Mental Health

A Better Morning

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I woke yesterday from strange dreams where I was homeless again, running from people who wanted to hurt me. I was living in the streets in a dark, crowded world, trying to stay hidden and find somewhere safe. When I woke I found the fibro pain was present but the sinus pain easing, and a melancholy message from Rose on my phone. I sent her poems about sadness and hope. Then I got up, made a cup of green and cranberry tea, turned my armchair to face my garden through the window, and got out my pen to write. For this, I had more company than perhaps I would have wished. It had been wet the night before so the garden was pearled and fragrant. Poems and ink flowed. I’ve had some very interesting conversations lately and things are starting to gel in my mind about why this depression has come. It’s calming my heart, helping me find ways through. Sometimes it helps more to talk with old friends who know me well than the shrinks who do not. Things are moving inside, my system is shifting and responding. I’m starting to see a path. I’m writing again.

It’s not over. There’s still anguish inside. I’m still moving slowly, underwater, fragile and lost. I don’t recognise friends, I’m disconnected from my life, choices, goals, dreams. But I perceive a relationship between hope and hopelessness. With the dreams of a bright future now comes also the dread certainty of loss. Listening to both those voices, both songs, the dark and bright, the singing and the screaming in my heart.

Yesterday I sat by my window and remembered what it was like to live in a caravan. Permeable to sound, cold, heat , mosquitoes. Cramped, delightful, stressful with noise in the early morning, people walking past my windows, garden dying in the heat. But I loved it, the river nearby, the solitude, the bath a short walk away, pots of basil and of jonquils. I can find that again, that joy in an imperfect and temporary home. It’s not what I’ve been dreaming of for this house, not my safe forever home, but I can find that acceptance again. I can let my dreamers enjoy the space, the studio, the garden. It’s not so rotten and tainted that there’s no stars at all here. I can live more lightly in the space, less fear, I’m a temporary warden only. Garden for those who will come after me. Climb trees, go camping, sleep under stars when I need to. It need not be a cage or trap. I can let the old dream go, the hope for years of security go. It can be imperfect and beautiful.

Pets And Stress

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
Sarsaparilla has stuck close to me for days. He follows me from bed to couch and back again, snuggled up really close. It’s lovely. Zoe however is anxious, and is obsessively licking and chewing her feet, resulting in several sores. It’s very distressing. I have a cream from the vet that numbs and prevents swelling and infection, apart from that I’m bathing them in salt water twice a day. I hope she stops soon 😦

I’ve been in bed all day, I still have a sinus infection and I’m sore and a bit miserable. I had an appointment with my psychiatrist this morning. We talked about trying to get me into an intermediate care center if I am really struggling at home this week. The thought fills me with relief and fear in equal measure. I’m going to continue to try and create safety at home for the moment. I’ve cancelled everything this week and touched base with some friends and booked in some social time which I’m really looking forward to. Rose came over on the weekend and kept me company. We had a really wonderful time, visited some friends, spent all Sunday in our pj’s watching movies. I felt much better, had some giggles, enjoyed the trans show and the Dr who finale. Even so I spent at least three hours crying on her shoulder, and that was one of my good days this week. So, taking it slowly. Lots of my friends are sick, injured, or struggling with bad news at the moment which is really sad. As soon as the fibro and sinuses let up I’m hoping to do some gardening, and buy a new fountain pen as my lovely Parker had been missing for the months now and I badly need another for ink paintings and wrist poems.

It could be worse. I’m safe, I’m loved.

Staying safe in a crisis

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I’m still in crisis mode here, working on staying safe until I’m in a better head space. I haven’t worked out what’s triggered this mess – that can happen and it can take some time to put things together. The task at the moment is staying safe. I have at least one severely depressed part, which is new territory for us. Anxiety is also sky high, I’m struggling to eat (or keep food down), fighting off a cold and sinus infection, and feeling very unsafe about self harm.

If the mental health system was less toxic, I’d be in care. But because it’s such a mix of good care and abuse, it’s high risk. For someone like me with my diagnoses, it’s likely that I’ll struggle to get any care at all, and that’s not a struggle I have energy for. On one occasion previously when homeless, on the run from domestic violence, exhausted at caring for another mentally ill family member, and seriously suicidal I turned up to ACIS and asked for help… I was told that I had a better chance of surviving alone than I did with their assistance because they do not treat people with DID well.

So that leaves me with trying to manage using my own resources and networks, to create something as safe as I can in my own life. I shut down to the bath if the self harm impulse is overwhelming. I’ve borrowed two bags of books from the library. This gives me something else to focus on. Sometimes they’re a useful escape. Sometimes I read things that help me in some way. There needs to be something to ease that dangerous, frantic despair, the kind that has you running into the night looking for anything that might make you feel differently. I also have movies to watch, preferably long involved ones I already know. The flavour of the week is Harry Potter movies.

Sleep and food are critical. If they are both interrupted I will degenerate into severe dissociation and borderline psychosis. I’m fortunate at the moment in that I’m sleeping. Keeping food happening is more challenging currently. When you’re very anxious your digestion shuts down, the thought, smell, and taste of food becomes unappealing. If I force myself to eat I will vomit. So I have to find small, filling meals of things that tempt me, where the smell or texture don’t turn my stomach. Sometimes this means I eat the same thing every meal – like a bowl of cereal. Sometimes this means I need a different flavour and texture for every meal for a while. This gets very difficult if you’re not well enough to drive and stock the fridge. I need to drink enough fluid that I’m not dehydrating.

I need to keep enough admin going that my life doesn’t crash. This one is hard. I’ve cancelled almost every appointment this week. I’m getting by at the moment. Yesterday I was up to cleaning all the rotten food out of the fridge. I’m keeping up with feeding the pets and sorting out the cat litter tray. I’ve paid my bills. I’ve actually contacted people to cancel appointments instead of just not turning up. I’ve taken the dog to the vet when she was ill. I’ve removed all the clothes and linen the cat has peed on to a big pile in the laundry. I try not to think about all the big things worrying me about my life plans for the next few months or years, or I become hysterical. The goal is just one day at a time. Today I’m hoping to buy milk, cordial, and maybe hang out with some friends this evening if I feel safe enough to drive and have a chance of passing for normal.

I try and stay in touch a little with other people. Facebook can be good for this, if you’re comfortable with that and know how to use your privacy settings. It gets hard to communicate. I’m mixed up. I stood at my kitchen window yesterday and simultaneously felt rigid, bitter despair about my life, and simple childlike joy. That’s hard to explain to other people. In between jags of the kind of distressed crying that we never see on TV because it involves a truly horrifying amount of snot, I look fine. Maybe a bit tired and jumpy. I spent 5 hours yesterday morning trying to work out how to reply to a text from Rose asking me how I was, while she got increasingly concerned. Don’t do that. We’ve since decided that an empty text with an asterisk in it means ‘I’m not about to kill myself, but I’m not very good and I can’t think straight enough to write to you. But I am awake and alive.’ In between thinking about dying, I’m okay, just very flat and tired. There’s even been some confusing but welcome good hours where someone happy turns up. After the first few days I’ve stopped hoping that this means the whole mess is over and getting devastated when I go down again. I also have to be careful because when I don’t feel like a complete mess, it’s easy to over reach and take risks I actually can’t afford to manage at the moment.

I’m short fused and low on tolerance. It’s important to stay away from people and situations that stress me, whether that’s unwelcome advice, overbearing cheerfulness, people who don’t get that I’m touch sensitive when stressed, whatever. Kindness goes a hell of a long way, as does feeling like it’s okay that at the moment, you’re a useless friend and a mess.

I need to not listen to the internal chatter that says things like “You’re just lazy and weak and pathetic and useless and looking for attention and could snap out of it if you really tried”. It helps when I can share that with someone who doesn’t believe it. There’s a sting in being able to confess stuff like this with someone who can say ‘well so what if it is true? I still love you’ and bring you an icecream.

I need space to be honest. My journal, a shrink, friends, somewhere I can pour out all of how messed up I really am feeling, instead of sticking to how I am being told I *should* feel in the hope that will help. Even if that means pouring out pages of reasons I’m a failure or why I hate myself. I need to be damn careful not to drown any one person in this stuff, especially not anyone who’s already vulnerable themselves – or anyone’s who’s inclined to argue about it instead of just being kind, because I might throw things at them.

