R U OK (Day)?

Posted on by jenthegirlonfire

The post I wrote last week-“Anxiety” was quite unexpectedly timely. Today is national R U OK? Day; a day dedicated to mental health awareness, suicide prevention and the chance to reach out to loved ones and ask “are you ok?” But when asking, it’s not the flippant “how are you?” you might give when chatting to a work colleague over a hurried five minute lunch before meetings, or to a parent in passing at the school gate, but a deep, heartfelt “are you [really] OK?”

The last couple of days, the parenting podcast I have been completely obsessed with lately has focused on mental health. I’m the sort of person that is super slow and lazy with my uptake of technology-a fact my husband can firmly attest to. I resist as long as I possibly can and when I finally submit to whatever that piece of technology is, it becomes like this glorious, secret nugget of wisdom that I feel I have to share with as many people as possible. Like…this podcast. Almost anyone I have seen the past two weeks has heard about it -(you should check it out!) it’s titled The Happy Families Podcast with Dr Justin Coulson. Only, it’s not new – it actually started back in 2014 and podcasts in general are definitely not new, but I’m a technological dinosaur *sigh.*

Anyway, when Miss Six was a young bub, I didn’t read any parenting books, listen to any parenting podcasts and shows. With my fibro so incredibly acute, it was literally one foot in front of the other and our parenting style just haphazardly came to be. It’s only now that I have started to be more intentional with my parenting and listening to podcasts (and this one in particular!) has become a part of my own self-care routine. Frantically driving around today, trying to find the last of Hubby’s birthday presents for tomorrow, I absorbed the last couple of podcasts on mental health and wanted to share a few of their thoughts with you, if I can be so bold as to paraphrase their sentiments. The first thing that struck me was this idea of hopefulness and hopelessness that Dr Coulson and his wife (who cohosts once a week I think) delved into. He referenced two research psychologists, who twenty years ago explored the idea of hope. Their research found that there were three facets or three elements to the concept of hope and that without even one of these elements, then an individual would not be hopeful but hopeless. In short-these three things were spelt out as 1. a goal or an end point 2. a process 3. agency or self-agency (a belief that you can achieve what it is you set out to do). When I heard this, I thought, well, Jiminy Cricket, no wonder so many individuals with chronic illness feel hopeless and in turn feel anxious or depressed. As human beings, we are programmed to a concept of negativity bias-that we give more weight and importance to negative experiences than the positive ones. Take then, not an everyday annoying or negative experience-like missing the bus or being late to a meeting-but persistent and severe episodes of pain and it’s no wonder that it’s hard to feel positive or upbeat and hopeful.

If I use my own personal experience as an example-in the earlier months and even year after the onset of my symptoms-when the pain was so bad I felt it everywhere but my face and I couldn’t leave the house for more than fifteen minutes at a time-I didn’t know when or if this pain would stop or even abate. I didn’t have a set plan on how to improve, because the strategies I had previously used in life were failing me-that is, the more energy I put into trying to beat this thing, the worse the pain seemed to get. And by doing that, I didn’t have faith that I could personally overcome this. I was extremely suicidal. I was hope….less. But luckily, I was surrounded by a few excellent key support people and by nature, I can be very, very stubborn. As the years passed, I slowly improved with the right combination of medications, health therapies and lots of time and lots and lots of money. But it was a lot of trial and error and floods of tears in between.

Over the years, I was often told I was “too sensitive.” The more I heard this, the more I internalised it as a shameful thing, that I should try to control my emotions, hide them, squash them. The problem with that was, that emotions have a way of exploding out of you when you least expect it, the more you try to hide them. (As an aside, theoretically, we know this is a terrible way of dealing with feelings, but in practicality, we still live in a society where the stigma of mental health exists). When I reflect on it now, I think, how can being too sensitive be a bad thing? Now it seems a glorious, amazing thing to be a sensitive being, especially for those around me. I believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that is why I was such a great social worker. I think (though I don’t know), what those people were trying to say, was that by feeling things so deeply, that it served at times to contribute to my anxiety; I expected far more of myself than I would ever expect of others around me and berated myself heavily when I fell short of those expectations. It wasn’t until I developed fibro, that I started to realise that sometimes life is uncontrollable, that bad things happen and you can’t sweat the small stuff. So I started to worry less and less about the small stuff and in turn started celebrating the small things. This was so important in the early days of my diagnosis. On my really bad days, I had to work extra hard to find these small moments of joy, but I actually became very good at finding the silver lining in things. I found unexpected kindness from acquaintances and new friends, as it was often easier to be open about my struggles with them, than those who had known me for a long time. Why? Again, I can’t say for sure-but I think without knowing my history, they saw my current day emotional turbulence against the backdrop of my new diagnosis and could say, that alone sounds hard. And it was. It still can be. But in order to get through that difficult time, I had to learn new and different ways of approaching life and I can say confidently that I like myself far more today than I did pre-fibro. In my day to day, I am not an anxious person, because I’ve had to learn not to be, but in those bigger moments of stress and anxiety, which for me is when something sad and unexpected happens, I hope that when someone asks me “are you ok?”, they will just listen and be present with me, without judgement. When I recently reached out to a dear childhood friend for support, the moment that sticks with me far more than any of her words, was when she sat with me with tears in her eyes. She was present with me. I love her even more now for that moment.

On today’s podcast, one of the strategies they talked about for building hope (hope being so intrinsically tangled with good mental health, because without hope, what is there to look forward to in life?), was to create moments to look forward to or for me, back then in the Big Dark Days, it was also the small, everyday moments of joy that gave life meaning when my future was so uncertain. It had been as small as the smell of the orange blossoms on the walk to playgroup when Miss Six was Miss One, that over time progressed to larger things as my condition improved. The ironic thing is though, that as time passed and the strategies were less necessary to my survival, that my attention to them slipped and it wasn’t until something unexpectedly sad happened, that I realised that those strategies, that I had worked so hard on, were unreachable. The good thing though (ahhhh, there’s that silver lining!), is that we can always work on them again! Hooray! And I have resumed my work on them once again.

I hope this post on R U OK Day has helped you in even some small way-perhaps you might invest more time in your self-care or it might have encouraged you to reach out to a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while. Feel free to leave a comment if something has resonated with you today.

Catch you on the next post!

xxx Jen-The Girl on Fire