Finding HopeSeptember 2023 in Photos
Posted on October 1, 2023
It’s been ages since I did a photo challenge and I’ve always really enjoyed them so I thought it was about time I revisited the practice. So here we are. This is my September, guided by the Planner & Paper photo challenge on Instagram, Life in Pockets…
Day 1 – Wardrobe Change
Given that the weather hasn’t changed yet, my wardrobe hasn’t really changed. It was a really warm day but I don’t like being uncovered: it makes me feel really exposed and vulnerable. I did wear my brown ankle boots, which I don’t usually wear; they’ve been all but living in my wardrobe up until now but I like them too much to let them just gather dust.
Day 3 – Your Choice!
My Mum bought a new toy for the cats and they were big fans, of the catnip at the very least. It wasn’t long before they were all rolling around on the rug, blissed out on catnip. It was very cute. We don’t usually get all of them inside together at this time of year; they’re usually stretched out in the garden, either in the sun or the shade depending on their preference moment to moment. It’s very cute but it was delightful to have them all back in for while, even if only for a little while.
Day 4 – Listening To
I’m obsessed with The Good Witch by Maisie Peters and have been listening to it on repeat since it came out. I absolutely love pretty much all of them – picking a favourite is actually impossible – but I’ve been having a great time singing along to this song, ‘BSC,’ recently. Maybe because there’s a certain person I’ve been talking about in therapy that I’m reminded of when I sing some of the lyrics to this song. I love the chorus: it’s such a true, relatable, hilarious-but-still-kind-of-heartbreaking statement so succinctly put. Her songwriting is SO clever and I always lose my mind over the genius lyrics like, ‘Mister “I don’t want a label” / You made me ‘Little Miss Unstable.” I also absolutely love the bridge: ‘I am unhinged / I am scaling all these walls I’ve gone within / I am both Kathy Bates and Stephen King / I can write you out the way I wrote you in.’ That last line is so empowering and I think that being a writer myself makes me love it even more. ‘I am unhinged’ is just hilarious and so relatable and ‘I am both Kathy Bates and Stephen King’ is so freaking clever. I could honestly talk about these songs for HOURS.
Day 5 – Cozy
I didn’t take a picture for this one but I wanted to include it here because I find it so hilarious. Here in the UK, we’re experiencing a heatwave and oh my god, the idea of cozy is just so far from my mind; all I want is to cool down. I’m melting in this heat. And suffocating in the humidity.
Day 7 – Reading
I started out listening to this book on my phone, passing the time on a long drive, but ended up continuing it in physical form; I prefer physical books to audiobooks for reading but I can’t deny the convenience of audiobooks when in the car or when swimming, for example. I really enjoyed This Is Going to Hurt so I was keen to read Undoctored. So far I’m really enjoying it; I really like the way Adam Kay writes and he’s utterly hilarious.
Day 8 – On The TV
My Mum and I are currently watching the second series of Annika. My whole family LOVES Nicola Walker and I would honestly watch the worst show ever just for her. This certainly isn’t the worst show. It’s pretty lighthearted most of the time with some heavy moments and Nicola Walker’s character, Annika, is hilarious and awkward in a really endearing way. She’s a mess but all of her relationships with her family and friends and colleagues are really lovely and I honestly never want this show to end; it’s really nice to see her play a character who isn’t deeply and consistently traumatised, as most of her characters seem to be. It also seems like a really fun show to be on, which just adds to the enjoyment of it.
Day 10 – Sunday’s Are For…
In theory, I like Sunday to be for collecting myself for the coming week, recuperating, and doing my favourite things. Having said that, I’m usually frantically busy trying to catch up with things from the previous week before they spill into the next week. This Sunday, however, I was able to just dedicate my time to practicing for the show I’m playing on Wednesday and spend time with Izzy, our brand new puppy: playing when she was awake and snuggling as she slept. It was a very pleasant day.
Day 12 – Below
I had no idea what to do for this prompt until we got Izzy. I keep picking her up like this because she’s just so adorable and so chilled out, when she’s sleepy at least. And she looks so ridiculously cute. As she always does. All the time. It’s very distracting.
Day 13 – From Behind
I mean, with ears this spectacular, how could I take a photo of anything else for this prompt?
Day 15 – Boots
My favourite pair of boots, and the ones I wear practically everyday, are Sorel Joan of Arc lace up boots. They’re the same boots that Daisy Johnson in Agents of Shield wears a lot, especially during Season 2. I always thought they looked super cool and the fact that she was wearing them was an added bonus. They’re really comfortable, they look cool, and I feel like a superhero when I wear them. Is it any wonder I wear them all the time?
