Group Therapy?

So many ideas, so little motivation. My drafts folder is overloaded with stuff. I think of an idea, whip out my iPhone and note the idea plus some basic points about it down, then get back home and stare at the closed laptop in contempt, and go and do something else (until yesterday, that was mainly playing Dish0nored, although I’ve completed one ending of it now. Gamer? Go and buy it if you haven’t already done so!). Or, more frequently, nothing else.

I go through periods like this quite frequently, so if you’ve heard nothing from me on Twitter, on your own blogs, via email or in response to comments left here, it’s because I’m hiding from the world. It’s not that I’ve lost interest in any of I'll Be Backyou – never that. It’s just that my social awkwardness often extends into the online world, particularly when I’m feeling low. I wouldn’t describe myself as depressed as such, but I recognise that the symptoms of an episode are wider ranging that just mood. Not that I would describe said mood as sublime, having said that. Does that ever happen outside a manic episode? I don’t know what I believe about that any more – a subject of one of these billion unwritten posts, indeed. Anyway, sorry. To coin a cliche, it’s not you, lovely people; it’s me. The whole SAD thing doesn’t exactly help matters.

Anyway, I’ll be back!

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World Mental Health Day 2012

The below is pretty much an exact replica of a piece I wrote elsewhere for 2010’s World Mental Health Day. The facts remain essentially the same, and I have a different audience here, so I’ve decided it was worth posting on AtMoM in the spirit of awareness-raising and stigma-busting. It’s reprinted with permission, yakka yakka blah.

Today is World Mental Health Day.

Anything I can say on the subject will have already been much better said by others, so I will just add some facts, figures and information here.

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CATastrophe – Part One

Since mid-2008, just before I left my last permanent job, The Man and I have had two cats. The original two were tiny litter-mates; one male, one female. I remember the night we got them home – the poor, minuscule things were petrified of this new big walled place, and they hid all evening under the table in the corner. The female protected the male, dear love her.

Our First Two KittiesShe was always a very good cat, though he certainly had his moments as a kitten. He got himself trapped in a vacant house when he was maybe six months old, for example. But he didn’t get himself mowed down by a car when he was three years old, like his sister fatally did 😦 We still miss her, over a year later.

At the time of her death her brother was, understandably, upset and unsettled. From our perspective, we didn’t want a second cat until we had time to deal with our loss – and perhaps in retrospect, we should have listened to that instinct. However, we tried to think from the cat’s point of view – he had no feline company, and in any case, we didn’t want him coming to be used to being alone and subsequently being horrified when we did finally get another companion for him. So, in the wake of our female’s loss, we acted relatively quickly and got another kitten. Continue reading

Colonoscopy

Okay, lads and ladies – before we go any further (do you love me? Will you love me forrrrrrreverrrrrrr? That’s one of my party pieces with my brother-in-law, but I’ll leave those tales for another time), I’d better warn you that this post is probably not that attractive. It’s about irritable bowel syndrome and related maladies, and is likely to involve discussion about shit. I mean ‘shit shit’, not just shit, as in, “oh, that’s a bit rubbish”. Okay? I’ll put the ‘more’ tag in right under this paragraph so as you can do a runner now. Sorry to those of you that subscribe by email 😐

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