I've read at book club over the past year 😂

The gate you unlocked was a great thing! Sorry my post was confusing. I meant to say less 🤐 - the emoji was how I was feeling before, so much so that writing a word wouldn't suffice.

I hope that makes sense? My story doesn't have an into as it just sort of flowed out of what I was trying to describe but I'll see what I can do with it and post some. Though it's a bit of a ramble.

Thank you @Fredd50 for clarifying that it was a good change for you 🙂

And thank you for your feedback. I did a writing course that helped. I would love to tell my story and write a book, and I would like my parts to play the characters in my book, but it’s so complicated in my head and I don’t want to open a can of worms, so I’m leaving it (for now). Lots of ideas and a few story lines on paper, but that’s all it will be for now.

When i write here, and sometimes ramble, I write unfiltered. I like being able to express how I feel without having to deal with the impact on the people around me or explain myself. There are so many secrets to hide, so many emotions to suppress...

Ok it's long and rambly and jumps around.. has no beginning and no end yet but here is the weird fragment I found of my recovered past. It's a bit bleak, but I didn't feel bleak writing it. It just felt really good to let it out.

Sometimes while I'm struggling up the mountain, battered by the elements and trying not to fall off the edge I paradoxically come across a door. I can walk through into a space where I'm sheltered from the elements for a while (usually a very meticulously timed hour, half hour or quarter hour).

There are a quite few of these doors scattered around, but it's a big and treacherous mountain, so when I find a place I can shelter from the elements for a spell, I tend to come back to it as often as allowed.

It's hard work exploring the mountain for places to shelter, so I take what shelter I can to try and gain energy. When the weather is better or my courage and strength picks up, I might launch an expedition to find other shelters and investigate what might be inside.

At one such shelter, I open the door to find a completely windowless space. It's very pleasant, well appointed and wonderfully climate controlled. The receptionist is calm and friendly. How this shelter or it's occupants got to the mountain or seem to be entirely oblivious of the conditions outside is a mystery. They seem to have what I crave in their calm and perfect demeanor, and perhaps if I sit and follow their direction, I too will spend my life comfortable in a calm climate controlled world, making pleasantries and eating tea-cakes oblivious of what's going on outside. I may even come to forget it entirely, surely it was just a dream and this calm and perfectly regulated world is the real one?

My name is called and I walk into another room to meet a man with a concerned but contained and confident demeanor. He has studied many drawings of the "mountain people" and even talks directly to some of them on a daily basis. He is clearly the man who knows what to do in this situation and has had great success with 'them', particularly the young ones. The others in the space recognise this and look to him with unspoken deference and respect. He carries the responsibility well, not too arrogant, not too humble. The others are satisfied with this and all seem to feel adequately acknowledged and comfortable with their lot.

After a few visits to this particular shelter, I come to realise that my rocked and tired, fritzed or shaken fresh-from-surviving-another-day-on-the-mountain demeanor is making the occupants of this space uncomfortable. It is after all, not for nothing that they built such thick and windowless walls against the world outside.

I realise that if I wish to be admitted inside- not just to visit for my 1 hour blocks in the waiting room and office but to be allowed to live deep into the shelter and far away from the mountain and its storms - then I will need to learn how to look, think and act just like the folks in here. I must carefully screen out any slight nuance or variation from that. I must learn not to talk too much or too loud, express any anger, any bitterness, show any fear or dare disagree.

Disagreement is the most cardinal of sins as it demonstrates a clear 'lack of insight'. The drawings of the mountain-folk are very clear in their neat and careful annotations, and bear the official seal-of-knowledge that marks them as fact. My concerned and caring helper has 15 years of experience interpreting the diagrams and recognising the neatly numbered features in my face, speech, dress, action and demeanor. If I wish to be admitted to this shelter, I had best remember that.

I keep quiet. Perhaps there is a price to pay but I don't yet know how to safely navigate the mountain and I have rebelled enough times to know by now that there are shelters out there far worse than this one, shelters that one has to battle out of, far more dangerous than the mountain itself and where doors are locked.

He was a list-checker, a gate-keeper and the price I would need to pay to try and get in from the cold through his particular doorway was to check all of the right boxes on his list.

His soul seemed as rigid and walled off as the windowless office in which he worked, as meticulously controlled and organised as the lists and diagrams from which he drew his pride. His idea of safety was certainty and there would be no room for nuance, for subtlety, for feeling - for the mess and the wildness - the confusion of life, of loss, of hurt and of growth.

What he was like outside that office I never knew, but inside it there was no getting through to that one. I gave up on his doorway and took my chances on the mountain, returning every six months or so to get a stamp that I had been certified by one of his lists and was thus eligible to get special dispensation for struggling to pass through a different doorway through which I was trying to enter. Each visit was the same, he asked a list of questions, word for word the same each time. I answered. Nothing more. I got my certificate and I left.