I need to make sure if I can that at least one other person knows what’s really going on so that if it turns out that my assessment of where I’m up to is really off, someone else will step in.

I need a backup plan and other options in case this doesn’t work. In my case at the moment if next week is still bad I’ll be talking to my shrink. I also run a scale of stress-reduction behaviour according to degree of harm. So for example at the moment I’m struggling with a strong drive to self harm. I’m managing this using distraction, writing, wrist poems, hanging with other people when I don’t feel safe to be alone, and long baths. If I become seriously suicidal and can’t get help, I’ll change focus and let myself self harm if that reduces enough stress and generates enough dissociation to reduce the risk of a suicide attempt. I keep shifting the goals as I need to. If I’m having a good day I try to connect to my networks, get urgent admin done, and go somewhere nice. If I’ve fallen apart I consider that if I’m still breathing at the end of the day that’s a success. In the middle there is an attempt to self care and reduce stress with as little damage to myself, my relationships, and my life as possible.

On that note I’m going to fill a water bottle and watch the Order of the Phoenix.

Sadness

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I’ve hit a rough patch the past few days, really distressed and overwhelmed. I’m not sure what’s going on, this year has been tough with these. I’m still sleeping and somewhat eating for which I’m grateful. The dog is restless and the cat has taken to peeing on the rugs, towels, and any clothes left on the floors. I have a lot of washing to do. I seem to pick up for a few hours here and there in between panic attacks and depression. I’ve been canceling most of my commitments and I’m just keeping my head down until it eases, my next shrink appointment, or things crash badly enough that I look for more intensive help somewhere. Rose is looking out for me, took us down to the beach tonight to let Zoe have a run and talk about how we’re going to manage this. I’m lucky. I’ve friends, a home, a lot more than I’ve had when I’ve been in trouble some other times in my life. Just got to stay safe until I come through it.

Hearing Voices Links and Information

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

If you’re looking for support around the experience of hearing voices, here are all the resources and links I’m aware of. Firstly a few from this blog:

The International Voice Hearing Community has a website at www.intervoiceonline.org and a facebook group for anyone to join to share and discuss experiences at www.facebook.com/groups/intervoice This is open to people who hear voices as well as friends and family looking for information and support.

For children and young people who hear voices, Voice Collective is UK based and found at www.voicecollective.co.uk they have a number of free resources including this online booklet: For Parents Carers and Family Members of Young People who Hear Voices or See Visions.

Here’s a list of Australian based organisations and groups:

Here in South Australia, we have currently one group meeting every week, called Sound Minds. Details on the Mental Illness Fellowship of SA website here: www.mifa.org.au/voice-hearers-group This is run by Ben and Anna, you can ask to speak with them on (08) 8378 4100. If you experience your voices as parts, there’s a group called Bridges running weekly you may wish to contact. That’s run through the Dissociative Initiative who can be found here: dissociativeinitiative.wordpress.com. There’s also a number of books on voice hearing in the DI library which you can borrow free if you live in SA.

There are many other Voice Hearing Activists who themselves hear or have heard voices and now work in Mental Health sharing their experiences and resources, a couple are listed here:

If you’re in a crisis situation, please reach out for help. In Australia you can call 000 for a life threatening situation, or ACIS on 13 14 65 for mental health crisis, or to speak with someone urgently Lifeline www.lifeline.org.au are available on 13 11 14. These are all available 24/7 and although they’re not specific for voice hearing if you or someone else is in danger they are the fastest support available. If you’re struggling to get support from ACIS, I would suggest reading

If you’re still struggling to find something local or you’d like to talk with me about your situation, you’re welcome to send me an email to sarah@di.org.au, but please be aware I’m extremely busy and may take a week or more to get back to you. Best wishes and take care x

Acceptance

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Had a pretty good day today. It was hard coming home from the Fair to my stressful housing situation and my anxiety had been sky high lately. Rose visited and kept me company through a stressful appointment. I took her out for a treat at my favourite cafe. In a burst of energy I pruned, mowed, swept, and tidied my front yard, then re-washed the load of wet laundry that had been sitting in a basket for several days and yet to be hung out, this time it actually made it into the line. We all went down to the beach and did an hour of training, Zoe has her test for Basic training class this Saturday. She’s going very well with one small but significant glitch – she has almost no capacity to pay attention when other dogs are around, they’re just too interesting. This is going to make the test in class rather interesting.

The evening was spent lying on the couch watching the Hobbit. My pain levels are down, I’ve Zoe sleeping on my legs, I’ve decided to sleep on the couch tonight so she can sleep with me. My neighbour has done nothing more antisocial than chuck a bunch of leaves and garden debris over the fence in a week. My psychiatrist was nice to me when I went in on Monday very stressed and teary. Things are challenging but okay.

I’ve been working on a new mental health approach… Learning to accept even my own lack of self acceptance on my rough days. To have a less perfectionistic, and a more compassionate stance towards my mental health troubles. It’s okay to have issues, even the self loathing kind. If I can’t always stop me from hating myself, maybe I can at least break the spiral where I hate myself for hating myself. So far it’s helping.

Why bother blogging?

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Sometimes I find myself wondering about the value of spending my time blogging. Especially when I’m trying to make a business work as a face and body painter, having so much deeply personal information out there on the net really seems like shooting myself in the foot. In the wake of recent homophobia, I’m wrestling with conflicting impulses to wear my rainbow throw everywhere like a cape – or strip my public online world of every reference to my sexuality, relationship, and mental health.

Whenever I feel like this, I go into my blog and have a look at one area of the stats collected about how this site gets used – the words that people are typing into search engines like google to find my site. Here’s a short collection of things people have been searching the internet for when they found this blog:

    • How to be comfortable with intimacy
    • Grounding techniques for dissociation
    • Adults who lack object constancy
    • Do you need to speak about your trauma?
    • Therapist wants to talk about my childhood
    • I hate positive thinking
    • Dissociative identity disorder pamphlet
    • Safe sex
    • Afraid of my psychotic neighbour
    • Self harm tools
    • Intense self loathing
    • Chronically feeling suicidal
    • I hate myself

How can I not share?

Cape it is.

Homophobia & despair

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I’m tired. It’s been a very difficult couple of days and I’ve shut down. Depression is protective sometimes, when the alternatives are frantic and destructive.

I’m 4 months in to a 10 year lease, signed with Housing SA for my lovely unit. That followed a 1 year probationary lease. I’ve had hassles with a neighbour since moving in, which despite my best efforts have escalated into minor vandalism, and harassment in the form of hostile letters and verbal abuse. There’s a history of difficulties between other tenants and this neighbour, some of which is frighteningly dangerous (none of which involves witnesses or can be proved). Last night blew up badly, she harassed me persistently as I ignored her and tried to get from my car into my house. For the first time I lost my cool and shouted at her to leave me alone. She dumped a tirade of homophobia on me. She told me I was a dirty, filthy, deviant, freak lesbian, who should be exterminated.

I waited a very long time to get into this unit. Years of unstable housing and periodic homelessness, waiting for the dream of a home of my own. Somewhere safe and permanent, to plant my roses. Somewhere I could have a dog and a cat, work on my degree and my business, bring home a date in peace. This dream of security is being destroyed.

The reality is that my circumstances – female, disabled, poor, queer, make me vulnerable. I don’t have money to fix problems like this. Our safety net services don’t protect people like me very well. I remember when homeless, sitting outside a shelter that could not accommodate my electric scooter, having been kicked out for the cleaners to come in, and told to walk into town. I was too sick to walk to the end of the street. I sat in the gutter and wept. There is no security. Life turns on a dime.

This is the first time I’ve been personally abused since coming out. Oh, there’s been issues here and there. A waitress so uncomfortable with Rose and I that she could not make eye contact and avoided our table. An intimidating group of guys that prompted us to drop hands and walk home faster. People in our close circles who still refuse to meet the girlfriend. Friendships that randomly blew up after we started dating. A training facilitator asking us to ‘stop obviously being in a relationship’ during classes. But this, to have someone spitting with loathing as they tell me I should die, this is a first.

It’s horrific.

I feel dead inside. Because I have to. Because the alternatives were unsafe. The scream rising in my chest, the images in my mind, of running into the night, of slashing my arms and smearing the blood on her door, the despair that having run from the threat of violence and homophobia years ago, I’m still not safe. That I pay such very high prices to be safe in my life, and safety eludes me.

