Music Monday: Amanda Fucking Palmer!
17 Sep 2012 1 Comment
in Monday Theme, music Tags: the life of erin, growth, quotes, mental illness, happiness, music, comfort, amanda palmer, monday theme, self-care
For those of you who know me in ‘real life’ or happen to live in my building (or my neighbourhood I’ve been rocking out so hard), you know that I am COMPLETELY in love with the new Amanda Palmer album, Theatre is Evil. So this Monday post is clearly dedicated to music.
I was a fan of The Dresden Dolls before Amanda branched out on her own in 2008 with Who Killed Amanda Palmer. That album reached me like both a security blanket and a giant statement of flaunting your fuckedupness (yes, I’m making up words now):
My friend has problems with winter and autumn.
They give him prescriptions and shine bright lights on him.
They say it’s genetic, they say he can’t help it, they say you can catch it – but sometimes you’re born with it.
~ Runs in the Family
The track I sung along loudest to was The Point of it All:
She spends a few days at a time on the couch but she says
She wears shades, she wears shades…And just ’cause they call themselves experts
It doesn’t mean sweet fuck all…
And Another Year gave me comfort about the standstill my life was in. Amanda Palmer got it.
Gradually her lyrics became more positive until she grew into the fabulous flourishing star who I’m dying to be best friends with. Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under was my anthem ever since it was released in 2011. The track In My Mind is pure self-esteem boosting lyrics of love.
This past May, Amanda Palmer announced a Kickstarter project to offset the costs of her recently recorded album and upcoming world tour. The original goal of $100, 000 turned into a profit of $1.1 million dollars.
“I think kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms like this are the BEST way to put out music right now – no label, no rules, no fuss, no muss. Just us, the music, and the art,” Amanda writes on the Kickstarter page. WE ARE THE MEDIA is one of her sayings.
She’s giving away her new album for free, but I paid for mine to support her amazing self and her amazing cause. And oh yeah, she’s married to Neil Gaiman. Is there a better duo in the whole fucking world?
So before I share a bunch of her videos under the cut, read some of these lyrics from Lost:
No one’s ever lost forever
When they die they go away
But they will visit you occasionally
Do not be afraid
No one’s ever lost forever
They are caught inside your heart
If you garden them and water them
They make you what you are
We can do the same with mental illness. Integrate it into our lives until it makes us who we’ve grown to be in wellness. So click “more” to watch some Amanda Palmer videos. I’m off to go buy a ukulele now!
More
Share love & it grows; share sorrow & it lessens.
15 Sep 2012 4 Comments
in Fun, Reviews Tags: articles, asking for help, crisis, emergency, links, mindyourmind.ca, positive thinking, quotes, suicide
I’ve had all of these tabs open for over a week, planning on posting about each one of them and today I’ve realized that this is ridiculous. It’s time for one big sharing post!
Let’s start with the graphic I paired with this post. It’s been floating around Tumblr and I can’t find a source, unfortunately, but it hits the nail on the head with incredible precision. When I’m feeling depressed, it makes me feel a thousand times worse when someone tells me to cheer up because someone in the world is suffering more than I am. Not only does that message make me feel guilty for feeling bad but then I become overwhelmed with all the pain in the world and how helpless we all can feel. Next time you feel guilty for being depressed, remember this picture! Think about how silly it would be to tell a kid who’s happy about a lollipop to stop smiling because someone in the world owns a whole candy factory. It’s like one of my favourite Mark Twain quotes:
“Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.”
Going Public With Depression by Kat Kinsman on CNN Living reminds me of the biggest reason I’m coping with my mental illnesses today: I spoke up after being silent for so long. In volunteering and later working for mindyourmind I started to share my story to help other people and doing so has kept me afloat. Kinsman’s article covers her experience with depression and provides links to many other authors and websites who inspired her to reach out and speak up.
