Rambling Yogi

Tag: depression

  • Easing into life

    Easing into life

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    The year just past really challenged me to start taking some personal responsibility for the state of my life. I realised just how much of a big difference there is between knowing something and actually putting it into practice. Putting things into practice requires self-awareness, a willingness to let go of current ways, a healthy dose of courage to take action and determination to keep trying. It’s not a easy thing to do and it often isn’t until things fall apart that we’re forced to stop and look at how we’re living.

    These are my big lessons for the year:

    Respect

    In a class recently I was reading out a poem I’ve read many times before but this time one passage resonated with me more than ever.

    As I began to love myself I understood how much it can offend somebody as I try to force my desires on this person, even though I knew the time was not right and the person was not ready for it, and even though this person was me. Today I call it “RESPECT”.

    My first though was my god Clare what have you been doing to yourself and to one of the most important people in your life. I’d been walking around for the last few months with zero respect for where I was at in my own journey and where my partner was at in his. I had all these ideas about what our relationship should be like and who we should be within our relationship. My expectations put a huge amount of pressure on both of us and caused a lot of damage.

    I always had good intentions but I’ve come to realise that even the best of intentions are no excuse for not respecting who someone is and where they’re at. You can’t simply ask someone to be ready and expect them to step up accordingly. In fact, trying to hand someone one of your lessons is essentially stealing from their experience and saying to them I don’t trust you to figure this out on your own.   True growth and change come naturally when the time is right and the person is ready. Needing people (yourself or others) to be different so that you can then be happy is setting yourself up to suffer.

    Accepting someone else really starts with completely accepting yourself. For me accepting myself means reminding myself every day that I am enough just as I am and there is no set of circumstances that will make me more complete.

     

    Reconnecting

    This year for the first time I was challenged about my use of Instagram. When I was asked why I posted all my yoga photos I began to realise that I didn’t really have a great reason. I was quick to defend my daily habit saying that it makes me happy and a lot of people have told me that they like reading the quotes. To that I got the response so you like the attention. And that struck a definite sore spot with me.

    The likes, the comments, the shares I loved it all. The instant little hits of gratification really had become addictive without me even realising. My life had become so focused on my Instagram. I would spend entire days thinking about what I was going to post for the day and looking for the perfect quote. Whenever I would go somewhere new I was always looking for the perfect photo opportunity.

    At first I went into heavy denial. People like the quotes I share, I enjoy taking all the photos and so what if I like the attention. But there was now a sense of guilt with each post. I was now stopping and asking myself why you are actually doing this.  From there I started to get pretty depressed about it. Something that used to make me feel so happy with now making me feel pretty miserable.

    I felt miserable and struggled with this sense of guilt for months. It just didn’t bring me the happiness it used to and I felt like I’d lost a huge part of who I am. That then started to make me feel awful; that a social media account felt like such a huge part of my identity and it became a pretty negative spiral from there. It wasn’t until I really hit rock bottom that I started to get some perspective.

    I decided it was time to do away with the negative frame of mind and time to think creatively. Which brings me to the opportunity cost (the accountant in me comes out). The things you choose not to do, the stuff you miss out on. Basically I began to ask myself what are the alternatives, what can I now do with my time. What does less time on Instagram give me? It gave me a lot more than I expected but the most precious thing it gave me was more space to tune into life and  be mindful. Mindfulness has always been important to me but I had lost touch with what it meant to actually live it.

    While it was hugely confronting initially and I was quite angry, I now see this as one of the greatest gifts I could have been given. It’s balanced me out and helped me to realise what’s actually important to me.

    Uncertainty

    One of the biggest things that brought me undone this year was a fear of uncertainty and change. After having lost my dad this fear got a lot bigger and more real. Having to confront the fact that life is always in flux and the only certain thing is that things will change…well I just wasn’t ready for that. I invested a huge amount of time and energy trying to control things and focusing on what I thought I needed to be happy and secure. In that pursuit I started to lose perspective on the bigger picture and the smallest things became huge issues.