Last year a very dear friend of mine was attacked by a group of strangers who assumed they were gay. They escaped, hurting themself in the process. Their car was burned to the ground. This is the stuff of nightmares, the stuff that has you waking up screaming. It’s real and it’s still happening now. This is the world I live in, and the world my children would live in.

I’m used to mindless vandalism  I once lived in a unit where every week, something would be stolen from my yard. I made a game of it, bringing home broken or misshapen statues from my work to leave in the front yard to be stolen. One mother’s day, half of my irises were dug out and stolen overnight. It’s demoralizing.  It’s also not so hard to pity the person so broke and hopeless that stolen irises are their gift for mother’s day. This is different because it’s personal. It’s not mindless, it’s malicious. The intention is to hurt, the motivation is a narcissistic belief that they have the right to punish. It’s gutting. It’s impossible to know what it feels like to be hated if you’ve never been hated.

I have been hated and abused before. I’ve been threatened, I’ve been hurt, I’ve been screamed at, had property damaged or stolen, been touched when I said no, been told the world would be a better place without me. I’ve been given all the advice – hit them back, ignore it, don’t show fear, report it, record it, move away, try to befriend them, try to scare them, try to humanise yourself to them, fight back, turn the other cheek, disengage, empathise, deescalate, don’t make yourself a target.

I’ve followed it all, at one time or another. I’ve frozen. I’ve not shown fear or pain. I’ve cried. I’ve cut myself. I’ve reported and recorded. I’ve downplayed it and hated myself for being over sensitive. I’ve protected their reputation and kept the secrets. I’ve run.

I’ve been told “Until they touch you, we can’t intervene” (not unless, but until). I’ve been told “without witnesses it’s just your word against theirs”. I’ve been told “you bring it on yourself”. I’ve been told “it takes two to tango”. I’ve been told “you need to toughen up”.

They’re wrong, of course. It’s always easiest to blame the person being hurt, to make not being hurt again their responsibility, to offload the anger and frustration that powerlessness makes us feel onto the easiest target.

Abuse has only ended two ways for me – someone with power came along and decided I had enough value to protect me, or I ran. Hence the homelessness. I wonder, at times like this, if it was worth running if this is where I have run to? I have sacrificed so much following a dream of a life without violence or abuse, when that dream evades me like the end of the rainbow. There’s a scream in my chest that’s so loud it would tear the world in two. Not only for me, but for all those like me. The ones I’ve outlived, and the ones who live maimed by memories of torture and terror. Why run, if there is no safety? Because you cannot stay without imbibing the belief that you deserve this. That they are right, that you are perverted, pathetic, vile. That the world would be better off without you. When I ran, when I lost everything, I gained back the self respect that denies all those claims.

I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. My options are limited. Both Housing SA and the police have been involved, neither are offering me answers. I am vulnerable, and I am hated by some people, for things I cannot change or help, for things I do not wish to conceal, for things about myself that are not flaws or failings or perversions. This used to be my whole world, growing up. Now it’s a vicious corner of my universe. Those invited into my world love and respect me. It’s the uninvited who are doing the poisoning.

Rose and I are reeling, quietly. Hurt, scared, stressed. I’ve a lot of face painting coming up, which will be a welcome relief from thinking about this. Making kids happy – there’s no better thing. Admin is on hold, plans of all kinds are on hold. I’m just putting one foot in front of the other. I need to eat, Zoe needs a walk, I need a shower. I feel dead. On the phone to lifeline last night I moved out of hysterical and into numb. They were pleased and moved on to more urgent cases. In my mind I’m back at school again and I can’t escape, back in relationships that terrified me. In my mind I feel the despair settling in – that nothing works out for me, that everything falls apart, that there is no real hope.

There’ll be a way through this, somehow. I’m creative and resilient and I have much better networks these days, friends who care, counselors. But I think that dream of reaching a safe place some day, I think that’s gone. Nowhere is ever really safe like that. And that feeling – it’s like being profoundly homesick. The loss of that dream aches so badly, like a child longing for a home that has burned.

Looking for self compassion

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
A few hours ago, I was sitting on the floor of my psychologist’s office, choking on tears as I talked about what it felt to like to want to hurt myself. Something that started at 10 as a way of escaping the unrelenting misery of my experiences at school has stayed with me throughout life. My longest stretch without cutting or burning myself is 8 years. I was devastated when I fell off that wagon, and even more so to realise that for me, denying the impulse does not stop me wanting it. A desire that divides people immediately – those who simply cannot grasp the sense of need, the intensity of the urge, and those who have felt it too. It’s difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t been there.

I remember the first time I went and bought blades. The build up was appalling. I was in year 12, under massive pressure, with no opportunity to find emotional support. I had PTSD but had been offered no treatment and no possibility for recovery. That day I walked to the newsagents and I didn’t feel broken by pain. I felt powerful, I floated. I had found another way out of the trap, of the pain of bullying and loneliness and alienation, of being forced to spend hours a day in a place I hated, where I felt without value, where I longed at times for the physical abuse because at least that left a mark I could show. At least that garnered a response from the adults. I couldn’t escape my situation, but I stumbled onto a way out where my body stayed but I broke out of the rules instead. The rules about decorum and what is appropriate, about how to live and what to value and that the little people must learn to ‘take it’. Alone at night my body became my thing again, mine to do with as I chose, to use as an instrument on which to play out my pain, to prove my agony. I felt powerful and defiant. I felt less suicidal. It was a way to stay, to settle into the trap and obey the path I’d been given to walk. I felt above pain.

There have been days when I wake up and look at my wrists and feel so revolted by myself, such intense shame and self loathing that self harm is not enough, I want to annihilate myself entirely. There are days my wrists feel so naked and vulnerable, shivering before my rage, that I have to cover them. I wear sleeves or gloves or cuffs. I sit and find my fingers stroking stroking stroking the skin, like you stroke a distressed child or a hurt animal – it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, I won’t hurt you. There are days when I see self harm marks on someone else and there’s such a leap of longing inside me, such desperation – ‘how come they get to do it?’ ‘How come they can be hurt and they are still loved?’ And then I feel so very small, and ugly, and alone.

I’m so tired of the struggle. I’m tired of the shame. Trying to walk carefully around the things that trigger the impulse, trying to find other ways to ease the pain. I sat on the floor today and talked about what it was like to be at school, what it was like to be so desperate to escape it that at 10 years old I was bashing my writing hand with a brick so that I wouldn’t have to go in. “It’s still so raw” she said to me. Yes.

Somewhere, between a house to live in, and pets and friends and a garden and a wonderful girlfriend, I feel like I’ve lost the rights to my own pain. How can I paint scenes of anguish and despair now? How can I write? Too many confidences to betray. Too many people looking to me to see if it’s possible for life to get better. So instead, there’s the longing for blood, the need to see scars, to prove pain, to connect to it and disconnect from it. To find a way not to drown in the pit of self hatred. I’ve lived my hell in the daylight, in a world oblivious to it. “You survived” she said to me. “Parts of me died!” I snarled. “Things were taken from me they had no right to take.” Nothing makes up for that.

There’s good days. There’s so many good days, things I’m excited about, new hopes and dreams. How quickly we begin to speak the language of the daylight, to conceal the wounds, to deny the pain that lingers. I’m trying to listen. I’m still here. I’m looking for self compassion beneath the fear. I don’t want to go down. I need a better way through this. I’m looking. Ink, not blood.

Bullying

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I follow The Blogess who recently linked to a post about bullying and self harm on EPBOT. The word poem moved me particularly.

I was bullied at school. A lot. I’m a connoisseur of bullying, I’ve been bullied by girls and boys, by peers and teachers, by lone individuals and whole groups, by kids who saw me every day and kids who’d never met me before, by the wealthy privileged kids with power, and by the alienated loners who were victims themselves.

The very word bullying bothers me a great deal, because it is so innocuous. It has no impact. What would be assault or abuse in another context becomes bullying if it happens on school grounds.

