Gifts

Dec 14, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

People are sending me money through the donate button on this blog, and it’s blowing me away! People I’ve never met, people who have found this a useful resource, who know how many unpaid hours I work and want to say thanks. One came in last night while I was hanging out with friends and I cried. Several times. It’s just incredible to me that people would offer to pay me for something I’m already giving for free. There’s a lot of love out there! This was the message that came with one:

Cheers to hope and the spirit of multiplicity

Hells yes. I’ll drink to that! And write to that! It’s deeply inspiring and a lot of work is happening to figure out my approach to hope and multiplicity and weave it together to form the book I’m working on.

So, I’m rewriting parts of my business. I’ve been trying to turn myself into someone who is comfortable with money and goes and writes grant applications and asks for good money for some resources so I can fund others to be free… but wow it’s so not me, or at least, not yet. I’ve learned to stand my ground and ask for pay in face painting otherwise all my weekends would be free charity work, but in mental health it just feels different. I’ve always wanted to be paid a salary so I can offer resources for free… This model of inviting those who can to pay and support free work for those who can’t seems to be working… and right now I can cope with it. So I’ve started to trial it in other areas.

I’m now offering henna or skin inks for people who are grieving with a ‘pay what you can’ approach. I’m also opening the door to more direct contact. I’ve always been happy for people to email me looking for help (sarah @ di.org.au) and I get back to them as soon as possible. Now I’m arranging phone calls with people who want to talk to someone – not a therapist, counsellor or doctor, just a peer. I’m also arranging catch ups with people looking for contact, for private art tutoring, whatever skills I can share. I’ve been carefully opening these doors these past few weeks, inviting people to pay what they can, if they can, and only if they find it helpful.

I’m anxious about being overwhelmed by how many people are looking for support, or finding myself offering so many free services I don’t have time for paid work, which I just can’t afford to do with a family to think of, but so far… well so far it’s good. And I’m getting to do what I love doing – build my networks, reach out, connect, offer hope.

I shouldn’t be surprised that people can be so generous. I’ve devoted a lot of time to writing and running groups and so on, why would I think other people don’t reach out to support things they believe in? I think my time working in mental health has closed my eyes to the real kindness that can exist between people. I’m glad to have them opened again. You guys are amazing. You are changing my world.

Oil Painting – Undivided Heart

Dec 1, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

I painted this the other day… love the vibrancy of oil colours. Trying to decide whether to use a different medium for the image for each of my websites (business, the DI, the HVNSA) to give them a different flavour.

I still really love this image as a metaphor for both multiplicity and community – diversity, coming together with one heart. I’d like to get it as a tattoo one day.

The long wait

Nov 27, 2014Nov 27, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I’m off all the hormones now, counting days and figuring out how to track ovulation. It does seem to involve a fair variety of things to lick, pee on, and other odd behaviour. Yesterday we picked up an ovulation tracking kit. We sat in the van outside the chemist reading all the instructions together and Rose asks me ‘so what method do you think you’ll use, peeing on the stick, or peeing into a cup and putting the stick in it?’ I attempt to explain with dignity that I have limited experience in peeing onto or into anything but shall practice.

Rose and I are desperately excited and also daunted about how challenging this could be and how long it could take. It’s kind of hard to be rational, I feel like I’m either going to pregnant the first month, or not for a year. I can’t make myself believe it might be, say, month 4. We’re preparing for a trial run of inseminating with our awesome donor in early December. We’re also going to get a blood test on day 21 of my cycle to double check I am ovulating.

Rose is sick again, her psoriasis makes her terribly vulnerable to these awful ear infections. Each time she uses antibiotics she’s at more risk of developing an antibiotic resistant strain of the bacteria. Apparently she’s also increasing her risk of knocking her skin bug balance out badly enough to wind up with a fungal infection in there too, which is what the doc reckons has happened this time. She started getting better after going onto the antibiotics then a day later went downhill badly. So her face and neck hurt like hell, her jaw is stiff, she’s weak and sleeps all the time. It’s kinda scary to be honest! I miss her when she’s like this. She slept over last night when the locum didn’t get to us until almost 1am, and I loved the way she reached out in her sleep or held my hand whenever I rolled over.