It was such a small amount of time. Half an hour or so once every six months. Yet somehow these visits were implanting strings that would come to shape and distort every aspect of my life. They tied me to an experience, a time of crisis that had happened, by now, many years ago. A time when I had wanted to make sense of my experience, of the turmoil out on the mountain where there had been, I could vaguely remember, other people, goings on, problems that worried and concerned me and I wanted to solve and understand. But for years now it had been unvisited, unconsidered. It didn't matter, there was nothing but the list. In that office, I was the list and the list was me and he, who had never really seen me, was the keeper of all who I was. Neatly summarised in two short words at the top of the certificate I left with once every six months.

Ok .. so that's all I have bit raw n bleak

There's an arc, no doubt, but I haven't got there yet...

Wow @Fredd50

that was an amazing piece of work, I absolutely love your analogy about the mountain folk and the gate keeper. There is so much depth with the strings and the rubber stamp we need! Telling our stories in this way could be another possibility to raise awareness in the general community.

I could not find any ramblings and the story line was clear 🙂

It is nice to meet someone like you. I know i may be interpreting your messages from my point of view, but i feel connected as i too feel i always had to comply to be allowed with the ‘in crowd’, that i never really fitted in anywhere and i also hate labels with a passion, not only in mental health but in life in general. There are so many labels and so many rules - what if people like us don’t fit in?

Here is another song. I didn’t write it, but I like that people stand together being different. The band Delain wrote it after a true story where a girl (Sophie) was murdered because she was goth. Did you listen to the other song?

I'm walking with Sophie tonight,
She lives in the air that I breathe;
I can't get it out of my mind
How you were left to bleed
Was it how you dressed?
Or how you act?
I can't believe
How they could act so violently,
Without regret,
Well, we will not forget

As simple as air in your lungs
As simple as words on your lips
And no one should take that away
No one should argue this
Now with our heads up high
We'll carry on,
And carry out,
And we won't let them get us down,
Wear us out,
'Cause we are not alone

Normal is not the norm,
It's just a uniform
Forget about the norm,
Take off your uniform,
We are all beautiful

We are the others,
We are the cast outs,
We're the outsiders
But you can't hide us,
We are the others,
We are the cast outs
You're not out there on your own
If you feel mistreated,
Torn and cheated,
You're not alone,
We are the others

Good night

@Former-Member

Hi @Former-Member@

Sorry this ended up such a long post! I just got carried away

Hope you are having a really lovely Sunday!

Good morning 🙂

Sorry I didn't get a chance to reply last night, I had tired myself out with yesterday's efforts and just fell into bed. A good day though! Thankyou souch for all your incredible inspiration and insight. ☺️

I've just caught up properly on your last posts. I would absolutely love to see an artwork 🙂

I haven't had a chance to catch up on the songs yet but I will definitely check them out sometime today. The lyrics are awesome!

I loved your last post, and the lyrics you chose and totally agree. I guess the story was about that but also about what it's like for all young people trying to find a place in the world, even one that's literally out of the elements. We never learned about our natural world and most people don't know how to survive in it, be part of it. Nature is beautiful but it can also be unforgiving and cruel, especially to strangers and we left behind knowing her ways. To get food, water, shelter and belonging we need to find a way ''in". But the options available to a young, un-indoctrinated human look fantastically strange. I guess it's also about connection and understanding. That sometimes families break down or can't provide kids with the support guidance they need to understand how to make sense of what's happening or happened in their life. Then wondering around looking for that guidance seems natural. I guess there's the pressure of being a young adult needing to find a home, a job, a new set of people, and or a way to pay bills with no idea how to navigate that world and still reeling and hurting from the situation that's happened with their old people and how to make sense of and/or repair that. So no idea how to navigate the 'commercial' world and no idea how to process or navigate their world of humans families and connections is the typical young person ejected out of a broken home. Instinctively the human knows they need to find some kind of tribe. So I guess the doors are different ways people can try and enter society - meet their basic needs for food shelter and belonging - and how each door has a price. So in the end nobody gets to be truly whole and connected to nature and each other and whatever makes their heart feel right. Even for those who seem to get 'in' there's always the parts of themselves they had to leave behind or deny and then there's ''the other" and fear of becoming it or being defeated by it, and sometimes ''the other" is even the earth itself. But that's just the distopian view at the beginning, I'm hoping the real story turns out to be one of self discovery and slowly liberation of the people behind all of the doors. Including the poor old list-checker - I feel like he was just a "symptom" of a list-checking, diagram making world and never chose to be a villian. He genuinely believed his distorted view of the world was real.