People like the big stories. The time this or that happened. They are the stories we tell when we talk about bullying. There’s a hierarchy of horror – sexual, physical, emotional. I have those stories. But they’re not what did the damage. Kids are resilient, surprisingly so. They get through big impact crap if they’ve got support. The boring story of my bullying, the ugliest and most damaging side of it was simply the alienation. The sheer, relentless loneliness. The daily rejection by my peers. It wasn’t the presence of the abuse that left such scars, as much as the absence of friends and care. It was being forced to spend days in a place where I had no value that eroded my spirit. I hated myself, I hated my situation, I hated the bullies, I hated the bystanders. Everything hurt and there was no escape. I spent hours sitting by the fence with my fingers laced through the wire, knowing that more than a fence stood between me and freedom. A whole society that believes in schooling the way we do, a whole culture that calls what was being done to me ‘bullying’, a whole school that fervently believed that it did not have any bullying there, a world in which hurting the principal was wrong but hurting me was fair game, stood between me and escape.

I suffered, and my whole world denied the reality of that suffering. While adults lectured us about the evils of drugs and sex, I was dying of loneliness.

It stays with you. The impact lingers long. It takes courage and faith to believe they were wrong.

It also, perhaps, takes a modicum of common sense and cynicism to realise that sometimes the most interesting, brilliant, and unusual, the ones we fear or don’t understand, or envy, are the ones we torture.

More thoughts on bullying and empathy.

Should we be afraid of mental illness?

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Being a peer worker in mental health I’m often caught in a certain tension between the reality of my own experiences, and the ‘party line’ I often feel a certain pressure to toe. One of the areas this occurs in is the many current efforts to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness.

A couple of years ago I listened to a presentation about research and psychosis that was very interesting. After the talk, I asked the presenter what I, as a ‘consumer’ could do to help. He told me that research indicated that stigma reduction campaigns that relied on increased education actually often backfired. Giving people more information about the nature of experiences such as psychosis sometimes just gave people more information about something they were already really frightened of. What did help was humanising these experiences. Putting a face to these conditions helped people to see that we are still human, that we are deserving of care and dignity, and there is so much more to us than ‘illness’. This conversation was one of the motivations for my passion for peer work.

Currently I’ve been aware of an attitude I feel I’m supposed to express, along the lines of “Mental illness is nothing to be afraid of”. Slogans like this are really difficult to get right, because you are trying to sum up a huge concept and idea into a phrase. This is like trying to communicate advanced physics concepts through haiku. It takes rare talent!

I get where this idea is coming from.

I just find it difficult to subscribe to.

I live in a funny corner of the world where most of my personal networks are peopled with people who experience, or support someone who experiences, a mental illness. In my world, issues are the norm. This is cool, I prefer it. I fit in, I get the people, we speak our own shorthand language, complain about sleep deprivation, are sensitive about touch, navigate life with a painful awareness of our own vulnerabilities. I get that the idea of telling people not to be scared is what I’m trying to communicate when I give mental health talks and say – so, guess what, I have multiple personalities and none of them are axe murderers! It’s what I’m trying to say when I give talks about voice hearing and try to get across the message that we are not some strange, terrifying, alien species; we are regular folk, who happen to hear voices. What we’re all trying to say with messages like this is that common myths about violence, insanity, psychopathy, do us harm. They’re needless and harmful fears. They alienate and damage whole groups of our communities, leaving them alone with their demons, without help or comfort. Mental illness is nothing to be afraid of.

Here’s the other side though, I know what it’s like to be suicidal, constantly, deeply, permanently thinking of death. I know what it’s like to be afraid of myself. I know the shame of waking up and finding fresh self harm wounds. I know the misery of panic attacks, of ‘ugly days’, of ‘non-food’ days. I care deeply for others who battle things like this. I’ve been the full time carer of someone who spent 6 months in hospital in a state of intense emotional distress and a constant drive to die. I’ve cared for friends who cut, or starve, who hate themselves, who experience paralyzing depressions, horrific trauma stress, chronic nightmares… To tell you the truth, ‘mental illness’ our strange, impersonal term for so much hurt and suffering, scares the hell out of me. I don’t want it, and I don’t wish it on any of the wonderful people I care about. Watching people you love suffer, watching the cycles, the decent into their own personal hell, it’s terrifying, and it’s painful.

Here’s the thing, the people are nothing to be afraid of. They’re still people. If they were assholes before, I doubt that a mental illness has improved matters. If they were decent people, in many cases it makes them difficult to live with, but not dangerous. There’s nothing to fear from them. There’s much to fear for them. And even there – there’s hope. There’s paths through these things. There’s ways to reduce their impact, to limit their capacity to destroy lives. People change, grow, heal. It’s not a life sentence. Mental illness isn’t the grave of all our dreams for our lives.

But people suffer. And people die. You can’t work in this field and not be aware of it. The situations some families are living in is horrifying. When we paint a rosy image, when we put photos of calm, happy, beautiful people on our banners and pamphlets and say – mental illness is nothing to be afraid of, we deny the reality of a lot of people who are suffering terribly. Their pain is devastating and it is something to be afraid of. Not the kind of fear that paralyses, the kind that makes us speak up about better resources. The kind that makes us research our options, get help early and get good help, look after ourselves, stay connected with our mates, fight stigma and discrimination, count our blessings.

People are suffering, and people are dying. I think it’s okay to be afraid of this. I think that in the face of this fear, we chose to act and live with courage.

Quietness

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
This morning I remember things I had forgotten. I remember that when we are hurting, and try to be strong, everything becomes brittle, frantic, and broken. I remember that fears we are too afraid to voice, those that stick in the throat like fishbones, they tears holes in us, through which strength bleeds. I remember that if I do not try to hold off the storm, but bow before it, speaking truths that burn my throat and blister my tongue, then it passes. It passes and I find mornings like this. Waking late, to a white sky and the wind gentle plaiting and unplaiting the slender branches of the tree outside my window. My hands feel like doves, laid gently by my face in rest, in my lap in wakefulness. There’s silence and thoughtfulness, my mind moves gently like a woman combing the beach after a storm, lifting a shell here, a branch of wood for the fire. I drink tea and eat porridge, and in their simpleness there is a peace. No more the screaming excesses. The burden has passed, the pain has eased.

Today I shall do what I can and no more. I shall work with my hands to make my world whole, to sew up the tears and sweep out the shadows that cloy at the mind. I had a nightmare, and it came over my face and my eyes, it screamed and would not stop screaming. I screamed within it and my world went dark, full of fire and fear. It bound me a future I could not bear, to a fate that twisted me, a destiny that compelled me to become a twisted thing. Such is the burden of those who have been wounded as I have, such are the shadows that follow at our heels. When we name them truly, they run from us, for a time. Today I can see clearly. There’s a wind in my soul, a peace in my heart. All is as it should be. I rest my heart in the hollow of the hill.

Coming home

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
Back from the holiday and trying to find some equilibrium  The last day was lovely, wandering about Sydney, a ferry ride under the harbor bridge, chocolates to take home. The flight back was beautiful, we skirted the storm. Clouds lay out beneath the plane like a fresh, wrinkled fleece. Out in the north, massive thunderhead clouds rose like huge anvils into the sky. I spent the entire flight watching them burst with lightning, and writing down ideas for paintings. Inspiration at last.

I haven’t made any art for months. Something is wrong when this happens. I’m poisoned by something in my life, or I’m starving for something I need. Just one day in the rain, free and flying with my heart open filled me with joy and new ideas. I’m not spending enough time in Narnia. Too much grief, too much time in the world. Not enough flying.

Coming home was painful. My house feels, not like a home, but like a trap. My life choices hurt, chafe, cut, bite into skin. Everything is difficult. There is so much I must do and it is all so difficult. On the train from Newcastle, in the tiny sewer-stinking toilet, the old scars on my wrist catch the light and I suddenly want a matching set on my other wrist. Grief catches in my throat. The first day home and working on urgent admin – phone calls, emails, enrolling in tafe classes, I’m three hours in before the sense of self loathing kicks in so strong it’s like a punch to the gut. It’s like coming home to find mental illness waiting for me. My life hurts.

So I take a step back from the edge. I spend time alone. I read. My cat comes and cuddles up to me for the first time in months and it feels like a blessing. I watch the rain. I go and buy big canvases from the art shop, hoping the inspiration wont leave, wont collapse, hoping the strength will stay long enough that I can paint. I move slowly, I’m silent, even in my mind, silent. Letting thoughts flow through me very slowly, very quietly. Waiting in the stillness for the pain and sadness to ease, for the joy to settle. For clarity and hope.

