COMMUNITY WITH ADDITIONS!

It was mental health week recently with the theme of Community. Here are some reflections.

The sun was lighting up the blind on the window just now. I liked it very much, I had intended to spend time outside but it felt too hot and even here at the top of the house with the windows wide open the heat is oppressive; no wind and the remnants of the day resolutely refusing to cool down.

At some stage Wendy will get home from the Gin and Beer festival, which is strange as she does not like alcohol anymore but if today is anything to go by, she will have been being wild with her friends.

Ever since she got up this morning she has been in the best of worst moods, complaining and swearing about everything possible but always with that smile in her voice that means she is finding her displeasure at the world immensely funny. Currently she is telling everyone she much prefers dogs to any human and I think she half believes it.

It is like being in a theatre show when she is like this, she dances round the kitchen or the sitting room; lifts Dash for cuddles. To be honest I have no idea what it is she does but it is wonderful. I just sit and bask in the joy of it.

We walked up the path to Overtoun from down by the Lama centre today; bright burning sun and yet we were under the trees in a sunken lane heading uphill, flowers ferns, bluebells, horses in the fields, birds in the trees and all those fresh delicate leaves. Slabs of stone on the path, the scent of blossom, the almost pleasant smell of the horses and for most of the time, blessed cool.

When we reached the top of the hill, we came across a group of young women sitting on the ground, while their horse, which happened to have fluffy feet, ate hay from a nosebag.

We passed big houses and almost ornamental gardens, we wittered and I pretended to be affronted again and again. For me this is one of the best parts of being with Wendy, the companionship and the laughter; the utter silliness.

And then we were walking back down to the car which, when we opened the doors, was baking with heat. We drove with all the windows open, back to Cardross with a huge line of holiday makers heading for Loch Lomond in front of us, making our journey very slow indeed.

I dropped Wendy and Dash off and carried on to Jeans bothy in Helensburgh to join, late, the meeting about the mental health and arts festival. The theme this year is comfort and disturb. I like that, in a way. I joined our small group of people and we talked and planned, everything from a travelling show of the craft fairs, to public speaking and exhibitions to podcasts. Some of us, me included, wanted to highlight the agony of mental illness, to get away from smiley faces and an image that nothing particularly awful happens, to the brute reality of prison and addiction and abuse and isolation and utter despair.

To show that what we go through is almost unimaginable and that we are not just the victims, because some of us, because of illness, cause terrible suffering to those around us and yet remain resolutely human despite that.

I want that to be remarked on and understand but at the same time I want the wonderful optimism of other people who were there, who said we just need to teach world peace and then no one will suffer anymore or who said it is all down to the dogs; they love us all.

Being in that room was lovely, there was a tenderness to our conversation even when we disagreed and behind it all, we knew, despite our different perceptions and wishes, we all knew fine what it is to be in these terrible places and yet, for those moments, we smiled and we laughed and got excited by ideas and ended up with a program which, if it is implemented, will carry on every day from now until next year and beyond! And of course that won’t happen but you never know.

I am pretty sure it is mental health week at the moment and that the theme of it is community. I am a big champion for the need for community but that is much easier to speak out about than to inhabit. In a way Jeans Bothy is my community. It is where I can be me to some extent, it is where I feel welcome and accepted but I don’t really go to it that often, probably once a week and I don’t see people outside of the Bothy so I wonder if I can really say it is my place of community. Maybe I can because I know it is always there. My real community is Wendy and the children and Dash but the name for that is family and somehow that is different.

I know many people and live in many settings, my work one, my writing one, my friends, the virtual one on substack but I am not sure I fit into any of them. Certainly I don’t think I fit in in my workplace, and I still feel like a fraud when I call myself a writer or attend an author event and my friends, they are dear to me but it is a long time since I have sat down with one of them and been open about life.

That is not surprising as I keep even myself from myself. I not only live on the edge of other people’s worlds but I live on the edge of my world. Substack says it is a community but, hard as it is to say, I do not really belong there. It is probably where I am most open and honest but I am not at all sure who I am being honest to. I very much doubt it is to anyone I know and identify with. I think it is the place where I say what I would like to say to the real people in my life but fail to do so in reality.