I guess it would be nice to tell a story, I hope about reclaiming humanity, without having to starve. How do we keep the good parts of our civilisation while letting go of the bad ones? Is it possible to have a direct relationship with nature, even our own, or have we gone too far in our attempts to make a world entirely apart from it? Or is it more that we don't have a choice, because as much as we might try to shut it out, our nature (inside and out) operates according to her own rules and we can't completely ignore them without ultimately defeating ourselves. I guess it's something that's occupied me for a while. And getting to a point of hope with that, even from one person's perspective would be a good point to move on from, so I can get back to my job of making lists and diagrams to describe the ocean 😂 - where we have a big office with lots of nice people, frequent tea-cakes and big windows with views of the mountain and the sea so we can at least look at out at the real world while we study it through our machines 😉

I missed this from one of our last posts:

"I’m not clear what you refer to with symptoms. I have been told before that some of my symptoms (physiological and psychological) will get better as i progress in therapy. "

I guess I was trying to say that I never had any "symptoms"... When I first met a psychiatrist I was just a young person, struggling to deal with a difficult situation. I knew that the way I was feeling was completely connected to what was happening, I also knew what those connections were. I came to seek his help because I was looking for understanding about what to do with my situation, how to handle broken relationships and broken homes and my family tearing itself apart. It was actually very mild compared to the situations that some incredible and amazing young people have had to survive in life. It wouldn't have occurred to me for a second that anyone would think there was anything "wrong" with me. I thought psychiatrists were amazing wise psyche-detectives who knew all about people and relationships. This was a long time ago when P*rozac was still making headlines and the tone of them was largely that it was a completely nuts idea to take a pill to solve life's difficulties. The tone of TV reports on P*rozac back then reported it as a worrying trend - the way it might report on a growing trend of people using diet pills to get thin. Psychiatrists were still largely represented as people with couches, asking about your mother ;-). I'd read a book called 'sybil' where a psychiatrist was like a compassionate detective helping a young woman recover her past and reintegrate. I didn't have a particularly complicated situation going on inside when met the psychiatrist, the complication was in my outside world, it was relatively new, I had no idea how to handle it and it was causing a huge amount of stress. Back then I didn't feel like there was an argument in my head. But there were some cataclysmic arguments going on amongst the people I loved. A friend had told me she saw a psychiatrist for a road accident she'd been in and it was great, I would love it, she just talked and the psychiatrist listened. So that's what I expected. But when I met this fella I tried to talk about what was happening with my family and how I felt. I was in tears about it, from the sheer relief of being able to talk to someone about it and let out what I'd been feeling. I hadn't been crying every day, back then crying was something that naturally happened when I opened up to someone about something really sad. 20 minutes after meeting me and hearing a small part of what I'd come hoping to let out, he cut me off, told me I had depression (because I had cried) and recommended I take an antidepressant. When I scoffed at him being ridiculous and told him I'd come because I needed to talk, he said I had verbal dihorrea. This guy really did have a great reputation for dealing with 'anxiety in young people'. When I'd told the GP I'd wanted help with anxiety, I had absolutely no idea anyone thought it was a ''disease". I'd meant, stressful stuff is happening and it's making me feel stressed, I need someone to help me make sense of all this, be understood and make good decisions. The 'strings' I talked about were the slow conditioning of me to forget the connection between what I was thinking and feeling and what I was thinking and feeling about - of going from a being a human being with human reactions and feelings to someone who believed every sadness was a symptom of ''depression" and every fear, worry or stress was a symptom of "anxiety". The rest of the world were being conditioned along with me. I lost my identity, and my ability to make meaning and sense, and hence my ability to cope, or have a full and meaningful experience of learning from life and its difficulties. Eventually those aspects of myself that knew it was all wrong started to try and assert themselves but by now they were all disparate, acting in cacophony no longer working together as an integrated team. And some of the had a child's view of how to "stand up to oppressors". This led to many further misadventures ;-). In essence, the psychiatrist caused, at least partially, the very disintegration that society had given him a licence to mend in others.

Looking back through the history of public perception kinda fascinating.

Flash forward to 2007 and what was once aworrying trend" of taking a pill instead of learning to understand life's difficulties was 49 percent of people in Australia believing they've had a 'mental illness'. And the only way to get understanding, time or support to deal with life's difficulties, big or small, is to get labelled as ''ill", and call your emotions, thoughts, feelings and inner world "symptoms".

I'm hoping that we learn from history in that where once we were starting to call everyone's difficulties ''illness", we can realise that nobody's are. Just like we could condition ourselves to believe something as mundane as crying when your family is breaking up is "depression" and forget how to make those most basic of human connections. We can learn that the experiences that were once labelled "weird" or "abnormal" also have very basic human roots, and can we learn learn to understand and grow from them instead of labelling them illness.

Hi @Fredd50

good morning. Your post is empty?

Good morning!

Lol sorry, that was an accident, I'm just fixing it now 😊

Hi @Fredd50

im sorry but I’ll have to write back later or tomorrow. I’m not well and hiding in bed.

Hope your Sunday is better