I’m working on a set of blog posts about sex which are important to me but very difficult to write. My blog post about it has reached a few thousand words so I’ve decided to break it up into parts. Some days I can think clearly to write and others I edit and rewrite endlessly. I’ve also been revamping the blog, adding new pages, changing the colour scheme. There’s more to be done but I’m happy with the progress so far. I’m also planning to upgrade the DI website which is painfully out of date. I was too busy to keep up with it last year but I’ve a little window now to get some more work done on it. My facepainting page on my wordpress blog is looking good too, although the rest of that site is mostly empty. It’s all a lot of work. Little bits at a time. 

Flour on my hands

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

I’ve had a good day. Which is especially nice as my life has been rather up and down lately. I’m writing now in the peace and quiet of the early hours of the morning. I have a load of freshly washed laundry hanging about the house and smelling clean and wonderful. I’m showered and enjoying actually being able to wear my warm winter robe as the weather has been perfectly cool today. Sarsaparilla is being smoochy and trying to head rub my keyboard. I’ve washed all my dishes and my kitchen is clean. My dining table is clear, my bedroom is tidy, the study room has been sorted.

I cooked today. I’m so pleased, it’s been ages since I cooked. By which I mean something more complicated than toast. I made ham and zucchini pasta for dinner, and brownies for dessert.

It’s been an erratic start to the year for me. The past couple of months have been tiring and challenging. My fibro flares quickly at the moment so I’ve been in a fair amount of pain many days. I’ve also been anxious and stressed. A lot of my friends have been struggling with their mental or physical health, I’ve been rocky and getting overwhelmed. Some nights are pretty peaceful with decent sleep, others have been terrible. My girlfriend told me recently that sometimes when I’m having nightmares, I moan in my sleep, recoil if touched, and weep. That’s the saddest image in my mind, it seems so lonely to be crying in your sleep, sailed out in a world of dreams, beyond comfort.

I had such a rough day the other day, I worked out afterwards that I’d spent 7 (non-consecutive) hours in a 24 hour period crying. Some days everything is too much. I’m tired, tired in my aching bones, tired in my soul. There’s no strength left in my spirit, no hope left to light my lamps, no inspiration in my hands to paint or sculpt or tend. There’s yearning and grief and fear for my future.

So I cry. I hurt, weep, curl up in bed and hold my broken heart in my hands. My tears, they slowly dull the edges of the broken glass in my chest. I cry the despair out of me. I speak the black things that are gnawing on my bones, that have teeth sunken deep into my heart. Desperate to be hopeful, to be bright with joy, to be at peace in the dawn, I name my demons instead. I still my hands, I let the depression take me. It’s a blessing. It keeps me safe, the lethal lethargy eases me from frantic need. I seek no relief, blades do not tempt me, the sirens of death are far off. Here is just the frozen despair, the paralysing sense of inadequacy, the raw, overwhelming awareness of pain.

Then the tide goes out and the fire dies down, the pain ebbs. I get a day like today where I wake and my mind is quiet and clear. The rain falls softly on my face, washing away self-loathing, easing the grief. I walk without pain. There’s no burning in my skin, my eyes don’t throb, the knives that were in my muscles have fallen out overnight. I can dance. I can dream. There’s delight in simple things. I watch a favourite French movie (La tete en friche), I get flour on my hands, I let the rain scented air into my home. And it’s okay again, it’s okay, I remember life’s sweetness, I remember the songs of the little birds in the morning.

Poem – In The Paper Moat

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

In bed
I build
A little fort of books
To keep away
The bad dreams
And the memories.

My paper moat
Is filled with people of courage
Compassion
In the face of brutality
Wisdom,
Patient rage,
Love-
All the things that are monsters
To the monsters that hunt me.

Here I lay, naked
In the dark, and alone
But not without defence
My authors speak on my behalf
When I am lost with weeping
They shape the dark
Give it name
Whisper to me
The limits of its lies.

Dissociation and tricks of the brain

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
Something happens when I rearrange the furniture. It’s like part of my brain that was sleeping, wakes up and realises that I’m living in my own home where I can do that now. For a few weeks I look at everything with fresh eyes and find myself stirring out of the numb dissociation and actually paying attention to the miracle that is stable housing. It doesn’t take a lot. I’ve recently moved my bed about 30cm away from the window, and stuck a cardboard box down the gap to act as a second side table. Suddenly my room is fresh and exciting. Today I secreted a few indoors friendly plants in small pots out of my garden and put them on the window sill. My inner house-people, the younger ones who love baking and having a beautiful home, prick up their ears. My goth starts dreaming of painting poems on the doorframes, of wall chandeliers full of candles. I start dreaming of peaceful sleep.

In the early hours of this morning, while it was cool and I could move about without feeling ill, I begun the task of rearranging my studio. This time the entire room is being moved around a single, critical need: that I have only one form of refrigerated air conditioning in my unit, and it is the freestanding kind that needs to be vented out a window. Previously one of my art desks blocked the window entirely. I have also had a lot of trouble with the curtains. The hooks that hold up the curtains constantly snag on the netting behind them when I try to open or close them. If I pull too vigorously, the curtain rod falls down. The netting is too long for the window so it gets caught under anything I put under the desk, and the dog and cat get tangled in it when they try to look out the window, also pulling the curtain down. With the wide desk in front of the window I simply can’t easily open or close them, so they either live open and I vacate the studio once it’s dark and keep the door shut, or they live closed and I vacate the studio during the day. I once lived in a horrible bachelor pad where the house stank of mould from the bathroom, off food in the fridge or from various half finished meals left in bowls around the house, the blinds were rarely opened and the floor stuck to your feet. I was desperately unhappy and constantly trying to clean it up but when your flatmates are trashing it daily it’s not a happy place to be. I now particularly hate having the curtains drawn during the day. I tolerate it during extremely hot weather, but the rest of the time, if I’m out of bed, the curtains are opened. I crave and love the light when it’s there, and open windows letting in fresh air and the sound of birds and traffic and the far off trains.

So I’ve changed things around, freeing up the entire window, removed the netting, and changed one of the curtains. I was going to change both because the original blue were also only just wide enough to cover the window which also made life tricky, but I love the effect of one of each. In theory, once I’ve cleared away the rest of the mess, I should be able to wheel my air conditioner in there, shut the door, and make art in the cool.

It’s not perfect, both tables/desks are awkward sizes, one very long and one very wide, but I think for now it will work. Hopefully it will help me get back in there and get my fingers dirty, seeing the space with fresh eyes and reclaiming my constantly dimming sense of ownership over it can only be a good thing. Either way, it still feels good to have done something.

Recovery from Trauma – Touch

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

This has been a huge area for me, one I’ve had to re-negotiate throughout my life so far to try and find something that works for me. A lot of us who come through interpersonal trauma – where other people hurt us, are left with major struggles about touch. For me, I found that I’ve suffered when I’m touched, and I’ve suffered from being touch-starved. If you imagine for a moment that in your mind and body, there are three basic types of touch that you register and react to. One is touch that makes you feel good – a little baby holding on to your finger or a kiss from your lover or a hug from a friend. The next is touch that makes you feel bad, such as being hurt or invaded. The last is neutral touch, that doesn’t make you feel good or bad, inconsequential things like sitting against someone on the bus or brushing hands with a checkout operator handing you your bags.

I found this last category of touch collapsed completely for me and has been by far the hardest to get back. When I’m really struggling good touch goes too, but a lot of days when I can still enjoy good touch I can’t cope with neutral touch. I’m very sensitive to touch and it’s like my brain can’t work out how to handle neutral touch and does a very basic ‘what kind of touch is this?’ assessment that goes

    1. ‘does this feel good?’ 
    2. ‘no’ 
    3. right then – ‘BAD TOUCH’

I’ve had to talk myself through re building a sense of neutral touch. It rests on feeling reasonably safe and calm, and for me at least, part of a community. Strangers don’t bother me if I am feeling content and like we’re all just people. Being able to cope with neutral touch is an important key for me to cope with medical and dental appointments, travelling on public transport and in lifts, accessing crowded places, using supermarkets – basic functioning in life.

Touch is actually a crucially important aspect of being human. Newborns need touch after being born. Untouched, they will simply die. Touch changes us on a physiological level, massages support immune function and health for example. Touch is crucial in attachment, in bonding, and in social connection. Touch communicates affection, loathing, power, or love.

