There used to be a time when I would accept nothing less than perfection. I still fight the frustration when I’m not completely perfect.
I’ve come to believe perfectionism it’s a disease. An infection that slowly eats away at your skin until it buries itself into your bone and spreads to every corner of your body like an angry cancer. The growing niggle questioning whether perfectionism is something to be strived for, or maybe, abhorred has become a raging monster, and now, a blog post… (more…)
***Warning*** Audience Participation Required!
What is it that makes us creative? I mean other than the obvious grey matter, neurological synapse firing and conscious and subconscious minds? (more…)
So I pulled my head out of my own arse and after a few slaps to the face, self scalding and deprecation I well and truly got over myself!
When I say I got over myself, I mean I found a muse that inspired me enough to pull my head out my backside and see the light. A muse that made me realise: the piling emails lain untouched in my inbox, the 4000 word assignment still unwritten, the untouched 52K of my baby and my now week long hiatus of my blog, was, in sum, unacceptable.
I appeared to have momentarily tipped into an abyss of self loathing and depression. I do that sometimes… Actually quite regularly. But then I think a lot of writers fight depression or if not then a creative slump or whatever.
This particular slump is connected to a lot of other things I shall try not to elaborate on too much. My dear friend who is a hypnotherapist has agreed to treat me. I am extremely hopeful that she can help me work through whatever crap is going on in my head thats causing my absolute lack of self worth. Anyway…
This muse in particular happens to be a song. I stumbled upon it quite by mistake. I was given a voucher for iTunes for christmas and happened to be browsing the iTunes store and came across this beauty which has been on repeat ever since! Now I must caveat this song with a little explanation of me and music.
I don’t hear lyrics. Like, at all. I constantly sing the wrong words, its a rare occasion I can tell you what a song is actually about. I only hear how the music makes me feel. I hear melody, and tune, and rhythm and beat, but never do I hear lyrics. So I don’t have a scoobies what this song is about either! But I sure do like the way it makes me feel. For the first time this year I felt motivated.
The song is ‘Warrior’ by Imagine Dragons
Has anyone else found a new muse this year? What is it?
I am feeling worse than ever. I saw the above picture today, and I just cried. For me it’s such an inspirational picture. It takes me back to when I was travelling. Reminds me of the breath taking Himalayan mountains I trekked through. The peace I found when I was there. I want nothing more right now than to run away and climb into a big dark hole, hiding away from the world forever.
I want to be that girl in the photo. I should be that girl in the photo. All I ever wanted to do was go to uni and go travelling. Bum around the world for a while, sucking life experiences in and just ‘being’. No responsibilities, no plans, no cares. Coming from someone so anal, and organised I surprised myself at how much I enjoyed travelling. But I really did find a kind of peace when I was away. A kind of silence. Like the silence late at night when it’s snowed or is snowing. When it’s 1am, and nothing moves not even the air… Travelling was my muse, it inspired me, it humbled me and it gave me peace.
I am a shell, a living breathing carcass right now.
The last year has crushed me.
I don’t think I even know who I am anymore.
The stress of my family during the wedding, the job that has sucked every ounce of individuality out of me and forced a monotonous drone of boring beige routine into my life, and worst into me…. but worst of all the fertility issue.
I have been in and out of depression enough over the last 18 months because of ‘life’ but right now… it truly has to be the worst place I have been in…
I just cant cope.
My senior manager told me the other day that he couldn’t believe how well I was coping. He said no one would notice that something so horrific was happening to me. He said that I was really strong, and he was very impressed with my resilience.
It’s a facade. I am a fake. A plastic temporary smile, that I wear for 8 hours a day that drains every last ounce of anything I have in me.
He shouldn’t be impressed. He might think I am still brilliant, I am coasting through the days just to keep myself going. I am on autopilot… again.
I just didn’t picture my life like this, when I think back, this picture, that girl… that’s who I was going to be. I think that’s why the photo has struck such a deep resonance with me.
I have started testing my ovulation again today… when I ovulate this week, we will be flying to Denmark to try insemination.
The wife is so positive that it scares me. I already feel like a failure, my body… my ovaries are inadequate and I don’t want to disappoint her if the insemination doesn’t work. It only has a 25% chance of working at the best of times, let alone with my problems. I am also worried because I have been trying to be really healthy, but I seem to have got a cold this week… that is not going to help me get pregnant… more worries.
Then the thought of actually getting pregnant is also terrifying. All the life changes, I am still trying to get my head around it all, giving up everything I thought I was going to have, that was who I was going to be in my 30’s… not in my mid twenties. The next 5 years were meant to be fun before we tried to have a family…. I just can’t get my head around it. I just can’t. Why hasn’t someone told me it’s all a big mistake yet? WHY?????