Day 17 – Time Alone
Right now, all of my ‘alone time’ is actually ‘Izzy time.’ I’m either playing with her and keeping her occupied so that she doesn’t get into anything she shouldn’t or I’m sitting with her while she naps. Sometimes I try and get stuff done while she sleeps but sometimes all I can do is sit and adore her; the fact that she’s actually real, that this absolutely gorgeous little creature is mine to love is still kind of overwhelming and I just find the time disappearing as I stroke her and cuddle her.
Day 18 – Something Brown
I could’ve easily stuck another puppy picture here but I thought I’d try and come up with something a little more interesting, for one day at least. There’s no such thing as too many pictures of this puppy. So here is my beloved guitar, an electro-acoustic Taylor that I got during my first year at university. It has the most gorgeous sound and I honestly have no desire to ever get a new one, even if I could afford to get a ‘better’ one. This one just sounds and feels so beautiful; it feels like an extension of me, and of my songwriting.
Day 19 – Something For You
A couple of months ago, I ordered this necklace from Etsy. I’ve been looking for one like it for years and having finally found it, I didn’t want it to slip away again – I’ve let that happen far too many times. I have such anxiety around money that I struggle with spending it on myself when there isn’t a ‘productive’ purpose (like learning a new skill) but I’ve been working so hard at my physiotherapy and hydrotherapy that I said, ‘fuck it,’ and bought the necklace. I can get my head around a little reward for over a year’s worth of hard work.
Day 20 – Selfie
I did it for the challenge but I really don’t like taking selfies. I can just about manage selfies if they’re with people or as part of a special event or at a specific place but I’m rarely happy with how I look in them. I think a big part of that is that I’m masking really hard in order for the photo to be a good one and so I think I just don’t end up looking like myself. I like candids because they’re in the moment and honest and real. But, as I said, I have obliged for the challenge.
Day 23 – Lazy Afternoon
Lucy was certainly having a lazy afternoon (while I was busy working away). Of all of the cats, she’s the most unfazed by Izzy’s appearance: she’s not thrilled and they’re not playing (yet?) but Lucy will chill out in the same room and will engage with her to a limited extent. Having said that, she’s not shy about giving Izzy a swipe if Izzy gets overexcited and ends up swerving too close to her. The other cats have barely managed five minutes in the same room; I have to hope that they’ll get used to her over time, especially as she learns what to do and what not to do. Anyway, as well as Lucy’s handling the Izzy situation, she’s happiest when Izzy is downstairs and she can just relax without having to worry that Izzy might bound over to her at any second. So this was a thoroughly blissed out moment, unbothered by a tiny canine.
Day 25 – 11am
This is my physio set up, just before I ran through my personal exercise plan. I feel very lucky to be able to work with a physiotherapist and not just a physiotherapist but an excellent physiotherapist who has a really good, working understanding of Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. I’ve been working with her for a few months now and have a series of exercises that take about fifteen minutes to do, trying to strengthen and stabilise my body. As of earlier this week, we cut one exercise and added two new ones for my elbow and shoulder because I’ve been experiencing serious pain in them for a really long time now. So I’m still getting to grips with those. Although, having said that, my arm has been sore as a result of my recent COVID jab (my fourth, I think) so I haven’t managed as much as I usually do. If it follows the same pattern as the others, it’ll be fine in a couple of days and I’ll be able to work at normal capacity again.
Day 28 – Book Review
I love Trista Mateer’s poetry and I loved her previous book, Aphrodite Made Me Do It. I loved Artemis Made Me Do It even more. I read it in less than twenty-four hours, folding a ridiculous number of page corners. Her poetry is so visceral, like the earth just spits it out; it’s beautiful and delicate and brutal and fierce and I feel like I could write a song inspired by every poem. I really loved it and I can’t wait to read the next one in the series.
Day 29 – Weather
My birthday was on the 29th and part of that involved doing this really amazing Equine Facilitated Learning session about building confidence and assertiveness so I spent the morning in a field, working with three gorgeous horses. It was a bit chilly but a beautiful day with warming sunshine and big blue skies. It was a good day.
