Edit: Sadly this event has been cancelled 😦

Come and join us for International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia (IDAHOT). SHineSA are hosting a ReFRESH forum in the afternoon of May 17th in Woodville. There will also be an interactive panel, resources, and most importantly of all, rainbow cake. (although I’m not baking this one) There is a cost and you do need to enrol. You can find all the details in a print ready pdf here and the enrolment online system, which is still open, is here.

“Sarah is an amazing individual who is part of the queer community, a consumer of mental health services, and also a worker in the sector. With an open and creative approach she will take a fresh look at self-care – we all hear about it as workers in regard to ourselves and our clients, but how useful is the way we frame it? When self-care becomes more work which is measured in terms of success or failure, and carries with it notions of obligation and shame, can we take stock and look at it in a different way?

The forum on 17 May at Woodville will explore mental health and LGBTI people, with particular reference to some of the people who exist at the intersections in the community: nonbinary/genderqueer people and bisexual/pansexual people.”

I’m very pleased to be speaking at this event, self care is an important topic and one that is often not well handled. I’m also proud to be a visible part of the queer community, speaking to inclusion and diversity in that space.

My Rainbow Cake for Rose’s birthday a few years ago 🙂

This is my celebratory lunch, watermelon & cherries. I am having a wonderful day, singing around the house doing housework and feeling fantastic. I’m finally starting to get some hours or days where I’m not completely demolished by exhaustion and nausea! It’s been going on long enough that I find I have to keep reminding myself that I haven’t had a major health relapse, I’m just pregnant and that’s a good thing and I’ll feel better soon. The most wonderful thing about feeling better is enjoying life, even the drudgery, and suddenly recalling forcefully that other people haven’t been far more productive than me because they have greater willpower, but because they don’t feel so horrible!  I find that depressingly easy to forget after a few weeks home sick. I am so ready for the second trimester and hopefully a lot more days like this.

Last night I had a meltdown about my work/career/money plans again, which is currently my blackest pit of misery and not hard to tip me into. People were kind and although no one had any easy answers for me I was reminded that I have not failed at everything I’ve set out to do. I’ve taken many risks and worked hard to rebuild my life over the past 5 years and a lot has worked out brilliantly for me – I have an amazing life partner I adore, a lovely home, animals and a garden, a whole tribe of friends and family whom I love and who love me. I’ve helped people and made art and learned things and now I’m pregnant with a healthy little 9 week old froggie. My world is full of valuable but unpaid opportunities and people doing good work in fields I’m passionate about. I’ve found my passions and developed many skills and helped many people. Paid work has just proved a much tougher nut for me to crack, and that’s not for foolish decisions or lack of effort.

So, I’m drawing a line in the sand. Last year was a roller coaster with some very, very dark times for me that I’m not entirely through. I’m still nursing my very wounded soul. I want to find new stories about my work situation to counter my brutal sense of failure, exploitation, gullibility, and uselessness. I want to coax my sense of humour back to being a regular part of my life. I want to spoil my lover and enjoy my tribe.

For now, I’m going to rearrange my house, go camping with my love, and wring the most I can out of every moment I feel good. Happy new year!

It’s okay to be struggling, even when things are going well. It’s okay that the bad days cast a shadow over the good ones, that the dark memories are hard to forget, that pain has a kind of hangover that takes the sweetness from the new dawn.

It’s okay to be hurting even when others feel you should be grateful, to notice the bitterness of loss, the empty spaces, the shadows at the edges.

It’s okay to be scared. To have trouble believing that momentary joy will stay. To doubt. To feel doomed and unworthy. To be numb. It’s okay to cry, to wrestle, to want to feel differently, to try and fake it and feel exhausted and alone.

It’s okay to crawl away broken somewhere in the night and confess the things that have become secret, shameful, impossible to share. To feel the shattered pieces of your heart pass into your throat and spill out of your mouth like shards of thick, smoked glass. To let go of the bright, unsullied image of who you might have been if you had not been hurt. To stop trying to become them. To be wounded. To grieve.

It’s okay to find peace there, to find hope there, to feel more than one thing. To find the candles that burn down in the deep darkness are beautiful, that life is complicated and bitter sweet, that we are all wounded and all hiding our own pain from the unbearable light. It’s okay to laugh again, to love again, to be hurt again. To face the world with a battered heart. To show up, even if you can’t feel anything. To be brave with broken dreams. To live, even if your story is not a triumph, not a happy ending, not a guide for others. To live anyway.

For all those who are hurting xxx

It’s my first game of baseball tonight. I’m really looking forward to it, although not understanding the rules means it’s going to be especially interesting. I’m on the green team with Rose. 🙂 In fact, it all made the local news – I’m in the photo on the far right at the back!

