Happiness is nothing more than good health and bad memory.

Posted on February 7, 2013 by borysSNORC

Time to try and change tack here. I’ve been down, extremely down. It happens to the best of us, and it happens to chronic pain sufferers and people diagnosed with chronic major depressive disorders, all the fucking time. With the big ticket items (like good health, a pain free and drug free life, and more children) being well and truly out of reach on the ‘too high shelf’ I think it’s time to start trying to focus on the little things.

So I’m going to try and make a list of things that make me happy and then I’m going to try and start spending more time focusing of The Good Stuff(tm) no matter trivial, how silly, how meaningless or how unimportant they might seem… just feeling the need to hang on to, and acknowledge the little things.

THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY

cuddles with my son
walking in heavy rain getting drenched
loud music that makes you want to dance
rolling around on soft carpet
cheese and wine shared with friends
big hugs at the end of a long day
finding a truly eloquent turn of phrase
listening to Straddie birds outside my house
laughing so hard you end up crying
having a clean kitchen with clear empty surfaces
being the little spoon
having someone brush my hair
a mug of port on a cold night
sliding into clean sheets on my bed
having my feet tickled
canoodling on the couch to watch a movie
sharing Fruit Tingles with the Not So Small Child
bubble wrap, ’nuff said
passionate debates about world issues over dinner
getting my nails done so I feel like a girly-girl
finishing a job, any job, and doing it well
crunching sweet corn off the cob
watching otters mingle and play
staring into campfires
ticking things off my many ‘to do’ lists
warm sun on my back in cold weather
non-window enveloped snail mail
feeling safe and comfortable in my home
watching the sunrise somewhere new
guacamole any time, anywhere
tickets for anything – looking forward to stuff
wrapping my hands around a hot drink
green tree frogs
reading books I loved as a child
the smell of the mock oranges at night
looking through A’s baby photos (sad but wonderful)

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi

It is beyond my control

Posted on February 6, 2013 by borysSNORC

What do you do when you turn out the lights and you’re left alone with your thoughts and NONE of them are good. When you find yourself in a dark place where your life seems to have no meaning… no hope and all you see ahead of you is more pain, more headaches and more heartaches?

Everyone has periods in their life where they feel down, sad, hopeless… helpless even. But what happens when that becomes your every day? Day in and Day out. Year in and Year out. When you feel that it’s inescapable and never ending. When you can’t see any positives in your future any more… when you start to feel the crushing weight of a life so decidedly unlike the one you wanted, pressing so heavily and inevitably on your chest, that you don’t feel like you can breathe any more?

What happens then? How do you pick yourself up and keep on going when you know the things that are making you so desperately unhappy are beyond your control. External factors that you wish you could change, that you really want to change but which simply won’t yield not matter how much energy you expend.

I have pain… constant, pervasive, exhausting, gut wrenching, soul destroying pain. Pain so bad and persistent I think about ending it all the time. It has turned me into a sad, unhappy, miserable and negative person. I know this because the people who know me the best, who live with me and who supposedly love me the most, have told me so. I am hard to live with because I feel like I have little to live for. I have spent years flailing about trying to find things that will make me happy… but ultimately, it’s so desperately difficult to damn near impossible, to be happy, upbeat or positive when your entire body is wracked by sensations of pain that no amount of analgesics seems to touch. What happens then?

You get to a point where you think ‘I can’t take it any more’ and the only thing that helps you carry on are the people you love. They become your raison d’etre… your whole reason to exist ends up being external to yourself and who you are and becomes anchored in the people around you. I’m not here because I want to be. I’m not here because I love who I am. I’m not here because I love my life. I’m only here because copping out would hurt all the people I love… and I can’t do that to them. I am only here these last four years, because of them.

But then, what happens when the people you love reach the self same conclusions that you reached years ago? And they too decide that you’re miserable and unhappy and unbearable to be around? And then they want to get away from that which you desperately want to escape too? I can’t escape me… but they can. What happens when your strength, your support, your raisons d’etre also decide you’re a useless, hopeless, miserable, sad, helpless human being and they don’t want to be near you any more? What happens when the external factors keeping you going, start to disappear? Your beautiful child grows up to live their own lives and don’t need you. Your husband decides he can’t take any more strain and sadness and decides to leave you. Your support network starts to crumble around you, leaving you flailing in the dark wondering what happened to ‘for the rest of our lives’. What happens then?

How do you change things you can’t change to make others happy?

How do you change yourself when everything about you is broken?

How do you pull it together when everything is beyond your control?

Just keep swimming.

Posted on January 20, 2013 by borysSNORC

I have vague recollections of this chick I knew once who used to walk around to the local pool near her house in the mornings before breakfast, and swim… She started off just turning up and swimming for a bit of exercise because she’d been in two car accidents and was trying to stay fit while her doctors told her to lay off the scuba diving and water skiing and other fun stuff like that. So, she started going to the local pool, and because her neck was kinda pooched from recent whiplash, she’d mostly do breaststroke. Bobbing her way up and down the pool trying hard to keep her hair from getting wet too much because the chlorine would turn it a delightful shade of green if it was exposed everyday.

Everyday. Back and forth. Slowly but surely increasing the amount of laps she could do until eventually she had to limit herself to 40 laps a day (about half an hour or so) because she was spending too much time there and then having to rush to get to uni. Not a cracking pace but a decent distance.