Day 30 – Self Care
One of the things that makes me feel like my best self – physically, mentally, and emotionally – is swimming. And, near where I live, the pool does this awesome thing on weekend evenings where they turn off the main lights and place a few lanterns around, basically lighting the space with the pool lights. They keep the number of people to two per lane so it never feels crowded or cramped and they play music to minimise the potential echoes in the room. All in all, it’s a really amazing way to swim and such a soothing experience, especially for someone like me who often finds swimming pools overwhelming and overstimulating. I’ve always loved swimming so I’ve put up with it, trying to find the quietest times to swim at whatever pool I’m going to but this is just amazing. It’s my favourite place to swim and I never get tired of it. I feel very lucky to have discovered it and to have pretty regular access to it.
I didn’t manage to take photos every day: sometimes I was too busy, sometimes I forgot, and sometimes nothing about the day matched the prompt (like ‘cozy’ in a heatwave or ‘fall leaves’ when we don’t have anything resembling autumn yet). I also didn’t do the bucket list because I find that they trigger my anxiety at the moment. But on the whole, it was really fun to document my days with photos again. I have a fair amount of fun things coming up over the next couple of months so I wouldn’t be surprised if I find myself doing another challenge sooner rather than later.
The Resurgence of My Body-Focussed Repetitive Behaviours
Posted on July 15, 2023
TW: Mentions of Trichotillomania, Dermatillomania, and self harm.
Over the last twenty months – the period dominated by my latest depressive episode – my hair pulling has been much less of a problem, something that tends to happen when I’m really depressed; it’s like I’m too depressed to pull. I guess that’s something to be grateful for while incredibly depressed (scraping the barrel but it’s something, or at least not nothing). But, over the last few months, my hair pulling (and other BFRBs) have returned with pretty frightening force.
As I said, it’s been a long time since I’ve been seriously pulling at my hair. But in the last couple of months, the urge has come roaring back with relentless intensity. Whether this is connected to starting the Phenelzine again, to beginning the escape from The Great Depression, or something else altogether, I have no idea but it’s a frustrating and exhausting to be back here again, back to pulling so much and so often that I have constant pain in my shoulder and arm. It hit me a while back that it will, in a couple of months, be ten years since I started pulling, which has been a pretty overwhelming realisation – I never thought it would become such a permanent part of my life.
I also started picking at my skin, which isn’t something I’ve ever really done and certainly not to the degree that I pull my hair. Frustrated by the imperfections of my fingertips, I ended up compulsively chewing on the callouses that had recently developed on my left hand (coming out of the depression, I’d started playing the guitar again and the callouses on my left hand – my string hand – had begun to reform); it got so bad and I’d gone through so many layers of skin that I couldn’t touch anything without pain. How they healed, I have no idea. I was also picking at my nails and the skin around them. My fingers were a mess, raw and painful and I ended up going through multiple packs of plasters in my attempts to stop. But, of course, I’d start picking at them as soon as I took the plasters off so they really did take ages to recover, and it was even longer before I could play guitar again.
And as if both of those behaviours weren’t enough, I was compulsively scratching at a half healed self harm cut on my face. It had started to heal but then suddenly I couldn’t leave the scab alone, reopening the cut and eventually making it bigger and bigger. I wasn’t trying to stop it from healing exactly but in my mind, the uneven, ‘imperfect’ edges needed to be fixed and so I kept trying to smooth them out, make them neater, make them symmetrical, or… something. It’s completely illogical because I was just making it bigger – just making the wound worse (and at this point, it really was a wound) – and more likely to get infected but I couldn’t help it.
I just could not stop myself. I tried so hard – trying every strategy I’ve ever used, every one I could find on the internet – but I still felt like I was losing my mind – and I mean that literally – if I didn’t do it, a feeling that got worse the longer I tried to stop myself. In the end, I always broke and my fingers found their way back to whichever of the three was their favourite at that moment in time. And it was always worse if I was extra tired or extra stressed. The only way to in way curb it – the behaviour if not the compulsion – was to cover the skin I was attacking, plasters over my fingers and a dressing across my face (that one was harder and less comfortable to explain). That didn’t stop me trying, constantly fiddling with the edges of them, and my hair bore the brunt of that coping mechanism. I ended up buying a hat that I could tuck all of my hair under but even with all of that in place, the urge to pull or pick got so bad sometimes that I simply gave in to it. Sometimes it was just too hard.