    Things that I knew would help me felt too hard and out of reach.  I didn’t want to accept that I was the only one who could calm myself down and refocus my perspective. I thought that the answer sat with getting certain things in life. Thinking if I just move in with my partner and get a cat then I’ll be happy….really seriously that is what I thought. I need the house, I need the cat and then everything will clam down and I would be happy. I got so stuck obsessing about these life conditions that I stopped being able to see the good things in my life.

    In the very narrow world I created for myself I began to get super anxious whenever I felt like things were out of my control and my needs were under threat. In fact I began to get super anxious about everything, my mind always went to the worst possible scenario, everything was a threat, the smallest things made me stressed off my head and I felt like I had no control over my reactions.

    As it got worse I started to get really overwhelmed. I wasn’t sure what I should do anymore, I just wanted it to stop. I was desperate for some sort of quick fix so that I could get control of my life again. I investigated every possible reason for why it has gotten so bad. I tired changing the pill, quitting coffee, reading self-help books, doing online courses… you name it I was looking into it. I briefly tired a few yoga classes and meditated a few mornings in a row but when there was no instant fix from these things I dropped them again.

    I was impatient as impatient could be, it had been months of things building up to this point and I wanted to find something that would make me better in a day. I wanted there to be one simple answer. In the end it took things falling apart and losing what I was trying to protect for me to see the root of my anxiety.  As is the case with most emotions there was never just one simple thing, there was a complex web of things that contributed to my anxiety and while I hated the place it took me to I value what it has shown me.

    It showed me how trying to control things in order to create a sense of security was actually driving me insane. From there I was able to loosen my grip on trying to control things and ever since then I’ve relaxed my need for certainty and have been able to enjoy life a lot more. Accepting that life will change and I won’t know how or when has made me a lot more engaged in everyday moments. I now feel more able to simply to appreciate life and all it has to offer without expectation or promise.

    It’s been a big year and the biggest lesson of all has been to compassionately accept that I am imperfect and there will be times that I will fall back into old habits, there will be times that things don’t work out and there will be times where I am not my best self. Letting all of that be okay is hard but amazingly liberating. Accepting that I will stumble and it won’t be perfect helps me to cultivate the courage to show up just as I am and keep trying in the face of uncertainty.

    xxx

  • There will be days like this

    There will be days like this

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    There are days where the pain hits me so hard I could almost choke on it. A song will come on the radio that reminds me of my dad and I’m gone – tears are immediately rolling down my face, I can hardly breathe and I find myself doing that loud childlike crying. In the privacy of my car it’s a good release, it helps me to bit by bit comprehend what happened.

    While my brain knows full well what happened, it’s taking my heart a while to catch up, that was until a couple of weeks ago. It was a good girlfriends wedding and the first wedding I’ve been to since I lost my dad. I really hadn’t even contemplated it being a hard day emotionally for me, I was so excited for my girlfriend.

    It started in the church that sinking feeling, the lump in the back of my throat, the first realisation that my dad will never walk me down the aisle, we’ll never share that final smile that says here we go as the doors open. My mind started going to a thousand places but I have quickly reeled it back in not wanting to take away from her amazing day.

    For the next few hours of the night I managed to drop back into normal mode, enjoying the champagne and hanging out with some of my best friends. But then the father of the bride and the father of the groom both got up to do speeches. There was so much in their speeches that I know my dad would have said. All the things that I was going to miss having him around for began to flood in and my heart started to grasp the reality of not having him here.

    My girlfriends took me outside and I let myself cry a little more but not wanting to be so miserable at such a joyous occasion I forced myself to push my feelings back down and went back to an old coping mechanism for numbing. I began to drink a hell of a lot more. I did such a good job of excessive drinking that everything after 9:30pm is completely gone for me; I was proper blackout drunk.

    The next morning, I woke up on a girlfriend’s couch because I’d been too drunk to get my own way home. Not only was I feeling devastated about my dad but I hated myself for having gotten so drunk.  I hated that there was so much of the night that I would never remember and more so I hated that I’d slipped back into something that I’ve worked so hard to stop.

