breathe by Becky Hemsley
This is a wonderful poem.
She sat at the back and they said she was shy,
She led from the front and they hated her pride,
They asked her advice and then questioned her guidance,
They branded her loud, then were shocked by her silence,
When she shared no ambition they said it was sad,
So she told them her dreams and they said she was mad,
They told her they’d listen, then covered their ears,
And gave her a hug while they laughed at her fears,
And she listened to all of it thinking she should,
Be the girl they told her to be best as she could,
But one day she asked what was best for herself,
Instead of trying to please everyone else,
So she walked to the forest and stood with the trees,
She heard the wind whisper and dance with the leaves,
She spoke to the willow, the elm and…
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That
You know that feeling when you’re walking on ice and suddenly lose your footing?
The seemingly endless time when you’re floating in the world of possibilities,
will you manage to stay upright or fall to earth with a bang?
The time when you’re still standing, just, but with no firm foundation beneath you?
That.
Every Tragedy Is Your Tragedy
24 hour media with its cacophony of bad news
drowning out the quiet good.
The clashing, clunky, destructive images crashing into your consciousness,
of all the naked pain of the world.
Every tragedy is your tragedy.
Tomorrow.
I’m aware that I’m emerging from sleep, I try to cling on but it has gone. I open my eyes and stretch out my hand to the mini Tardis that is my bedside clock, hoping that it’s early enough I can stay in bed. 9.30. Nope. If I don’t get up my parents will be up. Reluctantly I remove my ear plugs, actually an old pair of earphones with the cords cut off. The sounds of the world intrude into my mind. I talk myself into getting up and emerge from my room, calling out a cheery, that I don’t feel, ”morning” down to my parents. Most days I get a sarcastic “afternoon” but thankfully I am spared that witticism today. The witticism that always makes me feel like crying. I emerge from the bathroom, head back the few steps to my bedroom and sit back on the bed I have recently vacated. Often I lay back down, when I can feel secure that neither parent or brother will appear. Hearing the footsteps on the stairs I rapidly and silently sit up so it appears I’m just sitting, reading or tweeting. When I cry it is silently, and constantly on the alert for the footsteps, if I hear them I rapidly dry my face and become engaged on concentrating on something so that I can keep my face turned away. My voice cheerfully responds, this is so usual to me I sometimes even convince myself. I get called downstairs to collect my mid-morning hot chocolate. Put on my downstairs face and then relax again when I am back in my bedroom, the door shut behind me. I spend the rest of the morning trying to make myself do something, anything constructive. I usually fail. The afternoon is spent reading and napping. I can relax, my afternoons are rarely interrupted by parental intrusion. The ’nap’ usually lasts several hours and the whole afternoon is spent laying down. I feel guilty that another day is passing with no exercise or household chores accomplished. I am months behind with tearing off the days on my page a day Doctor Who calendar. No one seems to notice. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will go outside. Tomorrow I will get exercise. Tomorrow I will do some chores. Always tomorrow.
‘Normal Life’
Lately I’ve been increasingly struck by the fact that as well as the people who just don’t care about poverty, there are a lot of people who genuinely don’t understand. Recently I came upon a Twitter conversation about what exactly a Staycation is. One person had pointed out that a holiday in the UK is still a holiday and that a Staycation was when you are based in your own home and go out for day trips. The other person replied ”but that’s just normal life.” I know he honestly felt that and was bewildered, but no, for huge swathes of people that isn’t normal life. My family had a Staycation once (although that term hadn’t been invented then), at that point we hadn’t been able to afford a holiday for nine years. We were really excited about going for days out, we never went on days out if we weren’t away on holiday. The only place we went usually was to our school summer fete, for a couple of hours each year. As I recall we went to Battle on one of the days, Hastings on another. (We were living in Bexhill) One of the days we went on an all day walk from our house and took a picnic. I can’t recall the other places we went that week, but all were in a similar vein. We had a brilliant time and it was a real break. Whether you mean it that way or not, calling a holiday a Staycation is really dismissive and disrespectful to other people’s experience.
Another holiday based assumption came from a Twitter friend, who I know to be a very nice man, who said self-catering in this country was as expensive as a holiday abroad. It turned out his idea of self-catering and mine were very different. He meant a luxury detached cottage in the Lake District, I meant a flat in a seaside block of self-catering apartments or a caravan where you provide all your own bed linen. (We used to take a shopping trolley full of bed linen on the train to our holiday destinations, as well as our luggage.)
A couple of days ago I came upon another example of this assumption of wealth. I mentioned that ‘my’ supermarket has lots of gaps on the shelves and was told to go to another one then. I pointed out that we have no transport and therefore go to the nearest one and then they said ”well order online then.” I said we can’t afford the minimum spend and delivery costs and he said scornfully ”you can’t afford £40?” That is a lot of money to people. In truth my family is better off now than we’ve ever been, by which I mean we no longer have to buy all our clothes in charity shops or add up the cost of the shopping as we put it in the basket – things we did for the whole of my childhood. We do now usually get a food delivery before Christmas, but we can’t afford to do that on a regular basis even now. And there are many many people currently worse off than we are. They can’t afford large minimum orders and delivery costs. What to some seems like paltry sums is in fact a lot of money to many.