(On the left: before we found the correct dressing // On the right: in the early days when I’d only chewed on two callouses)
Jump to a few months later. My callouses finally healed and, after a period of using the wrong type of dressing before switching to a better one, my face recovered for the most part too although there’s still a scar. With those ‘imperfections’ ‘perfect’ again, hair pulling has become the main problem again. The urges are less than they were but still pretty relentless – perhaps a side effect of restarting the Phenelzine after all? – and I’m so fucking tired of the whole thing. I don’t know what to do, how to stop; I’ve seen so many people say that it’s not actually possible. But I don’t want to live like this. As I said, I don’t know what I’m going to do but I think I might try hypnotherapy; I’ve heard that some people have had positive results. So I guess we’ll see. Ten years is long enough.
Celebrating My 26th Birthday in Lockdown
Posted on October 3, 2020
When we went into lockdown in March, I never thought that I’d be celebrating my birthday (roughly six months later) still in lockdown. I just hadn’t thought that far ahead. I know that lockdown has loosened over the last few months but I still don’t feel as though it’s safe enough or socially responsible to do something as casual as going out for my birthday when, fingers crossed, I’ll have many more. So we had to get creative with the birthday celebrations but I feel like I still followed my birthday rules and feel good about how I celebrated my birthday even though it was a bit different than I’d have expected it to be.
So, to refresh our memories, these birthday rules that I discovered several years ago are: do something you wouldn’t normally do and buy yourself something you wouldn’t normally buy. So here we go…
Rule #1: Do something you wouldn’t normally do.
Finding something to do at home was a bit of a challenge because, after six months of staying inside, we’ve really done everything possible to do, from the mundane to the more interesting. So I did find it hard to come up with something. But then I had a sudden flash of inspiration. We always have homemade cake on birthdays but we thought that, rather than going out to do something special, we’d have something special brought to us and so we ordered a beautiful, more extravagant cake for the day of my birthday (we will still have homemade cake because it’s a family tradition – we’ll just do it later on). I got to choose it and I was very excited for it to arrive.
I had classes (online) all day on my birthday but when I came downstairs after the second one, this beautiful cake – chocolate cake, chocolate icing, and maltesers (available here from Betsy’s Bake) – was sitting on the counter. I had a couple of hours before my next class and one of my parents dropped in briefly for what we had officially named ‘the cake break.’ It was really, really good. I had cut myself far too big a slice to get through (it was very rich) so I tucked it away and did my last class of the day, before having dinner and finishing it off.
Because there was much more than we could eat ourselves, it was really fun to share with people and witness their excitement and enjoyment. That was a really nice part of it that I hadn’t expected, thinking we’d get through it all as a family. In general, I think I prefer our simpler, homemade cakes but I did really, really enjoy this as a fancy birthday treat, which, afterall, was the point.
Rule #2: Buy yourself something you wouldn’t normally buy.
Having received the two big items that I would have chosen to spend money on for my birthday (and technically I am contributing to the electric guitar because it is an expensive purchase), I was a bit lost as to what to do for this second rule. I feel very fortunate for my birthday presents but I have also really come to enjoy this tradition and so I still wanted to buy myself something I wouldn’t normally buy; I just wasn’t sure what to buy as there weren’t any big things I wanted and it would be a waste to buy something I only just kind of wanted. So instead of buying one thing, I looked at what I’d spent in previous years and once I had an estimate of what to spend, I decided to dedicate that money to my attempt during lockdown to finally finish decorating my room. It does mean these things won’t all arrive at once and it won’t be the traditional ‘the thing has arrived!’ but if there was ever a time to bend rules like these, this is it.
I haven’t spent all of the allotted money yet but so far, I’m getting a suncatcher, some sea glass to put in jars to place around the room, some small prints to go on the walls, and a cool candle. I’m not sure what else I’ll choose yet but I’m so excited to have my room start to feel truly like my space. It’s gonna be so great.
This is the guitar that was my main birthday present, which I’m paying for in part because it was pretty expensive.
My actual birthday was A LOT. I had some lovely messages and cards and gifts from family and friends and the amazing cake so there was a lot of good. But it was also very hard work. I had three university classes, one of which was kind of like a personal development seminar and that got very emotional. I felt drained and completely exhausted afterwards, even though it had been a positive experience. But it was hard and upsetting to dig so deep. Plus I have this weird anxiety about turning twenty-six when I feel like I haven’t done all the growing I’m supposed to do at twenty-five due to the pandemic. I ended the day falling asleep on the sofa with the beginning of what turned into a several day long migraine. So, yeah, it was a lot. But I do genuinely think I will always look back at it and remember a really good, really special birthday.
Finding Hope 