In reality, I am so silent for so much of the time; with few thoughts and a mild panic if called on to communicate.

I will give a talk in a few weeks time, where I will say we need to measure the power of connection and belonging and community and its effect on people like me who maybe have never really known it properly. It is a glib thing for me to be preaching. At its route is security and trust I think; that freedom to be you with no fear of what will happen. I almost have that with my lovely family. I am often very, very, silly and eccentric with them and they with me but still I lack the joy of my soul, the spark in my heart to truly relax and maybe that is what my illness is.

They have shown me it is possible; this gift of wanting to live and I think one day I might truly live life.

My psychology appointments are slowly showing me some of this. I cannot get away from how lonely I was as a child and how frightening it was too be away from home and family for months at a time. I am beginning to connect the hatred I have of myself with I am not sure what but whatever it is, maybe the weight of the years will fall away, maybe it will not always be medication and tribunals and maybe I will surprise my family by coming up with ideas for adventures and trips and the helter skelter life, a family with teenagers always seems to be.

I think maybe, for some of us who struggled as children and as adults, community is a distant concept that we take a lifetime to regain or understand. To learn to trust and to be utterly silly as Wendy can be, that is my ambition and sometimes I am there with it, especially on car journeys with the family where the children are teasing me unmercifully about my pomposity and awkwardness. I love those moments.

Anyway, I left Jeans Bothy and rapidly came back again, when I realised I had left my wallet and bag behind. After that it was shopping and off to Bonhill to pick up old bottles for the flower display Wendy is planning for Fiona’s wedding.

At home I cooked my crab and leek quiche while Wendy got ready to go out and then, when she was out, I didn’t do what I wanted to do. I wanted to write something beautiful and to find space but couldn’t relax, couldn’t free up the time to be me. I tried to watch Conclave and gave up. I ate my tea; I drank whisky, I phoned my mum and by and by I ended up here listening to the Eurovision song contest while writing. The bizarre energy of the program was wonderful.

I am meant to be filling in my feelings chart for my psychologist but can’t do it just now as I have no idea what my feelings are. I think I might be content but to be honest I am not too sure if I am or not, in some ways I am floating in a void, neither happy nor not, not excited or bored, not sad nor delighted but not in any way dismayed by my day. It is hard doing these exercises and forces me to look at myself in ways I am not used to doing.

My psychologist appointments are strange, exactly at nine fifteen she appears on the screen; a head in front of a logo. A kind, Irish, pretty, youngish woman who takes me through the next three quarters of an hour. In a way I am relieved that it doesn’t feel real. I am not sure I could face being in her presence and having to get home afterwards. Somehow in that gap I am in another space; a bizarre space.

Although it always feels good, we go places that quicken my heart with dread and at the same time it delights me for the relief of speaking and being heard. It is an unreal world and at the end of it I want to curl up and hide and not speak for hours and hours but do not have that choice.

She explains things to me and they make sense and yet I have to tell her my heart doesn’t agree with what she says. How do you explain that your heart will not countenance logic? She tells me that though I minimise the sexual abuse of my childhood she will not. She helps me with many things and at the same time when I say I cannot, dare not look at how I see myself, that it is much, much too hard to do that; so hard that I fear I will explode or die. She thanks me for telling her and says when we do, she will do it cautiously and sensitively and alongside me and I feel both reassured and terrified.

I am not entirely sure what I expected with these appointments but it was not this.

The thought that my life might change; my way of thinking might change is frankly something I do not and dare not believe and yet maybe, maybe, as time moves on perhaps tiny shifts will happen.

It is dark now and the room is cooling down rapidly and I have the real bed instead of the sofa bed. Dash the dog has just rushed downstairs so I imagine Wendy is back.

I will shut this down, put my dressing gown on and go and see what she has been up to for the last few hours. It is bound to have been wonderful and that will make me very happy indeed.

To read more about my life and my families life do skip over to Amazon to get a copy of START or Blackbird Singing and if Amazon is not for you message me direct and I will get a copy in the post to you.