I just…
I am in a very dark, very strange, very lonely place right now. Words are failing me, I just can’t explain where my head is. I don’t want to talk to anyone, I don’t want to see anyone, I don’t want to do anything. I can feel myself locking down, and shutting the world out and theres nothing I can do about it. I can’t muster enough ‘me’ to talk about how I feel. I don’t fucking know how I feel. That’s probably the problem. I don’t have words. The complexity of emotions I am feeling right now is indescribable.
I feel bad because I know I should be communicating, but I just don’t want to talk, about anything to anyone. I don’t want to have to justify myself, and I don’t want to explain my feelings. I just want to be quiet and for it all to go away. I want to wake up in the morning and be that girl in the photo…
But I won’t.
I am going to wake up… still be Sacha, still be depressed, still have a job I hate, and still have fertility issues.
I am broken,
I am broken,
I am broken.
Lost, in a dark pit of self loathing, and scornful hatred.
My skin is crawling with the rank stench of pity.
Their pity.
Their pity is anchoring my heavy soul further into this dark pit.
I am a failure.
I am a failure.
I am a failure.
I don’t work. I am abnormal, and I am pitied.
My heart is solidifying with sympathy,
A coal like sludge suffocating the pain inside.
I am pitied.
Their repetitions of comfort agitating my twisted, unstable mind.
I can’t breathe,
I can’t breathe,
I can’t breathe.
I am stewing in a pot of frustration and ‘feeling sorry for myself’.
I am frustrated with the wait. NHS appointment isn’t until the 26th Feb, when we find out if we are eligible for funding, but I am pretty sure we won’t be.
I ovulate before then… so I would lose another chance to get pregnant by waiting for the appointment. But if we go and I am pregnant then i will get spat out the system and not get the funding anyway. What happens if i miscarry or something awful?
So I have to decide do I take the risk and go to Denmark or do I wait and then be pissed off if the NHS wont treat me?
If I go to Denmark then its going to cost. Like 600 quid cost.
I am already in debt cause of the wedding, which I am trying to pay back but it just seems to keep piling on. Plus we will have to move at some point, as we live in a 1 bed, and we cant do that with a baby. (I know theres plenty of time to move, i’m just saying I need to factor it in.)
Moving requires a 1500 quid deposit.
Plus, my car broke last night. Fuel pump. That’s another 250-300 I don’t have that I need to shell out for.
I honestly don’t know why I am being dealt so much shit. This has to be the single worst start to a year I have ever had.
I’ve put weight on ( I know that’s my fault – but seems to be a vicious cycle at the moment)
and, I am falling behind on my studies, because I am constantly trying to fire fight.
I really need to be given a break.
I can feel the weight of everything pushing me down… somewhere dark. My head is falling back into it’s safetynet of depression.
I feel like a failure.
I am trying, beyond trying to stay hopeful and positive. All the books, journals, and articles, say that you need to stay positive. That in order to keep your body positive, and all the hormones in balance, you need to stay positive and hopeful and think of the good outcomes etc etc.
This is easier said than done, everyone suggests to do this, but never really explains how you turn off your incessant, ‘desperately seeking a solution’ brain. I am begging for some ideas, I understand that I need to do its, the logic makes sense, but I just can’t turn my brain off.
There are 7 stages of grief
1. Shock and Denial
2. Pain and Guilt
3. Anger and Bargaining
4.Depression, rejection, loneliness
5. The upward turn
6. Reconstruction and working through
7. Acceptance + Hope
Are grief and hope just two ends of a continuum? Two sides of the same coin?
Currently if I’m not feeling one I am feeling the other.
One minute, I am desperate with grief, sheer panic, an agony so deep inside I don’t know how I am going to pick myself up and dress myself let alone get to work.
The next minute I bounding around full of hope and promise. Certain I will fall pregnant on the first try.
It is exhausting.
Is it possible to feel all stages of grief at the same time? Or do we have to progress down through the seven stages?
I am definitely still in shock, I am struggling to accept that I don’t have many eggs, but more to the point that I will go through the menopause early.
I get slightly excited at the prospect of having a baby, I am still adjusting to the timescale, but I always wanted a family so I am trying to think of the positives and the fact that I am going to get what I want, even if a little early. But then my brain races off and tries to think about all the things I would need to buy and all the planning and moving house, and then I get real and think about how far off that is, the pain and treatments I will have to go through in order to get there, and then….
most horrible of all, the fact it might not even happen.
And thus I fall back into grief all over again.
I am convinced grief and hope are one and the same, part of each other.