I struggled through training on Wednesday and pulled a muscle which I’ve been nursing since – Tiger balm is really good stuff for this! Cold baths (I would pull a muscle in my bum, of course) also effective although I did scream a bit more. The bruises are faded out to yellow and today I can walk without limping. Pain from playing isn’t really bothering me, I find it much more manageable than fibro pain, and much easier to ignore. Plus I feel really proud of myself.

I cried my heart out at my doctors yesterday, and she was really kind. She was also excited I’d taken up a sport. I’m thinking of picking up some gym work too to help boost my fitness and mood. Rose has been working hard at the gym and she’s going brilliantly. It’s very inspiring. 🙂 My GP echoed the same situation re my own health – take it easy and be patient. So I’m concentrating on housework and supporting Rose at her work. She wouldn’t sign off on me working or volunteering at the moment. I’m chasing some extra support around fertility and grief and so far I’ve spoken to a couple of people and found that really helpful.

I’m kind of living for the game at the moment. I look forward to it all through bad days. The teams feel really good – there’s a good vibe and lots of camaraderie which is pretty important when you’re as new and bewildered as I am. Even in the short time I’ve been practising I’ve made a big improvement which says a lot for the coaches. Go Green team. 🙂

Happy Halloween oddballs, misfits, and freaks. I’m out again tonight, at a goth club this time. You knew what? It didn’t go away with the morning. I slept until midday and woke feeling fantastic, and hungry. Can’t remember the last time I’ve had an appetite. I’ve had a great day, and now I’m hanging out in a black vinyl armchair listening to dark music and watching freaks dance. Perfect.

You know once of the things I really love about goths? Their sense of humour. It’s wild. The guys who run this scene have done the dance from Pulp Fiction for us. There’s plenty of vampires and skeletons here, but there’s also a cute bumble bee and a dude dressed as a tube of toothpaste. Wtf? Goths are natural absurdists. I’ll drink to that.

Yesterday, our first red poppy bloomed. There was a black summer storm and it was crushed and bowed by the weight of the rain. It hurt my heart to see it. Everything hurts my heart at the moment, I look at the world through the eyes of a mother who’s child has died and nothing I do changes that grief or reconciles me to it. I wake trembling with guilt and sorrow throughout the night, find myself grieving for people I have known, people I still know, even for dead characters I have loved in books. There’s no sense to it and I cannot stop it. Cannot catch my breath, except in small windows. I feel Leanne close most days and I know she is only a memory because we understand each other perfectly and never argue. I find I am briefly comforted by the thought that if there is some kind of peaceful afterlife, Leanne, and my Grandmother, and Amanda will take excellent care of our dead babies.

Each day I dress and eat and sit in the sun and go for walks and take myself to places where people are kind to me. I tremble in hugs and hold hands with people who try to help me feel loved and safe. I can’t, and they forgive me for it. I wash dishes each night and feel a small sense of pride, I am useful in some way, contributing in some way to my world. I can eat and I’m not caught in obsessions or strange cravings, I eat simple meals of fruit and bread and porridge and pasta and don’t wish for the comfort of indulgence. I’m near neither self harm nor suicide. I feel closer to the animals, oddly, a little more able to let them in and let myself feel something for them. Sometimes, patting a cat while weeping, or holding my dog with my face masked in tears I think to myself how little they are in the world and yet how much they mean to me, and I hold myself to that scale – so small in the world and yet without meaning to do or be anything at all – so important to those near me. Just by existing. It’s a small comfort.

Today the sun was golden and I wept on and off most of the day, feeling like I was locked out, just out of reach of a feast I could smell and see but not touch or taste. I wept because my life is so utterly beautiful, my beloved who reaches out to comfort me in her sleep, my beautiful home and lovely animals, my dear friends and loving tribe. I wept because I want it to be enough and I want to be at peace. I wept because the pregnancy tests were negative today and in a way I was almost relieved because I can’t believe the next baby will survive either. Today was full of weeping, and it doesn’t make me feel better or worse. I can’t find a bottom to the rabbit hole I’m in.

By evening, most days, I’ve found some calm. I can breathe. The catch in my throat has eased. The hole in my chest is not so intense. Sometime in the night, it all resets. It’s like living in groundhog day. It makes it hard to go to sleep, a little.

Today the sun was golden and I was surprised to walk past the poppies and find the one crushed yesterday and drowned on the pavement had dried out and lifted its head and was glowing with golden pollen. Not such a brief life after all. It was beautiful. One day soon, please let that be me.

Rose and myself have been trying to gently turn things around on our little street. There’s such embedded hostility here, fights and stupid feuds and all kinds of heartache. One of our neighbours who’s been hard to live with in the past suffered a terrible loss a couple of months ago, when a guest of a neighbour ran over her cat. At the time I offered Sarsaparilla to her as he’d taken a shine to her. The relationship took and they’ve become close friends. He sleeps on her bed most nights, and she dotes on him. He’s sleek and happy. She’s arranged pet insurance for him and he never comes into our house any more. Sometimes when I’m in the front garden he comes over for a scratch under the chin. I miss him a little, but he’s happy, and she loves him.