Speaking of mindyourmind, I am super excited about their updated Help pages. As always, they provide useful tips and links for helping oneself and for helping a friend, but now they go one step further to explain everything you might need to know when first reaching out. I helped a lot with the initial redesign of the Help pages, especially the “waiting safely” part, in the section called . With my experience of attempting suicide several times, I am familiar with that horrible stage of waiting for help to arrive in an emergency. Most websites don’t go through the details of reaching out for help, waiting for help, and taking care of oneself in a crisis, but mindyourmind takes that crucial step.
What has inspired and motivated you this week?
Making New Memories
10 Sep 2012 6 Comments
in memory, Monday Theme Tags: change, coping, depression, friendship, goals, growth, memories, school, social anxiety, suicide
My trip away to attend my cousin’s wedding and visit my longtime friend in Salem, Massachusetts was amazing. Simply amazing. So great that in coming home I felt liberated, having witnessed true happiness and seeing so many new things. The world felt fresh and I spent my plane ride home making plans on how I could change my life for the better.
After landing back in Ontario, however, my mood sunk as I readjusted to home life. I always forget how busy the city gets again come September. Especially now that students from all over are back in town for school, my whole neighbourhood is teeming with people. Not only does my anxiety rise along with the swelling streets, deep down I’m still jealous of these students who seem so happy with their lives. Everyone starting or returning to school has a plan for their life and I don’t. I have small hopes for myself but I am so bitter about mental illness weighing me down.
I suppose recognizing reaching any goals is a good start. I actually never thought I’d meet my friend in Salem; we’ve been online friends for ten years but we only just met this past week. Meeting her was so amazing yet felt so natural. Beside her I recognized that good things can happen if we try hard enough. The second I had some spending money about six months ago I thought, “Why not make this happen?”
So I found a way, even though I probably “should have” saved that money to help myself get by this winter. The money wasn’t wasted however, it was invested in the best of ways. Memories do have a way of keeping us warm, don’t they?
In keeping up with my new trend of posts on Mondays, today I’m emphasizing the importance of making new memories for yourself. Good ones! Because even though we can get weighed down by life, we can always make new things happen and use those new memories to sustain ourselves.
Today is also World Suicide Prevention Day. Why not message a friend to remind them of a great memory you two share? Or make note of your favourite memory and put it somewhere to remind you of the good next time you’re struggling. Memories are worth staying alive for, whether it’s making new ones or hanging on to old ones, or a bit of both.
Mondays: Music, Memories & Medication
27 Aug 2012 3 Comments
in Medication, medication, Monday Theme Tags: books, depression, medication, psychiatrist, quotes, travel
Along with music and memories, I’ve chosen the third “M” word for Monday’s themed posts to be medication. It’s the largest reason I am still alive today, still breathing, and functioning enough to write here.
I have to spend a chunk of this week making sure I have enough medication to take with me on my upcoming travels. My psychiatrist wrote me a note this morning to explain my many bottles of pills (they all have to be in their original containers) in case they get me held up at the airport.
Medication is a huge topic which I would like to introduce merely with a quote today. It is from The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon, the very best book I’ve read on depression.
“Since I am writing a book about depression, I am often asked in social situations to describe my own experiences, and I usually end by saying that I am on medication.
“Still?” people ask. “But you seem fine!” To which I invariably reply that I seem fine because I am fine, and that I am fine in part because of medication.
“So how long do you expect to go on taking this stuff?” people ask. When I say that I will be on medication indefinitely, people who have dealt calmly and sympathetically with the news of suicide attempts, catatonia, missed years of work, significant loss of body weight, and so on stare at me with alarm.
“But it’s really bad to be on medicine that way,” they say. “Surely now you are strong enough to be able to phase out some of these drugs!” If you say to them that this is like phasing the carburetor out of your car or the buttresses out of Notre Dame, they laugh.