At one point in my childhood we were homeless, we stayed with a succession of friends and family, often my parents were in one county and my brother and I in another, so that we wouldn’t miss school. Nearly all our things were being stored in a number of people’s garages and we had no access to them. It wasn’t a fun time. On another occasion we were living in a tiny 2 bed very damp flat with no bathroom. My brother slept in the lounge and when he was ill once it meant we had no communal area to use. Worst was the fact there was no bathroom. There was a shower (that didn’t work properly) in the tiny corridor the other rooms opened off of. The curtain didn’t cover all of it. It was either freezing or boiling, literally. My parents and brother gave up with it and just had strip washes all the time we were there. I used to bung up the drain in the shower tray and alternate the water until I got a reasonable temperature and then take a ’bath’ in the few centimetres of water it held. Which was where I was when my brother brought a schoolfriend home once. I desperately covered my humiliated teenage body as best as I could whilst they passed.
I’m only telling you these things to try to make you challenge your assumptions about what “normal life” is for very many people. We were fortunate, at our poorest at least the benefit system meant we could afford food, albeit watching every penny. These days the changes to housing benefit have pushed many people into foodbanks. Housing benefit usually doesn’t cover the cost of housing any more and people need to spend other benefit money, that my family would have spent on food, on keeping a roof over their heads. There are so many other examples I could give of people just not thinking about what life is like for a great many other people. Normal life for many is a constant struggle, every brown envelope striking terror into you of another bill you can’t afford. Knowing exactly how much money to the penny you have to spend in a supermarket and adding it up as you go round to make sure you can afford it. Buying all your clothes in a charity shop, knowing your kids will get bullied for wearing things that aren’t fashionable. At least these days there are Primark and Ebay I guess, neither of which existed when I was young. Which reminds me of another thing that gets to me, people who make others feel bad for buying clothes from cheap shops. I do understand the genuine ethical concerns about sweatshops and so on, but expecting people who are only eating because of food banks to be able to choose to buy anything but the cheapest garments to clothe their children is unreasonable and unfair.
Just because something is normal life to you doesn’t mean it is to other people. Not having to worry about money all the time is a privilege like any other.
A fate worse than life?
I think one of the things that people without mental health problems most struggle to understand is lack of motivation. They think of it in terms they recognise, a day feeling a bit demotivated maybe, a lazy weekend without getting much done. That isn’t what we mean when we talk about a lack of motivation, what we mean is an almost total inability to get yourself to do much of anything. The effort it takes to do the simplest thing is more extreme than you could imagine. I had even lost sight myself of just how bad my day to day energy and motivation levels are. I had lived them every day for many years and I had become totally accustomed to struggling fiercely to do anything. Shortly after the start of the first lockdown, for reasons I explained in a previous blog, I felt the best I had felt for a decade and a half or more. I truly couldn’t believe the incredible difference in me. Everything became so easy and effortless, I got so much done and it wasn’t even a strain. I was enthusiastic and excited and I found myself wondering why on earth I hadn’t done some of my hobbies in years and was going to take them up again – I had to consciously remind myself that that was something that had seemed impossible to even contemplate before, it seemed so alien. I really can’t put into words the extent of the contrast that time was with my normal self. Sadly it didn’t last and I am now back where I was. But the knowledge of how far below ‘normal’ I am in motivation and energy haunts me in a way it didn’t before. I now know once again how my life could be if my mental health was better. As it is everything is a struggle, everything requires the most enormous effort to do and doing it exhausts me both physically and mentally. You get stuck in a morass of doubt and guilt and anxiety. Why can’t I do things? I should be doing things. Other people do these things without a second thought, why not me? I’m letting other people down. No wonder I’m single. My parents are ashamed of me. What use am I? I’m more trouble than I’m worth. I wish other people understood how hard it is to be me. I wish I wasn’t me.
Don’t you get it, it’s a pandemic and people are dying?!
I have seldom been so angry. I don’t care what the reason there is NO excuse for holding mass gatherings in the middle of a pandemic. What will it take to make these idiots realise the risks they are causing for other people? The people who have been shielding for a year must be so hurt that you don’t care about their lives, you don’t care about their liberties. You don’t care about them at all. Holding a vigil won’t bring Sarah back, it won’t make misogyny disappear. What it will do is spread Covid and kill people. Do you really think she’d want that? The pandemic should be our only priority at the moment. Beleaguered nurses and doctors have been working under appalling stress and pressure for more than a year, they must cry to see thousands of people gathering without any thought for them or our beloved NHS. These people are UTTERLY selfish and thoughtless and to turn it around and blame the police for enforcing laws designed to save lives is typical. It’s always someone else’s fault to these people. Take responsibility for your own actions for once, if you hadn’t been there there wouldn’t have been any police response! Know that you gathering might cause a child to lose its mother. I hope that is on your conscience. Remembering someone whose life was taken away, is no excuse for putting other families through that same pain.
I Fight My War Alone.
Why is it so hard to speak my truth?
To admit just how much I struggle and let life run over me?
Is it because I’m afraid people won’t want to talk to me any more?
Is it because I don’t want them to think I’m moaning or being negative or feeling sorry for myself, although it is all those things too.
Perhaps it’s that I know they all have their own battles to fight.
I fight my war alone.
I drift, trying my best to fill in time until I’m allowed to be released into nothingness.
Passing days marked by the passage of tears, long days and longer nights.
I am the only person on Earth still awake,
stranded amid the vastest desert,
alone.
My crying irrigates the desert until I am struggling in a maelstrom of rapidly flowing, violent water.
Swept against rocks I am battered and pummelled but still there is no escape for me.
Thrown ashore on a strange coastline I am stranded,
beyond hope.
It's a Topsy Turvey world! 