Well, since then she’s gotten nearly 20 years older, had two more car nasty accidents which turned her youthful whiplash incidents into a particularly pervasive and persistent chronic back pain condition, has had a kid, become way too sedentary and, like many of us, has gained more weight than she should have. So, anyway now she’s out there in her granny togs and she’s back in the pool after a long absence. Her first day out swimming she managed six laps. Only six. With many, many rest breaks it took her over an hour. To do just six laps. And oh my god, it hurt so much I didn’t… err, she didn’t ever want to go back. But she came back the following week and managed to do eight laps, then tried next time and managed ten laps.

It’s costing her a lot of effort and she needs a lot of rest breaks and fuck it hurts to keep going. And she probably won’t ever get anywhere near the 40 laps per day of her stronger, younger self… but she’s going to just keep swimming anyway.

My Happiness.

Posted on December 27, 2012 by borysSNORC

Have you ever been so far down the rabbit hole you don’t even expect to be happy anymore? Yes, I’m talking about depression. Many of us have been depressed before, many of us are still depressed. Some of us seem to be living with depression for the longest time. We all experience periods of sadness and if depression is situational, then perhaps all you need is some support, some time and maybe some professional assistance.

But, I’ve been in pain so long I can’t remember what it was like to wake up feeling pain free let alone ‘good’ or ‘happy’. I don’t even expect happiness in my life anymore. The depression is so pervasive and so persistent, it is like happiness is something that is for other people now…

There’s a story in my head and I’m not sure where it comes from – knowing me probably a book or an old movie or something but it basically goes like this:

There’s a guy walking down a street and he falls in a hole. The walls of the hole are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor walks past the guy yells out, ‘Hey you. Can you help me get out?’ The doctor writes him a prescription, throws it down in the hole and walks on by. Then a priest walks past and the guy in the hole yells out, ‘Father, I’m stuck in this hole, can you help me get out?’ The priest writes down a prayer, throws it down in the hole and then walks on by. Soon, a friend walks by and the guy yells out, ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me can you help me get out?’ And his friend jumps straight down the hole. The frist guy says, ‘What did you do that for? Now we’re are both stuck down here.’ The friend says t o him, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’

After so many years of waking up and trying to remind myself why I keep going, I really, really need a friend who knows the way out.

You don’t say – You just don’t.

Posted on November 26, 2012 by borysSNORC

When people say to you ‘How are you?’ do they really want to know how you are or are they just going through the motions of being polite?

I know it’s mostly just a social nicety but more and more I’m starting to feel like I’ve spent two decades deflecting from answering this question honestly with a ‘Good thanks, how are you?’ response, and have recently wondered why we go around effectively lying to each other so much. It’s so ingrained that I walk in to see my doctor at his clinic, and he says ‘How are you?’ and I reply with the same banal response… ‘Good thanks, how are you?’, when quite patently I wouldn’t be there if I was actually good?!?

Why do we do that? Do we think our friends and family don’t want to know how we actually are? Do we not want to bring people down with our worries and problems? Do we not want to look weak to the people we know and love… and even less so to the people we don’t know or don’t care for? Do we not trust people to react well if we tell them how we are really doing? Are we ultimately scared that no one really gives a shit and that if we give an honest answer we’re going to become that person that no one wants to talk to because something is always wrong?

I worked with a woman once, Sheryl… she was a typical govt OHS officer, floor fire warden, local union representative, long time public servant type who spent more of her time updating the evacuation response plan for the building than doing her actual job. When we first started together she’d walk in at 9:30-10:00am (I on the other hand was an 8am starter) and say ‘Good morning, how are you today?’. I would invariably bite my tongue and not mutter ‘Good afternoon’, but would reply instead with a civil ‘Good thanks, how are you?’ I hadn’t worked there a month when I started realizing this was a very loaded question and as a general proposition a very bad plan. Most days she would reply with an equally banal ‘Not bad thanks, etc, etc’. But as we got to know each other better… she started actually telling me how she was.

‘Hi Sheryl, how are you?’… Oh, absolutely horrid, the cat threw up all over the carpet this morning and I had to spend an hour scrubbing the vomit off the floor so I missed my train. Eww.

‘Hi Sheryl, how are you?’… Mostly okay, but I have this abscess up here (holds open mouth and retracts lips) on my left molar which is all black and weeping yucky tasting stuff in my mouth so I have to go to the dentist. Ewwww! Overshare!

‘Hi Sheryl, how are you?’ … Dreadful! I had this huge uncomfortable boil on crack of my bottom and I had to go to the doctor to have it lanced, which was okay, but I couldn’t reach to change the bandgage and now it’s all infected and… Ewwwwww! STFU woman!

Needless to say I rapidly got to the point where she would walk in and say ‘Good morning, how are you?’ and I’d respond with ‘Fine thanks. There’s some purchase orders on your desk that need quotes and I’m just popping out for a cuppa.’

I wonder if this is why we are all trained into the going through the motions with the social niceties when people enquire how we are, and rarely actually tell people what we are thinking, how we are doing and what’s going on in our lives? Because ultimately when some people start telling you what’s going on in their lives… no one actually gives a shit. :S