As a child and teenager I was ostracised and bullied at school. Touch became a key issue. I struggled to define moral responses to abuse and contempt. I developed a basic set of parameters – that until another person touched me, I would manage the situation verbally. If they initiated contact physically, then I would defend myself physically. It became generally known in the school that I was not to be touched. This decision was to some extent effective in that it relieved me of the chronic anxiety and distress around how I was to respond to relentless bullying. However the unintended downside of this was that I struggled alone, untouched and without comfort. Following a major trauma I was diagnosed with PTSD and in that space – traumatised, alienated, chronically suicidal, and devoured by nightmares, my world without touch became surreal and terrifying. I craved touch, longed to be hugged, my self-made wall designed for protection left me free-falling, alone and outcast. I no longer felt part of the world or of humanity, without touch to connect me. With no anchors, I floated into surreal dissociative states, feeling unreal and chronically numb, punctuated by intense fury, distress, and self loathing.

A few years ago, I turned up to the Mental Illness Fellowship SA activity centre. My life had burned down and I was extremely isolated at the time. I sat on a couch, nervous in a room full of strangers. Someone sat down next to me and I concentrated on not flinching. As I sat there stiffly and awkward and silent, the whole side of my body next to the stranger began to warm. This yearning for contact came unbidden from deep inside me and I realised how solitary my world had become. The loneliness was profound.

Touch is powerful, and for some of us, touch has been withheld and we have starved without it, or touch has been used to wound us and now we struggle to define our relationship with it. Touch often defines power in our relationships – I’ve felt trapped at times with people who refuse me the right to withdraw from touch I do not want. I’ve become more assertive these days as I’ve discovered that if I protect my right to control touch, then my relationship with touch becomes less ambivalent and stressed. My good friends know to check before hugs, and not to take it personally if I don’t want to be hugged that day. Likewise, I do this for them. Because of this, touch has more and more of a place in my life now, which delights me.

People who don’t get this and fight my right to choose who and when and how I am touched are usually excluded from my networks. Some of them are simply bullies. Some are too naturally dominating to consider someone else’s needs. Some are under the illusion that if they impose touch upon me, I will ‘realise’ that it is safe and my boundaries are silly and unnecessary. Some take a preference not to be touched as a personal insult to them. The occasional few are sadists who enjoy touching someone who clearly is uncomfortable with it but lacks the social power to tell them to stop. I have a strong commitment in my life now; that loneliness is better than torture. People who don’t respect me, don’t get close to me.

Developing that power and honouring that need to protect myself has given me a lot more freedom. If I trust myself to protect myself (and my system trusts me to protect them – no accepting hugs if they’re screaming inside me) then suddenly neutral touch isn’t such a big deal. I’m not small and powerless any more, I’m a member of the community. I have a voice and I can take care of myself, which means I can engage. I don’t have to hide, or run, or fight. I can be part of the world when I want to. I talk about the mental flip from seeing other people as inherently dangerous to just regular people in my article Using Public Transport. Here’s an example:

I was on the bus the other day and a man was standing in the aisle next to me when I noticed that he had a big mop of long fluffy white cat fur stuck to his nice dark pants! I suspect he has a lovely white persian cat at home that had been sleeping next to him on the couch. It suddenly flipped how I saw him – from being a threatening man standing too close to me, to just a regular guy with  a cat and not someone to be afraid of.

I crave this freedom. When the PTSD is too bad for me to handle crowds, strangers, confined spaces, being a passenger in someone else’s car, being out after dark, having other people in my home, being touched, new environments, loud environments, and so on, my world is very small, very painful, very lonely. I hate this place, it’s like being in a coffin.

There’s a thrill to being able to reclaim my place in the community. The more I protect myself and make myself feel safe, the more ‘risks’ I can take, like going to a concert I love. As I learn to reclaim touch it helps me manage experiences that typically are nightmares for me – like dental or medical appointments. It also frees me to have the ability to offer touch to someone else in need, to give a hug to a friend who is struggling or hold the hand of a psychiatric patient who is confused and distressed.

Touch is powerful. It can be my biggest trigger for anxiety and dissociation, such as when I get hugs following my talks at big conferences (see The Voices Vic Conference). It is also one of my strongest grounding techniques during anxiety attacks or major dissociative episodes. It’s a powerful way of communicating between people – acceptance, or rejection, affection or loathing, mutuality or domination. If touch is an area that has been damaged for you too, you can change how touch works in your life. You have the right to use it as a tool, to protect yourself from it, to seek out good touch, to be aware of the messages you send and accept through touch. There are more, and better, options than being touch starved or having to put up with touch that you find distressing and disempowering.

Relationships and trauma

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

One member of a relationship with a trauma background is a challenge. For the non-trauma partner, there is the hurdle of trying to understand and connect with experiences and reactions that are difficult to relate to. Applying the kind of personal wisdom that helps you get through less extreme situations, such as ‘just get on with it’ can cause a lot of stress for people who are struggling with severe after affects of major trauma. There’s two languages being spoken and a lot of work has to be done to get the translation working well and calm the anxieties of both parties. The person with the trauma background often feels ashamed, worried they are too much hard work, scared to trust, scared of being left, worried they’re making a big fuss about nothing, scared of turning their partner off, or of being pressured, that being vulnerable will engender disgust, or that being cared for will make them weak… The non-trauma partner often has anxieties such as wondering if their partner will ever come back from this world of trauma reactions, scared of saying or doing the wrong thing and triggering them, scared of not being strong enough to handle what they’re going through, scared of getting stuck having to care for them, anxious about their moodiness, unpredictability, mania, depression, or temper, anxious about leaning on them too much for day to day issues, and so on. Both partners can easily feel very alone, misunderstood, unsupported, under pressure, and afraid. It takes love, commitment, and skill to navigate complex trauma. I talk about this more in Supporting someone after Trauma.

Two of the biggest issues I observe about this kind of relationship is the difficulty communicating – eg. If I say to a friend who is a fellow trauma survivor or has a mental illness that I’ve had a rough week – they usually get what that means. We’re speaking the same language. Outside of that world, I find I have to spell things out much more strongly. To other friends I may have to directly explain that I’ve been in a self-harm crisis all week and haven’t left the house, or indeed, my bed. The other major issue I see a lot is the risk of the carer dynamic. Having a relationship polarise into the well one and the sick one, the strong/weak, the giver/receiver, the provider/needy can be very destructive for both people. That’s not to say that caring for a partner in distress is not a deeply beautiful and loving act. But rather that those dynamics come with risks that need to be navigated. I talk about this more in Caring for someone who’s suicidal.

Having said that, these relationships can be powerfully strong. The person with the trauma background learns to communicate about their needs and experiences, and has the experience of developing trust, being comforted, and having someone walk with them through their pain. The person without the trauma background learns the nuances of trauma language, how to be with someone in a very painful and vulnerable place, learns to connect more deeply in that very privileged space. These bonds can be strong, having worked hard to build language and connection and safety and fairness, powerful healing and hope can be created.

There’s another kind of relationship with different challenges, and that is where both members have a trauma background (or to a certain extent, a mental illness). Survivor/survivor pairings are not uncommon, and while some issues remain the same – such as feeling alone, others are quite different. I’ve been with my girlfriend for over three months now and it’s been an intensive time of sharing, learning, and finding ways through obstacles. We both have trauma histories. At times, those histories are in the far distant past. At other times, they are painfully present through flashbacks, nightmares, body memories, sensitivity to triggers, and so on. There are advantages in that there is a more common shared language. There’s less work to try and explain what these things are or what they feel like. There’s also more role swapping between who cares and who receives care depending on whose need is greatest at the time. But with this compatibility comes other risks – both are wounded people with needs and limitations. Sometimes the particular vulnerabilities create a painful feedback loop where nightmares in one trigger nightmares in the other, where dissociation in one feeds dissociation in the other and so on. Sometimes both parties are more comfortable giving than receiving care, or vice versa, and struggle to develop skills across both roles. Sometimes competitive comparisons of trauma lead to one person being invalidated and silenced because their experiences are not seen as significant. Sometimes the trauma bond is so intense two hurt people merge into one enmeshed person and neither keep growing back into whole separate people. Sometimes the needs brought into the relationship exceed the capabilities of the relationship. There’s risks.