I need to understand how to get rid of the grief and stick with the hope.
Today, after all the reading and learning about fertility, it was a little paragraph on wikipedia that made my day:
A 2008 study concluded that diminished reserve did not affect the quality of oocytes and any reduction in quality in diminished reserve women was age related.[6]One expert concluded: in young women with poor reserve when eggs are obtained they have near normal rates of implantation and pregnancy rates, but they are at high risk for IVF cancellation; if eggs are obtained, pregnancy rates are typically better than in older woman with normal reserve.
I guess I just have to take each day as it comes, and try to find a little hope in whatever I can.
One week. One week back in my cesspit hole of a job to feel myself start to tip off the side of sanity all over again.
I hate it. I hate my job so much it infects me. It putrefies my thoughts and tears tiny bits of my soul away, day by day. I can feel myself erupting on the inside over nothing. Something someone says, an insignificant remark makes my mind seethe and my blood burn with angry lust.
I am becoming scarred with bitter frustration.
I am broken.
I have a new boss, and he asked me this week after hearing my story if I had any fight left in me.
“you do don’t you… have fight left in you?” He asked me expectantly.
I just turned my head away. Biting back the tears.
” I don’t know”
And I really don’t know.
My old boss stole my confidence, and crushed my creativity.
” The thing is Sach…” He would say patronisingly.
“You got a big personality. You just need to be a bit less Sacha… you know?”
Cunt.
He hated me. He hated what I represented and made sure I knew it.
I am disgusted with myself that I could let a man beat me down and crush me the way he did, the way work has.
He left, but I have given up. I have nothing left, no fight, no drive, no ambition.
My entire being is bruise and I am exhausted.
I am Sacha, and I am beautiful, but, I am utterly broken.
I am watching my life through Eden’s eyes.
I am at his mercy.
My glass was always half empty, so I didn’t really notice it becoming less and less full. Eden didn’t arrive with some grandeur entrance, he snuck quietly into my life and changed everything. But nothing was sudden, and I always thought it would be.
I will never see the world through the naive eyes I used to have. Those eyes are gone. They were taken from me. Stolen. He stole them. Eden selfishly took them for himself; replacing them with his old broken ones. The tragedy is, I didn’t notice. Not until I was already looking through his battered eyes.
Until I met Eden, I didn’t actually understand the concept of numb. To really feel nothing.
‘Nothing’, is like infinity.
You can’t conceptualize infinity, and you can’t really imagine ‘nothing’ either. But, I feel nothing. No happiness, no sadness, no pain. Eden took it all away, piece-by-piece. Now I watch my life play out through his eyes.
My life is Eden’s phantom limb. I see it, but it isn’t really there. I used to feel it, but now there’s nothing.
All I can do is look through Eden’s window whilst he torments me. Makes me watch whole days pass by, actions, movements, people. Still I feel nothing. I look at my life, like a leg submerged in water, the ripples make it seem detached, disjointed somehow.
Every day he tears another piece of my soul off, ripping it apart and letting it crumble into ashes.
Eden was my dirty little secret. I was ashamed of him, because I was strong. I was meant to be unbreakable.
But he broke me so easily. I am weak. Useless.
I don’t remember how we met, but now I fight him every day. I beg him to leave, plead with him; and when he doesn’t I punish myself for ever meeting him.
I don’t want him in my life any more, but I am trapped. I am only a phantom limb.
By Sacha Black.
Eden is my depression.
Boredom is like a virus.
It’s a disease.
It starts with a unitary cell and spreads slowly and calculatingly through your whole body, until your entire being is depressed.
One brain cell, followed by another, and another, and then it spreads to your blood stream and into your muscles. Fatigue swells through your limbs and fights the nodules of energy in your muscles; causing you to feel restless and itchy.
It makes your whole body ache with irritation. You want to resort to childhood tantrums, except you can’t because you’re at work and it’s not allowed. You can feel your soul wriggling around inside you tempting you to do something naughty or inappropriate, just to explode out of the boredom.
The problem is, boredom isn’t momentary. Once you are bored, it infects everything. Suffocating your motivation, and drains you of energy.
When I am busy, I get lots done I am efficient, effective, and creative. But when I don’t have enough to do, I get angry. My inner hulk, is awakening, I can feel the familiar burn of rage brewing deep in my gut. I want to lash out at everyone because I am frustrated, but I can’t. They haven’t done anything. It’s me. I am frustrated at my situation, I am unhappy, but worst, I am bored. Bored of the same 8 hours a day, miserable at the lack of challenge, and tired of being surrounded my uneducated, close minded idiots.
Boredom is a virus. I am infected. I am contagious.
Sacha Black 