Positives

I was dismissed from my job on Tuesday, considered incapable of fulfilling the terms of my contract due to prolonged ill health and absences. I expected to be devastated when this (almost inevitable) turn of events came to be. I don't feel that way though.

I'm being positive, starting my new life with great anticipation of good things.I get to discover now who I have become whilst I;ve not been looking.


Yesterday I had a chat with one of my idols, CCW, a crystal healer and dealer. She agrees with my assessment, that something positive lies ahead for me. Her husband, CW, observed how much I have changed and how far I have come since they first knew me, that I am bolder and stronger and more confident. Despite my current illness, their assessments of me and my current situation feel absolutely correct.

I am experiencing, despite my financial worries / total lack of income,a lightness and optimism of spirit that has been missing from me for an uncountable number of years. I am reminded again of the 13th Tartot card, Death. Change can be needed and can be for the best, and that's how al this feels right now.

Today I walked in wind and sunshine, eschewing using either bus or taxi. I also decided not to shop. Yes, there was a financial element to these decisions, but it was also a choice to slow down and enjoy the moment.

I ate my lunch, trying to be mindful about it. I realised that egg and mushrooms work well together, as do eggs and cheese, but that eggs, cheese and mushrooms combined in one omlette need separating out again in order to be palatable to me.

Then I walked home, via an unusual route, listening to the birds, sensing the road under my feet, feeling the wind pleasantly chill on me, the sun gently warming me when I was able not to be in shadows. I discovered that I prefer to walk on paving stones to walking on tarmac. I never realised this before.

I achieved huge amounts today -- dealing with various agencies and being assertive and definite about my circumstances and my needs. All in all, a very good day.


Image is a red jasper wand, courtesy of : http://th263.photobucket.com/albums/ii142/greencrosstoad/Wands/th_RedJasper.jpg

More stuff Haydn has said

Haydn, in the same post I blogged about earlier, says:

The more sexually vulgar I could be the better. I loved to shock, be controversial and say things to put people off me. I had an almost obsessive need to have sex with any man I could find. I just wanted to have sex with someone who had not had to force me, hold me down, make me cry and cause me pain. I wanted to be in charge for a change.

I've been there. I still am there sometimes. I control people by how and when I disclose things. I like to shock, to shake up their happy little pictures of who I am. I don't make things up, though. I don't have to. I really have dated five people at once/ I really am a witch. I really am bisexual. My manipulations involve who I disclose what to, and at which moment I do so.

I've come to realise lately how important 'control' is to me, mainly because my life has been taken out of my hands so much lately. Maybe that is why D/s relationships interest me.

Haydn's wish to "put people off me" rings true too. It's a defense mechanism, I believe. If you've been abused you don't really want people to touch you, either physically or emotionally, and most definitely you don't want to risk being hurt by their touch. So we develop ways of making ourselves revolting to others, either through looks or mannerisms, by what we say or what we do, by making ourselves seem eccentric or plain old crazy. Been there and still doing that.


If you recignuse the kind of person Haydn speaks about, ask them some day if they have been abused in the past. We can't be other than we are, but I will tell you that if you try, if you look past the front and make contact with the interior person, you will find a friend--or maybe even a partner--so loyal and loving that you may never get rid of them.

On the topic of abuse

A friend has been running some blog entries past me by a guy called Hadyn. Hadyn was abused as a child, as I was. He gives a very personal account of his life and his feelings.

In this episode, 'Sexually Abused to Death', Haydn talks about the ghost of the child he was before the abuse began. I recognise this concept in myself. Effectively I stopped growing my persona at the age I started being abused. Someone else came along to fill what should have been her shoes. The low self-confidence and bitterly low self-esteem I experience when I enter what I term 'a downslide' belong to who she became, not who she was meant to become.

Person Centred Counselling (which I have accessed a number of times) attempts to help us be who we were meant to be, stripped of the rubbish other people (significant people like parents, teachers and abusers) have caused us to pick up since we were born - our 'authentic self'. I am reminded of a kids show I used to watch (Crackerjack) when I think of this...they had a game every show where the kids won a prize every time they got a question right and a cabbage every time they got one wrong. They got to keep answering questions for as long as they could hold the pile of prizes and cabbages. The art of being our 'authentic selves' is learning keep the prizes and lose the cabbages. PCC is an attempt at a 'reset'.


I'm not my authentic self, in PCC terms. I may never get to be that person. You see, you can discard the cabbages, but their smell hangs around.

So yes, I too am haunted by the child I was before the abuse. I catch tiny glimpses of her. Occasionally she comes along and stamps her feet and acts up, too. As a little girl it's all she knows how to do, or has the strength to do, when faced with injustice and cruelty and wrongness. She's dead but she doesn't know it, and she won't lie down like a good little corpse.


Haydn says:

I am sure abusers and those who have never been abused fail to realise that the abuse lives with the abused for the rest of their life.

For an abuser it is an act of pulling up his pants and leaving the room but for the abused it is a lot more than that. An abuser thinks with his very little head whereas the abused has to think with the head on his or her shoulders.

I disagree. I believe abusers know exactly how great an impact they are making. I believe that's a part of what gets them off. It is that which makes the act of abuse so unforgiveable as far as I am concerned.

It's interesting that my friend directed me to this particular part of Haydn's blog today, because there was an episode of 'Doctors' on this afternoon which posited that it was 'so sad' that a one-time abuser was rejected by his wife when the truth came out. The character committed assault on a girl of 12 when he was 20. His wife gets pregnant when he is 45 and he explains to her why her proposing to keep the baby is distressing him so much. When she turns away from him he commits suicide. Good riddance, imho. The writer clearly wanted us to empathise with the man, who had 'paid his dues' by going to prison for what he did. Only problem is, in the real world, his victim would never get to exhume her child-self from the grave his act of perversion put her into. So if your bleeding heart feels abuse and assault is can be absolved by a period of jail time and /or chemical castration, shove it up your a*s!
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Dysthymia?

I've never heard of Dysthymia before, but it sounds awfully familiar to me now that I have. That I am also being prescribed with the drugs mentioned in the article, and am also about to be prescribed Pregabalin at the lower dosage suggested for Dysthymia, suggests this may be what ails me.

Recognising that Wikipaedia isn't the best of sources, I've also looked at these sites:

Pub Med Health

Dysthymia UK

Dysthymia UK: Treatments

If you have any experience of taking Pregabalin for depressive illness please let me know how you've found it? Thanks.