“So maybe you’ll stay on a really low maintenance dose?” They ask. You explain that the level of medication you take was chosen because it normalizes the systems that can go haywire, and that a low dose of medication would be like removing half of your carburetor. You add that you have experienced almost no side effects from the medication you are taking, and that there is no evidence of negative effects of long-term medication. You say that you really don’t want to get sick again. But wellness is still, in this area, associated not with achieving control of your problem, but with discontinuation of medication.
“Well, I sure hope you get off it sometime soon,” they say.
So as I travel to visit family and a best friend over the next two weeks, I will take my medications with me. I will take them everywhere with me until the day I die because they simply keep me alive. I am very grateful.
Homewood, Part One: The IMAP Program
20 Aug 2012 6 Comments
in memory, Monday Theme Tags: coping, homewood, IMAP, ontario, programs, PTSD, PTSR, recovery, support, the life of erin
It’s week two of my Monday themed posts on music, memories, and a third “M” word that I have yet to hear suggestions about (comment with your idea for the M theme!). Today I’m wrapping the memory idea around a request I’ve received to talk about my time spent at Homewood Health Centre in Guelph, Ontario.
I’ve been to Homewood three times. The first time I was eighteen and did their Integrated Mood and Anxiety Program (IMAP). I learned so much but didn’t put it into practice once I got home. After all, “self-care” does sound pretty cheesy, and it took me six long years before I could realize how much I needed to take an active role in my recovery. After doing the IMAP program for the second time in 2009 I was able to do so.
Going back to Homewood was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Shame and self-loathing had me as their prisoner, but I fought them to get my life back.
Homewood has huge waiting lists even if you can afford to pay out-of-pocket. If you live in Ontario, the waiting list is incredibly long for the province to cover your stay. If you live outside of Ontario, the wait list tends to be shorter overall. Whenever I called Homewood’s admitting department, all they could tell me was that I needed to wait “a few more months.” Then with only four day’s notice, they called and I had to drop everything to be admitted into their eight week program.
(Please note that the programs at Homewood have likely changed in small ways since I was there, but their overall attitudes and approaches towards wellness should remain the same.)
I was fucking terrified to be there but somehow I did it one day at a time. The Integrated Mood and Anxiety Program feels like a school about depression and anxiety. We received a packed schedule that outlined our tasks for each day: getting up, breakfast, a mandatory walk outside, then usually two groups before lunch. Then there were two groups after lunch before a five o’clock dinner, and most evening groups were optional. We had groups on Anxiety and Stress, Leisure and Lifestyle, Self-Esteem, Return to Function (ie. school and work life), and Spirituality, to just name a few.
Homewood works on the bio-psycho-social-spiritual framework, and so wellness is approached in all directions, in every way possible. This means that medication wasn’t the only focus, neither was psychotherapy. Both of those treatments were explored, but so was everything from exercising to goal setting to being social. And at Homewood they kindly guide you to practice what they preach. At the beginning of your stay you have to set goals for your time at Homewood and the staff there help you break down your goals into weekly pieces for you to work on. If you say you want to practice self-care, they ask you to specify what you are going to do to take care of yourself. I often said I would do some art or walk to the book store. At the end of the week there would be a small group where everyone would go over their goals and talk about whether they were able to do what they planned for that week.
I left the IMAP program with a practiced habit of doing things that make me feel good. I started doing art every day and seriously, doors of inspiration opened up into my life. I remember telling my parents and my friends that I suddenly understood how everyone else in the world can enjoy life. They do things that they enjoy! And even as I type that, it’s like UM, DUH in my head, but really, when a person is depressed, it’s SO hard to remember what feels good or why you should do those things.
I honestly can’t recommend Homewood enough if you are serious about getting better. In addition to helping me reach my goals and start enjoying life again, my time in the IMAP program connected me with people again. Up until then I was SO ashamed of my depression. I thought I was this giant freak and I hated myself so much for being in pain. But the greatest thing about Homewood is that you go through their programs alongside people just like you. The IMAP program had about 30 other patients in it with me, and so we all learned at the same pace. I no longer felt like a freak because I was surrounded with people who knew depression and pain and isolation. Everyone was on board to get better so we encouraged each other along the way.
