Journaling as a mainstay

(A letter style entry about Covid 19- heads up so you can choose whethere you’re in the headspace to read this now or wish to return later)

Hello lovely,

How are you? Thanks for coming back and reading another one of these. I’m happy to have you here with me. I want today’s blogpost to read like a letter. I hope you enjoy the change in format.

The not so new news is Coronavirus. Global pandemic, lockdown, and quarantine are some of the keywords of the current times. A huge element of being instructed to stay indoors is challenging for me. Obviously as someone who has been sectioned (almost a decade ago now) it is not surprising that this feels very close to the skin. Autonomy is something of a theme that keeps on cropping up this year.

I don’t this is limited to me and my experiences though. I believe that it’s an entirely human feeling, to instinctively recoil at a command that seeks to keep you confined. Isn’t prison seens as a crime and punishment system? It’s punishing because your freedom of movement is voided. (We’ll talk another day about how prison also seems to void human rights, and the whole rehabilitation issue. I have huge feelings around institutionising humans.)

I find myself deeply concerned about the long term implications of our current conditions.

Today the Govt spokepeoples were talking about secondary deaths due to Cv19 they talked about comorbidity. They talked about “BAME” ( slowly coming to really dislike that term) covid rates. I waited with baited breath for them to talk about class, race, poverty how these things intersect with people’s likelihood to contract the illness, how they correlate with how likely they are offered treatment/testing or not believed and sent off …. of course this was not mentioned. Of course not.

Though “the pandemic” has all but painted bold the social inequalities that are built into the very fabric of many of our societies, by many it still goes unseen, unspoken about, and out of awareness.

There’s been such loss and grief.

Numerous people, souls who laughed, thought, felt, loved, were lights, complicated, joyous, passionate, have departed this life.

My Lord grant solace to all those grieving, and soothe them in their experience of loss, of breaking, and hurting.

It’s now more than ever that we realise the value of community perhaps. It feels like another thing that’s been painted bold. This spiritual human interconnectedness. This is a light, and I have hopes that this reconnection to our sense of collective purpose strengthens throughout and beyond this time.

There’s been a whole host of different experiences I guess, and it’s just, I think societies are bound to change in many unimaginable ways on the other side of this. Im hoping to be a part of the effort to make sure this is a “for the better” outcome than a “for the worse” type of thing. Tie your camel, and leave the rest to Him.

So having put things into context of course there’s a lot of feelings and emotions coming up, some mine, some the feelings of others that i feel so easily atuned to (hello, extraverted feeling). My current experience is that it’s taking even more energy than usual to maintain boundaries in that respect.

Hence I’m grateful to have journalling, as a great resource to sift through feelings, identify mine, sort them out from other people’s emotions, and then even looking into projections.

One of my new journaling experiences recently has been getting really relaxed in my body before hand, sort of floating along my mind’s currents and then feeling deeply into any emotion/memory that comes up. After that i breathe deeply, then stretch, and then turn to my journal.

There’s so much stuff coming up. Isn’t that always the case, that the more work you do, the more work there seems to be that needs doing. Such is the joy and sorrow of life.

Anyway that’s it, I just wanted to check in. And express things on here. This is history in the living, and I want to remember it exactly as it was lived for me, not however it might be reworked to fit objectives and poli-socio-economic narratives in the time after.

All the best,

take care,

Fine words Weave

Hospitalisation and How it Affected my Writing

I was looking back at some old blog posts on a different host site, and I stumbled across a long forgotten post from Novemeber 2010. In it I wrote

…So that’s what’s been going on with me. Well that and a stint in hospital, which I think had completely broken me.

I’ve not been able to write anything, which in turn has led me to be upset… but I just don’t feel things the way I used to. It’s weird and horrible, and I hope no one has to feel the way I feel.

My sense of humour has totally changed. Things I found funny before are now not nearly as funny. I have officially become an unenthusiastic person. It bites and I don’t know how to change it, or how to feel things anymore.

I’m not asking why. I accept that this is something that has had to happen, because it did actually happen, I just wanna know what to do about it.

Reading this seven years later and being confronted with that former version of myself is hard. My heart swells and remembers the faint echo of its old wounds whilst reading this post.

It was written shortly after I was sectioned under the mental health act and hospitalised. I am someone who is pretty open about this having been part of my life experience, though I feel where I come from, both from a cultural and religious standpoint, there is still at times a stigma attached to mental health problems, and being open about difficulties people face in that regard. I stand by my resolve to be open about my experience though, because it is through sharing, open discussion, and sincere reflection, that I believe we all learn, develop, and reach new levels of compassion and understanding.

What is very weird though, is that I’d forgotten that my writing slump coincided with my being sectioned. Prior to being sectioned, I would spend countless nights losing sleep because I was pouring out a new story idea, or working on a new poem, or just scribbling my feelings out in a journal. After being sectioned I just couldn’t do it. I tried, I tried to force myself to keep writing, I even attempted NaNoWriMo from my room on the triage ward, but it just didn’t pan out.

For perhaps the majority of my life words and writing have been places of refuge for me; from spending summers folding a4 sheets of paper in half, stapling them in the middle and designing books, writing endless stories fuelled by a youthful imagination, to journalling during my time in boarding school, even those angst filled poems that littered my teenage years. However, in the midst of one of my most difficult life experiences, that tool and solace was lost to me.

It was not that I couldn’t access writing, it’s just there was something off about it, even now it’s so hard to express this in a way that makes sense. It was almost as though in the same way that my self confidence had withered away during my time in hospital, the creativity I normally overflowed with when it came time to put my fingers to the keyboard or even pen to paper had shrivelled up too. I can still remember the desperate struggle to write, how huge of a mental block there seemed to be, how it was almost as though I’d lost not only the capacity to express myself, but also the will to do so. I believe this is very much a parallel to how things stood for me at that time mentally too. It took a lot of work to get back on an even keel, Alhamdulillah! I do feel that this experience, as much as it knocked me down, was useful in that it was a way to start rebuilding myself with a stronger foundation.

Eventually, painstakingly slowly my love of writing did return. I started of with a journal, a hot pink faux leather bound lined notebook; no dates or days, just blank lined pages a year after I left hospital. I didn’t write every day, in fact weeks would go by and I wouldn’t pick up my pen at all. When I did write, I would write a sentence here, a paragraph there, and there were a lot of days where I couldn’t find the motivation to get out of bed, talk less of the mental effort it took to pick up a pen and organise my thoughts enough to write what I was feeling.

I kept writing though. A new year started and I was still using that same hot pink diary… occasionally. Gradually I was recovering, and so was my writing. Things were not exactly the same, just as I had been altered by my experiences, I believe my writing was too. At times writing can still be a challenge, but I am so grateful that it wasn’t lost to me forever.

To anyone who’s found that mental health issues have negatively impacted their writing I wanted to just put this out there, don’t lose hope. It can come back, it may not be the same, but the challenging things that we go through in life don’t have to forever be dark ink blots on the pages of our life stories, we have the capacity to grow from and learn from our experiences. To transform the inkblots into fantastic illustrations of growth and starting points for change.

Lots of love