    There was a time in my friendship group I felt like I was the drunk, the liability, the person you couldn’t trust to just have a few drinks. On the outside I played up to the party girl persona but on the inside I hated myself. It became a self-perpetuating cycle; the more I had these completely out of control nights the more I hated myself, the more I hated myself the more I wanted to get blind drunk so that I could disappear and not face myself. It wasn’t pretty and it took my dad getting sick and hitting rock bottom to really force myself out of the pattern.

    For the next few days I hardly slept. I found myself constantly tossing and turning, anxious and upset. I hated the idea of having to really face any of it, it felt too painful to willingly sit with and so I continued with my regular routine and simply hoped that everything would just settle back down in a couple of days.

    To a certain extent it did settle down a little, I stopped feeling like I was going to burst into tears at my computer but it still sat just below the surface and began to manifest itself in different ways. I found myself less able to cope with life, more easily stressed by work, more emotionally reactive to people and quite scattered in general. Still I persevered through the mess not wanting to acknowledge that perhaps I needed to unpack what the wedding had brought up for me.

    But you can only let things sit below the surface for so long before something gives. I thankfully already had a session booked with my psychologist and when I found myself crying on the way there I knew I was in for a tough session. We talked at length about what had happened that night and how I felt. She asked how my dad would have felt about my wedding day would he have been excited? What might he have said in his speeches? Just thinking about it was heartbreaking not only from my perspective of not having him there but also from his perspective. I hate that he doesn’t get to be there, that he doesn’t get to be part of something that I know he would have loved.

    I was finding it hard to answer her questions honestly because the answers felt so painful then she asked me if my dad was excited about having grandchildren one day. I could hardly speak, the thought of him missing out on that part of my life hurt more than anything else. He loved children and was beyond excited about future grandchildren. He would often talk about the things he planned to do with my future children. In that moment my heart broke for him and his dreams that he will never get to live out in this life.

    As I was finding hard to speak my psychologist suggested that I journal about how I felt. She asked me to fully explore what I expected these major milestones to look like with my dad, to go into detail about the part I envisaged him playing and also come up with ways that I could still include him in the future. She suggested that maybe on my wedding day I might like to keep a seat reserved for my dad, acknowledging this presence in a different way and I have to say I really loved that idea. She told me that it would be hard and would bring up a lot of tough emotions but I needed to give myself the time and space to let that pain come out. I agreed that journaling about it sounded like a good idea but when I got home I just felt so emotionally exhausted that I decided that I really couldn’t deal with anything more right now.

    Then the stomach pain started – really severe stabbing abdominal pain that would almost stop me in my tracks. After a week of relentless pain, I went to my GP who cleared me of anything serious and gave no real other explanation expect that sometimes this happens and if it’s still happening in a week come back. I’m a strong believer in emotional issues being connected to physical issues in your body and after that GP visit with no other real explanation I decided that the pain in my gut was perhaps about what I wasn’t emotionally digesting.

    As much as it hurt there was a feeling of disentanglement as I slowly loosened my grip on my shattered dreams. At first I was hardly able to get a sentence down before I fell apart but then slowly as I began to let myself soften into the pain I was able to read back over things and find a sense of peace. I was slowly letting go of the attachment to what I thought my life would be. It won’t ever be what I thought it would be and no one will ever take his place but it will be wonderful in its own way and that I am sure of.

    And as for my stomach the next day it felt about 80% better and it’s almost back to completely normal, you can draw your own conclusions from that…

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    I thought a lot about not publishing this post. Part of me worried about how people would take the honest account of my pain. My initial thought was that I don’t want people to feeling sorry for me and that is the old person who thought that strength was about putting on a brave face for everyone, sucking it up and moving on. But really strength is about vulnerability it’s about being real, talking about the struggle and owning your story. So I give my story a voice here in the hope that it provides a source of strength for others as I believe we are all made stronger by sharing our truth.

    Love and Blessings

    xx