Everything’s become infused with this last glow… We talk about Christmas thinking it might be our last without kids, we have a lie in on Sunday mornings and tell each other we should soak this up while we can. And the possibility of months or years trying is something we try to adapt to, but every time I say it to myself, something small inside me squeaks like a squirrel that’s been kicked and curls up into an unhappy ball. We had a chance to visit a birthing suite at our local hospital and it was pretty cool, very different to a delivery suite, large and comfortable with a big bed and a spa for soaking in. It was really exiting and a bit frightening. I felt a long way away from my own territory. I’m doing my best to give myself lots of space to process things before they happen. I’m hoping that book writing will give me a project to focus on while we try.

I’m not quite back in the zone I had going for work before the surgery yet, still struggling to walk far or eat regular meals, and work is erratic because college stuff is due next week and Rose is ill, not to mention I’m behind on housework. Between the surgery and choosing to link my mental health work to my face painting, I’ve scared off about $2,000 worth of work in the past few months, compared to this time last year. I’m expecting that loss to double by the end of this year. That’s sad and hard, but hopefully as I pick up more mental health work it will be worth it. It has been really nice to be in less physical pain from all the painting than I was at this time last year.

Life goes on hey.

My new brochure!

Oct 28, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

First print run of my brochures advertising a talk I give! You can read it in full on my business website sarahkreece.com.au. Very excited. I was sick all night and spent the morning in bed, but wound up having a really nice day. Lunch with a friend, tremendously excited about my brochure, and returned all my overdue library books. 🙂 Very successful day. 🙂

Fear, grief, & chronic illness

Oct 6, 2014Oct 6, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

I’m scared. I’m really sick, again, or still, depending on where we draw the increasingly fuzzy lines between one sinus infection and the next. The doctor I saw today confirmed I have laryngitis as well, and was worried I will not be well enough for my scheduled surgery this Wednesday. We’ve added steroids to the antibiotics and prescription for rest and fluids. With a present infection I’m also running a much greater chance of post op infection. I’ve experienced that before, severe secondary infection after having my tonsils removed at 10. I’d prefer not to do a repeat!

It’s hard to keep my spirits up. This week was set aside to get everything ready for my recovery period post surgery. I wanted to mop and clean and make sure there was blended food in the fridge and take as much of the load off Rose as I could. I also wanted to get my library books back, and finalise the essay and tutorial due next term in case recovery knocks me off my feet for longer than expected… So much for those plans.

I’m in a vulnerable place with my business. I’ve just emptied out the beautiful studio we had to close. I let a good friend down. I never even put a launch together for it. Everyone was really enthusiastic about it, but not enough to visit. I was sick and busy. Another learning curve, another failure. Something else to keep me up at nights. I’m so sick all the time. How am I ever going to make any business work? I keep trying. I’m working so hard and it’s just not enough. ‘I hate myself’ is a constant quiet drone in my head. There’s always so much fodder for it. There’s too much against me.

I’ve added mental health to all my promotional material but not had a chance to launch that side of the business yet to generate some work. In the meantime, my face painting business which was getting really busy has gone frighteningly quiet. The booked and cancelled surgeries are costing me work with long term clients, my bread and butter relationships. And maybe I’ve made a terrible mistake and people are too frightened by the new marketing to hire me. It’s too early to tell what’s costing me the most, I have to wait for surgery to be done then reassess, because the illness and hospital will keep destroying anything I set up in the meantime. A small business like mine is so vulnerable to any perception of unreliability. I’m so replaceable. My sickness is tearing apart everything I build.

So, hopefully, after I recover, I’ll find that place of hope again and keep building, and something worthwhile will come from all this hard work and heartache. And if I keep being sick, I’ll have to change it all again. Move to product creation instead of service delivery, something I can do even if my health keeps crashing. I’m so tired and so discouraged. 😦 I’m doing everything right and it’s not enough. If I could just disentangle the grief and self hate and overwhelming sense of failure and the gap maybe then I could breathe.

This really hurts. It’s like being down the bottom of a deep pit. It’s so painfully lonely. I know other people handle their pits with positivity, or that other people have deeper pits, but somewhere in claiming the right to my own pain and fear, to name it and call it what it is, to express some of the bitter disappointment at how things work out, I find strength. It’s my story. I don’t need to compare it to anyone else’s, I don’t need to win some ‘tragedy of the year’ competition to feel hurt, I don’t need to handle it in some publicly approved way to have the right to be hurting in public or to reach out.

The funny is, when I let myself own my pain, the loneliness eases a little. The gap becomes a thing I can navigate again. I can find humour, wear the loss a little more lightly, present the face of disability the world tolerates better – articulate, insightful, optimistic, discrete. Carve myself some space to grieve. There’s so much grieving in sickness.

