WELLBEING AND ME – A FUTURE WE MIGHT DREAM OF OCCASIONALLY.
GRAHAM MORGAN
For me good mental health is about connection and belonging which is much easier said than done. I don’t fit in easily or at least don’t feel I do. Some people with similar experiences and values to me can help me to relax enough to be able to find some sort of ease in myself just because I know they ‘get me’; that is where belonging starts with me.
When I am so sure that I belong, even if it is in a tiny community, that is where I learn the courage to be silly, maybe not to make jokes but to be light in my thoughts and feel the safety that comes with connection, with belonging.
For me it is other people with mental health problems who usually provide this sense of safety but it can be others, those who like writing, or friends of friends, people who like to sit by a loch and gaze into nowhere. People who would walk the dog with me and enjoy the wind on their faces.
But principally it is family where I really feel safe, where the children can tease me unmercifully for my eccentricity and Wendy make me giggle at my more bizarre beliefs. Maybe even more it is knowing that Wendy knows those times when I lose my words and knows that means that something is troubling me which I am still not aware of. She will adjust and wait until, with a flash of insight, I realise I am sad or tired or paranoid or something and maybe by and by I will find out the reason and by and by regain my connection to the world or the family.
I know too many people who do not have connection and belonging and who do not feel safe in their own company. At the start of covid we showed we could find that sense of community. We realised we needed to look out for each other and that those who would not reach out and might fall silent and lost; sometimes needed the gesture that meant that they knew their neighbours cared for them, would get in milk or bread, talk from the road to them.
I would like that again. I would like to be brave and confident enough to offer that to others too. I wish that camaraderie had not disappeared to be whipped into suspicion and anger by the media and the people who like to have scapegoats and people to blame.
Some of us struggle, even though I have a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia I have nearly always worked but some of us do not work and cannot work. There can be a multitude of reasons for this, whether that be disability, illness, where we live, our family situation, our upbringing. I would love it if we saw the world freshly and realised that paid work was not the only form of contribution and that success did not come with the work we did or the wage we earned or the people we boss.
We do not have to be called failures or scroungers if we have lost the will to do things. Instead we could look at the person who shares a cup of tea and calms down someone filled with rage at the beginning of the week. Or the person who talks to the person everyone else avoids or even the person who has not got out the house for days and days and manages to get to the shops for the first time that week. We could see that as a contribution and being a part of society, in just as valid a fashion as someone who has everything at their fingertips.
The people who have had a good education, are confident in their bodies and their minds and their skills and act accordingly and unfortunately sometimes think this makes them superior to those people who do not conform to what is seen as desirable and who may look down upon them for this reason. We could help the people who have succeeded in this way, to recognise their good fortune and help them to realise this is a privilege with obligations to the community that has helped make this possible for them.
There are so many of us who experience the world differently; those who are older and who don’t have much money, whose friends are busy dying, whose own health is suspect and who struggle to pay for their groceries in the shop, who are so often seen as a burden and an irritation. To still have a semblance of humour when you have little prospect of life improving at all is something to celebrate and respect.
To still believe in love when the bitter legacy of the past means that you cannot help but fall again and again out of the trust and security of love because that represents the betrayal of all you never had as a child is also something to be celebrated and respected.
I have my community psychiatric nurse and my mental health nurse and I have my psychiatrist and soon will also have my psychologist but although they help me function and some people would say keep me alive, despite my best efforts. I also have Jeans Bothy which is not about the ways I don’t manage and is instead about the smile I get as I walk into the building or the encouragement I get to take away food to stop it going into landfill or those wonderful opportunities for self-expression through photography, the newsletter and the writing group. It is my haven to be me in.
We all need our havens and may all have different versions of what those are. We all need things to do, people to speak to, hugs to have, friends to confide in, get cross with and be forgiven by. We need to feel value and to be given the space and time to learn the skills to do whatever might bring ourselves and others benefit and laughter.
We need hope and we need refuge when we have lost hope. We need someone to hold us safely when every mooring by which we live our life has been swept away. We need the chance to get it wrong again and again and still be supported. We need to be able to say the wrong thing, to meet people whose lives we do not understand and learn from them. We need to still be loved when we do not get better.
We need the things we are good at and interested in to be things we can learn to do rather than having to concentrate on all the things we cannot do. We need to be able to say ‘I cannot manage anymore’ and know someone will help us and we need to know that sometimes we do not know that we cannot manage and that still we will be looked after.
We need not to be the perfect worker, or parent or friend or lover but instead have the space to have someone look after us when we cannot deal with a crying baby for one more second, or someone to reassure us when our targets at work seem impossible, or someone to comfort us when we do not understand why we have just had the row we have had.
I could write for pages and pages and pages….
For me – Wendy giving me a kiss in the morning when I have made her, her coffee. Charlotte telling me what she would like for breakfast even though she is still half asleep. James saying ‘woof woof’ when I bring him his marmite on toast because he still thinks he is part dog and that is a good way of speaking to me. Dash the dog sniffing everywhere as we walk round Ardmore. My editor encouraging me in my manuscript. A patient thinking it is worth talking to me when I visit a hospital ward to find out how they are finding it and I tell them I too know what it is like to be bored on a ward or humiliated by the constant observations designed to keep me safe despite myself.
I would like to know I will have a house I know I can stay in as long as I like. I want to sit in the green hued leaf smelling woods and have Wendy lean against me. I would like to have a cosy bed with fresh clean sheets and the knowledge that I will sleep through the night without having to have the radio on to drown out my thoughts. I would like to wake in the morning and know there are people around me who are delighted that I have woken that morning and who look forward to seeing me at some point in the next wee while.
I would like to have the space to be silent and slow and private where I can mourn things I cannot put my finger on and know that that is allowed too.
(Photo Sunrise Ardrishaig - Dec 2021)
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