A big part of the key of what seems to be working for us is being aware that there are a lot of ways our relationship could founder, and talking about them. We know that love is essential but also insufficient. There needs to be enough skills, mental health, and support also. We know that we cannot be ‘enough’ for each other, we need outside supports – friends, professional support. The brutal reality is that with trauma comes limitations. There are times we cannot be there for each other. We are going to let each other down. But there are also skills. People survive different kinds of trauma by developing different skills. Those of us who are more fortunate have a good match between our innate talents and the kinds of trauma we were subjected to. In my case, I’m sensitive in relationships. I read people well. I’m good at helping stressed people to feel safer. (this isn’t some kind of superpower and certainly doesn’t work with everyone) I’m a good communicator. The very history that leaves me with the limitations and vulnerabilities that make it more likely my close relationships will fail, also leaves with me the kinds of skills and capabilities that strengthen and support relationships. Survivor/survivor relationships can also work very well, with deep connections and strength and humility and respect.

We can’t know that our relationship will work out, we can only gently and lovingly build good foundations and try to create safe exits if things become dangerous or destructive. We talk of the future, about hopes and dreams together. We also talk about how to break up the least traumatically if we need to, how to ask for time apart, how to help during a bad night, what our biggest triggers are, who else we have permission to talk about each others past with, how to get through if we’re both in a bad space. It’s not a guarantee, but here and now it’s creating something beautiful and meaningful. There’s safety, awareness, freedom, and love. Trauma takes a lot away from all of us, but there’s still hope for our dreams and things we can do to make that hope stronger.

Poem – Mental Illness

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments
from a 2010 journal

Walking into the adult world
layers of illusions peeling away
and the emptiness beneath us all coming into view
the veneer of our security so thin
we are a lost race on a world
falling into space and our dreams
are a taste of death, first thing in the morning
and the last hour of night
in my minds eye 
everyone I love is gone
it falls away

No island so remote
as to be beyond the touch of tragedy
we destroy it all and it destroys us
we live on borrowed time and the pain
catches up in the end
we pay for all our sweet days
all the debts are collected

There is no peace.
There are moments of joy.
Touch on my skin
love in their eyes
dreams in my heart
but the dark always comes
and the light is so frail
all our hopes unwoven
our allotted happiness
spent like sand through glass
and what does it all mean?
I hold her hand
and I can feel her slipping
night has its teeth in her skin.

We live, we love, and we die.
Each moment is pulled like a cloth
over the emptiness beneath us
over the screaming terror and the helplessness
the hours that torture and the dreams that sustain
we fly a little, and then we fall.

Credibility in different worlds

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Working across different life areas the way I do is really interesting and somewhat head-bending. Peer work is already something I consider to have a ‘foot in both worlds’ of mental health ‘consumer’ and ‘staff’. The first time I sat down at a lunch table and heard staff members bitterly complaining about consumers with frustration because they wouldn’t attend a program they’d designed, I was shocked. The first time I sat with consumers who attacked not the practices but the character of all doctors, psychiatrists, staff, I felt my innards knot. Both consumers and staff often distrust me as having a primary loyalty to the other side. Sometimes having a foot in both worlds is painful and lonely, but I’m damn well determined to do it, because I see that as the heart of peer work, to unite what has been divided.

Then we add the creative world I also inhabit where I’m working with artists, poets, and writers. What a different world that is! It’s always funny to me how we build credibility in different areas.

As a peer worker, credibility is everything, it’s the platform on which I stand to have a voice. The usual way you establish credibility in the mental health world is through credentials. “Psychiatrist Gregory Brown says such-and-such.” I don’t have that (yet) so my credibility is based on lived experience, wide reading, and experience as a peer worker. I have to be conscious that my arty tendencies can play against me, that if I look like a hippy when talking to mainstream psychiatrists I quickly reduce my credibility. As a peer worker the message I have to give out to be accepted is that I’m normal, safe, trustworthy, reliable, and informed. Each audience I speak to is most comfortable with me if I appear to  be one of them, if I speak to them with respect, use their language, dress like them, understand their values. This is a world dominated by the tenants of psychiatry and social work, it is about systems and hierarchies, and about moderation and restraint. This is not a world comfortable with passion, excess, or madness.

The opposite applies in the art world. There is nothing so suspicious as someone who appears academic, mainstream, and normal. As an artist the message I have to give out to be accepted is that I’m brilliantly creative, unpredictable, talented, and utterly mad! It’s probably best if I haven’t slept in a fortnight and mainline cocaine. That’s what real artists do. It’s not just acceptable to have weird coloured hair, it’s concerning if you bother to brush it before leaving the house. Turning up on time or at all is problematic, being able to handle money or make any kind of sense in an interview might have your work dismissed as ‘too commercial’. Artists are supposed to be broke lunatics no one else understands.

Sometimes I wonder at the wisdom of trying to work in both of these areas. I have a sneaking suspicion that recognition in one actually plays against me in the other field. I’m trying to show the world of mental health that I’m sane and reliable, and the world of art that I’m mad and talented. Some days I feel like a magician with a sleight of hand trick going on – ‘don’t look here, look there!’ so no one notices this. It is also a source of endless amusement to me, particularly in busy weeks where art and mental health gigs pile on top of one another. I go from mad to sane and back again in the space of hours, like changing my shoes. I get to harangue one audience intellectually, connect deeply with the next, make the next laugh, or think, or see things differently…

This is where it all comes together. Everything I do is about mental health. I can’t help it, I can’t help but think, speak, write, and paint about life, about what it is to be alive, and that is about mental health. And everything I do is about art, about freedom, creativity, expression, connection, communication, about being one of the makers rather than one of the destroyers, about hope, voice, truth. They’re two sides of the same coin, two parts of a whole. I’m not happy in arts alone. I’m restless and discontent when I’m writing and painting alone. I crave the world of mental health, the intellectual stimulation of restructuring the DSM, researching the history of psychiatry, investigating alternative mental health movements. There’s also a passion in me to connect with hurting people, and my personal history has left me fragile, but it’s also left me with a lot of the skills to connect. I sit in my studio and the restlessness is like fire under my skin. I can feel the tides out there, the wave of humans in pain, in need, alone, and afraid, like I have been. I have to be on the front lines. I have to reach out. And I have to be an artist, a poet, a creator. It’s not what I do, it’s who I am, it’s my voice, my name, my identity, my way of speaking and listening, my joy. It’s what stitches my wounds.

I’m so sad sometimes at what straddling these worlds costs me. I doubt, I re-evaluate, I try to find a solution to the problem that I want to do, feel, learn, everything. My voracious appetite for life has only been enhanced by years of sickness and grief. Sometimes I come home from very hard days in mental health and I hate my job. I hate the pain I witness, the secrets I carry, the suffering and the lack of resources and grinding endlessness of it, the poverty and cruelty and savagery of the world. I hate it and I hate my choices, and I cry, and I think of all the books I could be writing, the canvases I could have painted, the films I could have worked on in that time. They are like unborn children. I could have gone entirely into a creative field, given myself up to huge passions and projects that are about life but do not wipe my face daily in the grit and filth of life. Some days I come home spent, empty, lost, burdened by people’s trust, by their pain, by finding in myself what it takes to really look at someone who is suffering, to sit with them. Some days I wish I could be just one thing or the other.

But then, that’s also what it is to be an artist. You are swept up in mad passions, you give yourself to them utterly, you are spent. You sleep, you hide, you grieve bewildered, and a new dream seeds in your heart. This is the nature of creativity and the cycle of life energy. You can hate it, fight it, deny it, but this is where the great work happens. The cost is high but so is the joy. Beneath doubt and frustration and impatience is passion and a profound certainty that I am following a path for myself that is right. I have found my calling. And however much it may confuse people at times, everything that makes me a good fit for the creative world is everything that makes me a good fit for the world of mental health, and vice versa. They just don’t always know it yet. 😉

Anxiety

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I have a rent inspection later today, not just any inspection but my end-of-the-first-probationary-year inspection and my anxiety levels have been sky high. My lawns are cut, my house is tidy, the clothes that have been living in my bath have been folded and put away, my floors are mopped. My backyard needs tidying from Zoe but there’s absolutely no point in doing that until about an hour before the inspection because she will un-tidy it again pretty quickly.

Since going through rounds of homelessness, even a small threat to my housing like this can send me sky high with anxiety. It will almost certainly be fine – but almost is not enough.