New patients came every week and patients left every week as they began and ended their programs respectively. Once I’d been in the IMAP program for a few weeks, I started feeling very passionate about helping the new patients adjust to the hospital and feel welcomed and safe. I started to find my footing in helping people go where I’d been before. Within two years I was hired at mindyourmind and now I write a mental health blog.
So this concludes Part One of my talk on Homewood. Next time I will post about doing the Program for Traumatic Stress Recovery (PTSR) a year after I did the IMAP program. The program was similar but also different in many ways. IMAP opened the door to my recovery and PTSR helped me step through that door.
Sadness, I’m Your Girl
13 Aug 2012 5 Comments
in Monday Theme Tags: blessing, monday, music, sadness, speaking, theme, video
I want to start a theme for Monday posts, giving me one of three options to write about:
Music, a Memory, or ().
What should it be? Share your ideas in the comments!
I’m starting with music this Monday. Lykke Li’s Sadness is a Blessing has completely mesmerized me since I first heard it almost a year ago. It’s a sensual and upbeat song with a steady heartbeat-like rhythm. The official music video tells a speechless story that can be interpreted many ways. In fact, I interpret it differently almost every time I watch it.
I listen to this song when I need assurance that it’s okay to feel however I’m feeling. Sadness is painful, yet it’s a huge part of life, and this song embraces that. Along with the video, it sends the message to dance to your sadness’ rhythm, even when others around you are silent and judgmental. The chorus says to me, I am not my pain or my diagnosis or the product of your stigma. I am ME.
I played the song on repeat during the hours leading up to the Distress Centre’s Annual General Meeting last September. By the time I stood at their podium to tell my story, I held sadness in my hand and shared my heartbeat with the room. I stood on steady legs that knew I was right where I was meant to be. I turned sadness into a blessing. Sadness, I’m your girl.
Sadness is a Blessing
by Lykke LiMy wounded rhymes make silent cries tonight
My wounded rhymes make silent cries tonight
And I keep it like a burning
Longing from a distanceI ranted, I pleaded, I beg him not to go
For sorrow, the only lover I’ve ever knownSadness is a blessing
Sadness is a pearl
Sadness is my boyfriend
Oh, sadness I’m your girlThese scars of mine make wounded rhymes tonight
I dream of times when you were mine so I
Can keep it like a haunting
Heart beating close to mineSadness is a blessing
Sadness is a pearl
Sadness is my boyfriend
Oh, sadness I’m your girlI ranted, I pleaded, I beg him not to go
For sorrow, the only lover I’ve ever known
Every night I rant, I plead, I beg him not to go
Will sorrow be the only lover I can call my own?Sadness is a blessing
Sadness is a pearl
Sadness is my boyfriend
Oh, sadness I’m your girl
Sadness is my boyfriend
Oh, sadness I’m your girl
Oh, sadness I’m your girl
Just Breathe
06 Aug 2012 2 Comments
in Day-to-Day Life Tags: anxiety, books, breathe, breathing, coping, grounding, PTSD, self-hypnosis, trauma
When I’m stressed out — which is pretty much always — I can get into a place emotionally that prevents me from breathing deeply. I physically can’t fill my lungs up with air. It’s gotten to the point where if I’m in a group that is practicing deep breathing (many trauma-centered groups do this) I simply stare at the ground and wait for everyone to be finished because I can’t join in. No matter how hard I try, it just doesn’t work.
Thank God I came across self-hypnosis. You might remember me blogging about it before; it was my miracle cure to easing my stomach pain that had prevented me from eating anything but the blandest food for years. The book helped me record my own tape by reading aloud some of their techniques.