The neighbour who stabbed another neighbour has not faced jail time. The victim of the crime is being blamed for being hard to live with and causing trouble. Her garden was kicked over and un-potted the other day. I waited to see her for a week and when she didn’t appear, went round there and straightened it up as best I could.

Another neighbour is struggling with arthritis in her hands so Rose and I have cleared some weeds for her and planted out some lilies and geraniums as low maintenance colour. Half the time we spent with any neighbour we are trying to gently discourage them from tearing each other down.

I’m glad my little black jellybean is going well. Today I managed to settle enough of my stress to write some thankyou cards I’ve been wanting to put together for a couple of months. I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of community that we give and receive with grace and gratitude. That it’s all part of a circle. I feel anxious and undeserving and confused.

People have been kind, which is exactly what I need right now. I’m not suicidal or feeling like self harming, I’m just in overwhelming stress. I’m struggling to think straight, follow writing like books or emails, remember what I was trying to do. I’m noticing my own trauma responses – I’m hypersensitive, startle easily, and feel anxious and insecure much of the time. A kind of cringe, a catch in my throat, total inability to look at my ‘to do’ list. The early morning waking is breaking my sleep – I woke Rose by crying out her name this morning when I startled from a dream in which she’d died. Poor love. All morning, everyone kept dying in my dreams and I’d wake in dread. At least I’ve stopped feeling like I am dying, that was especially hard.

A friend called today and told me my job tomorrow was to be daft and make 47 mistakes. I can do that! I said. Being patient with my incapacity. Remembering it will pass. My lovely sister trying to help me feel some sense of being an okay person, how I’ve helped her and that I haven’t wasted my life or failed or been useless, that accepting help from others is not manipulative or greedy or asking too much. I can remember feeling it, remember that glow of inner contentment.

I miss working for money and having a sense of dignity in my role and feeling that I was providing for my family, and the tangibility of all that compared to sitting up late with Rose through a flashback or waking her up early with my own dread and anxiety. I miss more than anything just feeling okay with myself instead of afraid all the time.

I’ve lost my bearings and I remember how much more fun life is with them! I can’t wait to get them back. There’s so many wonderful things waiting for me. So many wonderful people I can’t wait to see clearly again, to have them morph back from the scary, intimidating overlords who are disappointed in me, and back into my own daft, lovely, imperfect friends and colleagues. I can’t wait to feel like I can breathe again and that there isn’t a hole punched in my gut or a hand around my throat or a forest of dark violent trees with razor sharp limbs in my chest. I can smell it, almost. A place where my body rests when I lie down instead of lying rigid on the mattress, where sleep restores me instead of opening all the cages of my terrors and letting them out to destroy my inner world.

Poor lovely Rose and I, all jangled and afraid. I can see how we’ve needed others to soothe us. I felt so inadequate that I couldn’t stop her flashbacks or even make them bearable. I felt like a failure, like my work in trauma had been proved false and useless, that I was making claims about my ability and ideas that turned out to be hollow. Everything I thought I knew and every skill I thought I had being turned on its head. I have an image of a bird being startled from the cage of my chest and flying in panic about the ceiling. It’s not come home yet but I can feel it closer. What other people are doing to help isn’t something special I hadn’t thought of, it’s just that holding on, telling us things will be okay, that we’re okay, that we’ll make it, that we’re loved. I think maybe we both got a very big scare and it was just too much to make it through alone or even together – we’ve needed friends and therapists and books and mentors and our tribe. We’re not above it, not special, not better, not ‘recovered’ in all the wrong senses of that word. We’re human and vulnerable too, and thankfully not alone. We’re not independent of our tribe, not ministering to them from some lofty position of comfort and security, but living in the real world of light and shadow too, where the dark days are sometimes very dark, where sometimes you have to stop everything and just breathe again.

We’re still having windows of better times, sometimes even whole hours or longer. We’re both looking for those moments where all the impossible things feel a little more possible and doing them then – showering, eating, sleeping, sex, alone time, time with others, housework, admin. Just keeping things ticking along as best we can and staying as connected with others as we can, and enjoying the good moments and weathering the bad. I guess, like shock, if we can cushion it enough it will wear off. I’m stuck by how traumatising trauma reactions are, often far more so than the trauma itself. It will get better again, I will feel competent and like I have skin and a brain instead of raw flesh and a swamp that’s on fire. There will be time to write all the draft posts I have about topics that are more than updates, and my projects will call my name and sing to me and make my heart thrill again. I can’t wait.