When my anxiety is high like this, I feel like I can’t swallow properly or catch my breath. I can’t bear anything touching my throat like a scarf or necklace. It’s very difficult to get or keep food down. I’m tired but can’t sleep, and as a result my fibro pain levels start to spike.

So I’ve had a pretty quiet weekend at home, distracting myself with movies and music, snatching moments of housework every time I feel up to it and crashing back to bed as I feel sick and overloaded again. It’s not a pretty system, but I have to say it’s worked well. My gorgeous girlfriend has kept me company and played rounds of Rummikub and made tempting sandwiches to eat. Sarsaparilla has managed to go a couple of days without maiming any birds, or at least, without bringing them in the house. Zoe tore up one of my couch cushions yesterday but has restrained herself today. My Mum mowed my lawns last week so they look halfway decent now. Impressive teamwork going on at my place!

Looking forward to Monday evening and being able to breathe again. In the meantime, to bed with a book. 

So it turns out I am a bat

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I’ve been experimenting with my sleep patterns since I started the new job with Aceda 6 weeks ago. It has been a continual thorn in my side over the past 6 years that my sleep gears towards nocturnal. It started suddenly after the devastating break up of a long term relationship, I immediately went from being a very morning, waking up with the dawn to have a walk kind of person, to keeping company with the owls and bats.

Many things fed into this over the years, for a couple there I was totally nocturnal, unable to sleep at all until the dawn came and people started to wake up and go about their lives. I kept vigil all the long, lonely nights, baked scones, watched bizarre documentaries on SBS, wrote poetry, wept myself hoarse, and went for long walks when it rained and I figured I’d be the only mad one out on the streets.

When I was very sick with the chronic fatigue and fibro etc getting less than 9 hours would leave me trembling, vomiting, and massively dissociated. Insomnia cycles with nightmares were devastating physically and tipped me into psychosis. The usual treatments for sleep issues didn’t work at all, most sleeping meds do not work on me, the only one that does also leaves me dissociated and half out of my brain for days. Attempting to reset patterns by persistently getting out of bed in the morning and getting in the sun or taking melantonin only made me incredibly ill. I would crack long before any signs of sleep resetting would start.

So, I’ve been quite surprised to discover that I’ve been able to reset my patterns fairly easily over the past few weeks. I’m certainly physically far stronger than I have been, I can even handle one morning a week on a few hours sleep, and I’ve discovered recently there’s one part who seems to exist in a permanent hypo-manic state and doesn’t seem to notice even quite significant periods with little to no sleep. Slightly worrying but also incredibly useful when they’re around…

There’s been a downside I didn’t expect. My mental health isn’t coping with the change at all. Without my late night hours, there are a number of parts of my system who are not getting any time at all. We didn’t realise this. So many new realisations lately.

We are able to get by so much better than we used to in so many ways. One of the big things that has made a difference is the ability to contain distressed parts until we’re safe and alone. So often people say to me “I can’t believe you wrote that post about hating yourself, or painted that image about self harm, you don’t seem that way at all”. And I say back to them – “You haven’t met me at 3am”. How true that is. It’s such a constant surprise to me that people don’t pick that the confident, gracious person who steps onto the stage to read poems about savage pain cannot possibly have written them. When I was younger, triggers would floor me. Vulnerable parts would fall apart in public, switch out and hide in back rooms writing poetry in the journal we carried everywhere. Skinless and devastatingly sensitive we had no capacity to fit in, to conceal our difference or our pain. We’re still painfully raw at times, crying at work, missing the kinds of filters that adults seem to develop where you sit through movies untouched by the world within it. But we’re so much further along than we used to be, and it turns out a huge aspect of this is having hours at night, alone and uninterrupted by the rest of the world, to let out all of those suppressed feelings and those hidden parts.

How much of this is the difference between a child and an adult? How much of this is the distinction we draw between the crazy and the sane? The ‘sane’ still have the capacity to choke it down in public? Something left with which to conceal themselves? No sobbing on the bus, no poetry in the doctors office, mustn’t let them hear you scream…

I need my night hours to be mad. I crave my time in the sun, to be useful, to see friends, to study and work and live. But I need the night. It’s where I do my screaming, where I bleed ink, brew art, it’s the hours where the poems live and Narnia is close. It’s a difficult life to pull off, there’s too many mornings I can’t avoid being sleep deprived and up early, there’s the constant need for vigilence around things like driving and dissociation, cooking and dissociation – another nice burn on the inside of my arm from careless handling of a hot baking tray from a couple of days ago. There’s the risks of sleep deprivation which are serious. It’s a foot in two worlds kind of life, constantly frustrated by my inability to fit properly, to be entirely one thing or the other… It’s also a productive, fulfilling kind of life, sublime and mundane in their proper places, full of art, full of love, light and shadows, the dark and the bright of the moon.

It’s what I have to work with for now. So tonight, I’m a little tired, but I’m sitting up blogging again, past midnight where my thoughts suddenly become clear as snow melt and I feel at home. I belong here and I need this place.

The Dissociation Inc Is Official!

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

We’re registered as a legal entity now, all official and legit. The paperwork arrived in the post today, to much rejoicing!!

Next year some new plans and resources will start to be put into action with enthusiasm. In the meantime, we’re all learning a lot and working hard. Our two face to face groups are going really well and continue to grow and develop every month, providing support for some amazing people struggling with some really tough issues. Our online groups are also going great, our open group now has over 100 members! We are supporting more people with trans and diverse gender needs which is wonderful as that is another under-resourced high stigma area. We’re building bigger networks around Australia and some international too. Ticking along, ticking along. 🙂

Feast Picnic

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Yesterday was the last day of the Feast Festival, a two week queer arts and music event here in Adelaide. It wraps up with a huge picnic and then an after party. I went to picnic with a great group of friends and my girlfriend. We didn’t stay for the after party, by evening most of the crowd has been drinking steadily all day and gets restless. We set off once a few scurmishes involved the police.

It’s been an amazing fortnight, I attended Feast for the first time rather clandestinely last year, when I was not yet out as Bi to most of my networks. This time I’ve got along to dancing, music, theatre, and film events with my gorgeous girlfriend. It’s been an interesting experience to notice what it feels like to kiss in a public place and feel accepted. To hold hands and not be watching the crowd for danger signs. To be surrounded by the incredible diversity within the Queer community and feel like I’m on the inside for once. It’s been powerful to hear and be part of art and stories about being queer. It’s also been surreal, trekking along in the Pride march wondering why people are cheering for us, with us, at us. Buying cute/kitchy little rainbow bracelets to mark the event and remind myself I was here, try to remind myself what it feels like to be at home.

It makes me want desperately to find a way to create events like this in mental health. To make my little campfires for my groups huge events, full of pride, full of sorrow, full of respect for diversity, love. I want to make lonely straight kids feel this kind of acceptance too. I want to see comedy and theatre and films about madness, about the oddballs and the misfits.

I had a fantastic picnic, but when I got home, my head crashed. That’s not uncommon for me. All the triggered things surface and the lonely parts come out to howl the kind of pain I can’t bring out in the daylight without the men in white coats coming. So here in the small hours, there is blogging, there is the journal, my inks, my bath… there is a fresh Terry Pratchett book to read and a promise to my girlfriend that I’ll call her if things get bad. It’s sad. I’m lying in bed with a fan running, wrapped in my new beautiful rainbow sarong, with my little netbook. The screaming in my head has gone quiet, but I know it’s still there, cut off behind a door that’s now closed. My broken toe is a dull ache and my eyes are dust dry. The night is warm and still and silent. Makes me think of a line from Something Wicked This Way Comes;

Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt.

-Bradbury

Here’s to the nights you run.

Dining Table!

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I have a stunning antique dining table! I unfortunately, no longer have a lounge room, but that’s a problem I’m working on. 😉 It’s absolutely beautiful and I adore it, belonged to parents of friends of mine. I need some chairs to go with it, and I’m paranoid about the possibility of Zoe gnawing on it, but just think of the wonderful dinner parties I’ll have now! 🙂 
Working in the area of Eating Disorders lately I’ve noticed that my food issues have taken a little bit of a dive under the extra pressure. Getting a dining table to serve myself meals and enjoy them is one of the things I’m doing to manage that. Whee hee! 🙂