An awful lot has happened in the last couple of weeks. I'm a little overwhelmed by it all but also trying to settle into a rhythm of living. Which is difficult when life itself doesn't really have a rhythm at all. Most days I have nothing to do - I suppose I could say that my current "job" is to get better, but really that's about as helpful as saying I'm a lazy arse who's sponging off benefits. Sometimes the weeks go quickly and I feel like I've achieved nothing, and sometimes they go slowly and painfully. It's a very strange place to be because there's no real plan for how to get from where I am now to being able to work. It's that lack of direction that is most difficult. So in the interest of reminding myself how I am actually doing better in ways I just don't notice, here is a list of the things I have done/achieved in the last week.

1. I went swimming.
2. I have eaten a healthy breakfast each day and remembered to take every single medication I'm on at the same time.
3. Although I haven't had great nights' sleep, I have been going to bed by midnight and getting up around 9am every day.
4. I have sorted out all of my money problems to the best of my ability.
5. I have been keeping my flat tidy, not perfectly so, but it's not a tip.
6. I have been doing clothes washing.
7. I have only neglected to have a bath once or twice in the last few weeks.
8. I have written and run a 3-day LRP event.
9. I have acknowledged that it's okay for me to want to celebrate my birthday, and organised it.
10. I have survived being on my own for 90% of the time, and being away from my boyfriend.
11. I have made my parents proud of me.

I have to stop on that last one because it made me cry, but I think the ease with which I wrote all of those should prove a point to me. Enough said.

Home Sweet Home

It's purple, though with my terrible camera it's quite hard to tell. There's a new duvet cover, we got curtains up, and all sorts. I'm basically all moved in - the main gaps in my inventory now are a cooker, but I'll be making do with my microwave for a very long time because cookers are so expensive. I managed to plumb the washing machine in myself today. Never done that before, but it was quite simple. And yes there's all sorts going wrong here like yet another pipe is leaking (not badly) and it took them a while to fix the door but it's getting there. Money things are a bit arse over tit, but hopefully those will get sorted soon.

This is mostly a post to say hello, I'm alive, this is what I've been doing. Normal service will resume as soon as possible. Oh, and here is a gratuitous living room shot. Boyfriend did not come included with the flat.

Silencing Myself

Many people internalise a critical voice. For most people, this voice is the voice of someone from their past; a very demanding parent, an abuser, some sort of important figure from the person's life who has had such an influence that their voice is present and critical of all that they do. I have one of these, and it has very high standards that it expects me to meet, and critiques and analyses everything I experience and try. It has a black and white view of the world: I either succeed, or I do not. There is no try.

It would help me to have this voice go quiet, so that I can do things and be proud of them and not analyse everything I do with intrinsic scrutiny. Unfortunately, it's rather hard to silence yourself consciously without simply causing yourself to be all the louder. Because my critical voice inside me is me - or at the least the person that I think I should be - and so it's not only hugely difficult to shut it up but I also feel like I ought not to do it, like I should be trying to embrace and accept this part of me instead.

Because this has such a huge effect on how I deal with things, nay how I even exist from moment to moment, my psych is considering putting me onto a new form of treatment (on top of my psycho-dynamic therapy) - Mindfulness. Google it and you'll find that it's a meditation-based technique based on a Buddhist teaching. It looks interesting. It also looks like the sort of thing that I've tried in the past and failed, mostly out of trying to learn it myself from a few websites. But I'm excited about it, and we'll see how it goes.

Breaks and Guilt

After my pretty bad day on Monday, yesterday proved to be very profitable with the boyfriend and I going to the flat and finishing off all the decorating. Here is a gratuitous shot of the living room now that it is no longer salmon pink:

Isn't it lovely? The blue is awesome. It's a bit more slate blue when it dries fully, but it's really calming and cosy all at once. I am also very pleased with the horrible 70s stone in its new white form.

However, I am not actually here to blog about my flat, exciting though it is. I am here to blog about the pretty weird day I've been having. After speaking to my mum last night she advised me to take a couple of days off before the busy weekend (where we are driving up to Norfolk, filling a van with all my belongings and moving me in etc). So I'm trying to do that. Only I feel very guilty for having days off, because there's a bit of my head that says "well it's not like you go to work like everyone else, what have you got to be tired about" and so on. What that means is that I just don't relax very well.

This in turn creates a circle of guilt, because by not relaxing properly I am letting myself and those close to me down. (I'm aware that much of this may not be logical; I am trying to preserve the thoughts as they appear in my head because then you can see the place I have to work from). This makes me feel worse, relax less, and then we link round into the beginning again.

I've signed up for a study into the helpfulness or otherwise of online support groups for mental illness. It involves joining a forum and participating to get help and advice. I'm really not sure how to approach it, at the moment, and I keep getting thrown by the fact that I read threads where people have low self-esteem and think to myself "but people are awesome, all people - even those that have bad qualities are still really complex and interesting and worthy people, how can you not see how wonderful you are". A small voice in my head crops up at this point and wonders why I can't apply this point of view to myself.

Still, we'll see how it goes. If nothing else I will at least be able to tell myself that I contributed usefully to the study.