Moving forward

Your welcome @Former-Member . The short break as probably done you wonders. I am not sure if I will do volunteer this week- I don't have to do a shift until after I finish my course in Dec. I have work trail run thingy either Thursday or Friday I think it will be too much for me to do both. I want to be nice and relaxed for my trial run for my job and mite do the volunteer shift the following week.

I am still feeling quite empty but I am going to change that I think and try to get out of my old routine a bit or change something. My niece is having her baby this coming Thursday so I will be going away next weekend to meet him.

Hi @Former-Member

id really like to try take two of my response to you. Last night I was over tired and not thinking. This is the second post I've edited as a result. I really hope you get this.

I guess I've been going through an insecure patch lately although I've on the whole been going ok. Thank you so much for your very kind words and thinking of me. I've just come back from being away with my youngest son (aged16) and his girlfriend and my friend and her youngest. We had a lovely Sunday in the sunshine at the beach. Ive just got home and so has my second son from his study tour from America so it was nice to see his booming smile.

I wanted to say that I think of you often and hope that you are ok. I very much respect all the work you do for your community through work and volunteering. I hope today has been kind to you and that things are travelling ok. Sending hugs and best wishes. 💜😊🤗💐

@Former-Member 💜

I have a question to ask anyone reading this. Did you have a moment where the penny dropped and you accepted your symptoms and stopped fighting them? Was that a really pivotal part of the process for you? I don't know if I have yet but I guess I'm back connecting dots. Happy to hear of anyone's stories of pivotal parts in recovery. 💜😊

I'm really tired so this isn't going to be very coherent.

I had a moment when I realised it was an illness and I wasn't actually a bad broken person. Or at least, I manage to convince myself this most of the time. That was a huge moment for me. HUGE! I had spent so much time after getting ill thinking I was this bad, broken, failure of a person, it made everything worse. But when I accepted it was an illness and not my failure, I began to get well.

I think you need to accept your symptoms AND stop fighting them to get them better. Fighting just keeps you in that to-and-fro state. Which I think is the principles behind mindfulness (despite how much I hate mindfulness and it doesn't work for me). The more you fight your symptoms the more you get caught up in them. You need to accept them and accept who you are before they can get better and you can change them.

But this is only my opinion (and a tired one at that) so you may totally disagree with me!!!

And as another addendum, meds rock. Or at least for me they do.

Thanks for your response @Former-Member and it was coherent. I'm afraid meds won't do it for me as much of my illness is behavioural but they do help with the depression a bit. I guess the last few weeks I've been getting better at saying "oh we are here again, in the muddy waters of not seeing any point of living again but in a few days time it will get better until you get the couple of days where you don't think about it, then repeat". Today all the thoughts came but not the full range of emotion with it. I'm not confident yet as I have a few days to get through but it now is beginning to feel like ground hog day/week and it's not so scary. I'm not as scared of those feelings of wanting to die but they are still here. Not sure if I'm making sense but anyway. I'm so sorry you're feeling run down and tired. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. OMG I just realised it was the first day of work, how did it go?