Yesterday I woke up with more stomach pain than usual, and since my puppy was still asleep, I decided it was a good time to do some self-hypnosis. I grabbed my iPod and went back to bed, listening to my own voice. Once I was finished the twenty-minute session, my body was much more relaxed. I could breathe deeply again! Once I can breathe deeply, everything else in my body follows suit and relaxes. Yesterday’s session worked so well that I can still breathe deeply today. I have to focus to do it but I can do it. And now that I can breathe deeply, I understand why it’s so important. I feel much more grounded and calm. I feel more in control of everything.
The trick for me now is to stay in tune with my body so that I can recognize when it becomes hard for me to breathe again. It could be later today or tomorrow or even in a few days if I’m lucky. It can become extra complicated, though, if I get too stressed out. If I’m in a panic, it simply doesn’t feel safe to let my guard down enough to do self-hypnosis. I refuse to even close my eyes for that long in case I am attacked.
So, even though I’ve found a way to deal with my breathing difficulties, it’s still a battle. I really need to make it a priority to do self-hypnosis frequently so I stay practiced in relaxing my body.
If you’re curious about self-hypnosis, I really recommend by Dr. Brian M. Alman and Dr. Peter Lambrou. I bought the book off Amazon () and like I said before, it changed my life. Once you can relax your body and your mind, your subconscious is much more open to suggestion, so it can be a shortcut to helping things like low self-esteem or quitting smoking.
Contrary to popular belief, you are still in control of yourself when you are hypnotized. Look at it as a way to speak to your inner self without your negative self-talk interrupting. Our minds are POWERFUL tools, and hypnosis helps us use those tools to get better.
Live and Learn
30 Jul 2012 7 Comments
in Hindsight Tags: change, friendship, growth, happiness, home, pets
“Live and learn” is a common enough phrase, but how often do we inspect it? The phrase is often paired with “experience,” that dreaded word we use when we’re trying to put a positive spin on a mistake. This past week has taught me that we can live and learn in good ways, too, believe it or not.
The feedback you gave me on my last two posts have put me in a better head space. After reviewing the faux documentary A Necessary Death as an extremely triggering film, some readers expressed interest in seeing the movie after reading my blog post. Alarmed, I considered removing my post, but first I asked you for advice. You awesome readers told me that what triggers me may not necessarily trigger other people and that some people might actually benefit from watching the movie since everyone is different. I realized that I’d been feeling overprotective of my readers and learned to let go a bit.
I also had a new living and learning experience today when I flipped back in my journal to find that my car crash was exactly one year ago today. Honestly, it feels like it happened over a year ago because of all the changes it brought forth.
After walking and taking the bus everywhere for a month as I adjusted to my car-free life, I decided to move closer to downtown. BEST DECISION EVER! The apartment I found is perfect for me and now I can say that not only do I love the building I’m in, I’ve made so many new friends as a result of making this place my home. Two out of the four tenants in my house have pugs. Not just dogs, PUGS. My third neighbour loves dogs and loves crafts and is the nicest and funnest person I’ve met in a long time. Within a month or two of moving here, I got my own puppy who turned into a further catalyst, propelling me to meet tons of other people in my new neighbourhood.
I can’t believe how much my life has improved as a result of my car accident. Of course, I hate having lost my car, but really, I think it was worth it. Instead of driving everywhere, now I walk or ride my bike, experiencing my city at a whole new level. Errands take me longer than they used to but now I feel less rushed and stressed by going at a slower pace. I have new friends that sneaked into my life in the most subtle of ways, making a profound impact over time.
There’s some proof for both you and I that the “bad” changes we experience — those events that are out of our control — can invite really good changes into our lives. Like I’ve said before, change is good, whether or not it feels good at the time. So now, a year older, I can recognize that living and learning doesn’t always have to mean something negative. By living, I’m learning that life is full of surprises and it is possible for those surprises to be good.
If we stick around long enough, we will see that even the bad changes over to good eventually. It might not always, but it does happen, and those good things make the bad easier to live with.
How has your life changed in the past year? Did any good come out of the bad?
