The Grip and The Release

I write this blog and have for years since just after I had Bladder Cancer and so the blog must be coming up to 7 years old this October / November.  In all that time I've been the victim and I've tried all sorts of things to make myself better but actually more than that to stop it coming back.  In many ways, I hope that the diet I'm on now will be the answer, the weight coming off and a new level of fitness and getting out of the house more often will all help.

I'm surprised that Mrs. F. thinks that I am depressed?  I think that I'm a very changed person but I'm certainly not depressed but I don't actually have any plans at the moment, I don't know what I'm going to do and that I suppose might be a bit destabilizing but not to me.  I know I've been struggling with the new me but my real depressions were dark, black, awful places to be and I'm not there at all.  I did say that I felt on the brink of a nervous breakdown not long ago but again was aware enough to do something about it.  I feel a long way from being depressed.  Anyway she asked me to go to the Docs but I've refused - I don't need drugs or any of that nonsense.  She then blind called them and apparently they can put you on 1 to 1 or group counselling.  

The strange things is that I think she is misreading my new state of being as me being depressed.  I used Grip and Release in the title and that's the way I look at it.  Fourteen weeks ago or just over I made a conscious decision to move away from the 'grip' of depression and the cycle of ups and downs and all the other stuff I recognized were stopping me from getting on with my life.  I realised that I lived in a world where the past and the future ruled me.  Where I beat myself up constantly for being a failure, for getting ill, for so many things that it became self destructive in nature.  How could my own brain beat me up like this and if you've looked at the blog long term it's all about battling with myself.  Cancer stripped away the mechanisms I had to fight off the voices and to rein in and check my imagination and it's schemes and plans.  My head was so full all the time and my body was heavy with carrying this stuff around.

So that was the grip.  the release came recently when I realised that it was OK to be me.  A good friend took me to one side and re-built my self-confidence and my self-esteem, spent a lot of time doing that and convincing me that it was so, that it had always been so.  I owe them so much for doing that because it came at the right time, Karma again.  In fact it all arrived at the right time just after I'd made the decision to abandon the old me, to do something about it and to move on.

The release means that I now read and listen to books and music more and more (music was always important of course).  Now I write so much - it isn't here it is in a series of documents - I've written pages and pages of ideas and thoughts and many poems and just marvelled in this new world I've discovered. 

Some of the dreams I had crashed and burned but they were just dreams and were never likely to happen and some things happened to me that were truly wonderful.  The release is that I see the world differently now to just 3 months ago.  The hardest part is to maintain the living in the now, the present and not to be dwelling or thinking about the past. To also not be dreaming of the future because that too, whilst it is nice doesn't help especially if they never come true.  I have great schemes and ideas and ideals and they feel so real and yet they can never be like that so they become a source for disappointment and let down.  That's difficult for me - I've forever been a dreamer but I realise that and dwelling on stuff that has happened don't actually get me anywhere at all.  

Recent events too showed me how quickly your dreams turn to ashes and huge disappointment all because I dared to dream how it could be and wasn't here in the present enjoying how it was now.  How foolish I was not to do that but I know now and I've learnt and I can move on. 

I think it is nice to have dreams but you must temper that with the knowledge that it can never be like the dream.  It's nice to have a direction (I don't have that at the moment) but it needs to be sufficiently vague to allow you to get there.  If I look at my vision of my future from years ago it is nothing at all like the reality, how could it be?