Wrangling eating disorders

Sep 12, 2014Sep 12, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Wednesday
I’m sick, not, hopefully, with gastro like Rose, but with the pain and misery of too much work on not enough sleep. I hate Wednesdays and I’m under pressure to stay in the morning classes that are so distressing and exhausting me.

Thursday
Today I wrote and worked more on my business site, attended a morning and night class and an apt with my disability employment provider. I’m shattered. I’m in so much pain I’ve been doing that awful gasping breathing for hours. I updated the About Sarah K Reece page on this blog, and suddenly felt over exposed. The thought of business clients coming here is powerfully silencing. Something in me growls and I found myself writing as very dark bio indeed, like marking my territory… All that out there might be brought and cheerful and child friendly but here things are said as they are… Four more edits later and it’s still dark but doesn’t actually bite anyone on the throat.

What the hell am I doing?

And then my business cards turn up in the post, and they’re so beautiful I can’t stop looking at them. To see my own artwork on them, my design that means so much to me, all my skills listed together and unified… This new business model I’ve worked so hard on and that feels like such as risk… It’s so powerful and moving. I get excited on Facebook and people kindly write to me inviting me to send them some. I have no idea what I’m doing but I seem to be muddling through.

Friday
My exercise program is working. My capacity is far improved, I’m building muscle tone and losing weight. Irritatingly I can’t track the latter well as none of the scales at my doctors office work or agree with each other. I’ve been tempted to buy a set for myself, the first I’ll have owned since I really struggled with disordered eating. I’m telling myself I can manage, that I’ll hide them and only check once a month, but the massive emotional high of stepping on them and finding a lower weight is telling me otherwise. The huge low if the number is the same, or higher, is telling me I’m not as far away from trouble as I think.

It takes huge effort to confess this to Rose, to talk honestly about the battle in my mind, how there’s such a desire to restrict food a and how difficult it is at times because it’s so tempting to let that disordered eating self (ED) take over the weight loss and then try to stop it later on… But when I ask myself questions like; how much food should I eat today, ideally, and find the answer is ‘none’; or what my ideal weight should be, and find the answer is ‘less than the last time I weighed myself’, I know there’s nothing more dangerous than letting those ideas take hold. I could look like I’m doing everything right, get all the kudos and compliments, but actually be moving into seriously unhealthy and dangerous territory.

So, I won’t buy the scales. That’s so hard, and the fact that it’s this damn hard tells me it’s the right call. I’ll keep walking and exercising. I’ll keep trying to listen inside and identify the different voices – when it’s my healthy self saying I don’t really want that treat, and when it’s my ED self saying I don’t want to eat at all. Talking with Rose the other night, for the first time it occurred to me that I might have some very healthy impulses wired into my ED self. I want to defy my father, who spent my teenage years telling me I’d get fat as I got older. I want the limberness of a thinner body, able to sit on the floor with little kids more easily. I want to be able to buy nice clothes without having to pay three times the price at specialty stores. Some of these desires have been cross wired into my ED self. For the first time it’s occurred to me that I can work on reclaiming them, that I can undo some of the things that give my ED self such power. Issues like self hate I’m still working on and obviously that plays a role, alongside anxiety and dissociation and shame and having been badly bullied… But where those are vulnerabilities I’m trying to strengthen, these other drives are strengths I want to reclaim, want to guide back into becoming strong, useful, motivating forces for health in my life. That’s a very different perspective for me, and a much more hopeful one.

Gently does it, gently does it.

What Do I Do? Booklet

Sep 10, 2014Sep 10, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

Still working hard on business and marketing… this is the latest project, a laminated flip book of my services. There’s still a few pages to be added, and I’m still tinkering with my website so that everything matches up, but I’m super excited and think it’s looking a lot better than my previous design… this is about the only way I’m actually able to get anything done – not trying to make it perfect, just better than what I was using before. I guess in a small, diverse business like mine, tinkering while I get feedback and a response (if any) from the market is going to be the norm, it’s probably for the best if I’m not massively invested in the idea that my current approach is perfect! 🙂

I really like this. It’s easy to swap out/update a page if I want to, it’s mainly pictures which is always more interesting, and it’s pretty clear. I’ve used a much less professional looking mini photo album without any of the mental health stuff in it for this job before, and people do always pick it up and look at it.

I think it’s also child friendly and shouldn’t freak out any but the most conservative of people, who are not really my client base anyway. Goddamn I hope so!