Showing posts with label adjustment disorders. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adjustment disorders. Show all posts

Thursday, June 29, 2017

The Truth Teller - The Impimpi...Why Now?

The year I got sick 
It has taken years of chronically and often life-threatening illnesses to strip away slowly at everything that I held dear in my life.  And suddenly I was facing an adjustment disorder.  I have my own psychology degrees, so it has been a case of healer, heal thyself.

Apart from ill-health, there has been enormous financial strain with added expenses which have made us fly kites under a carpet.   It is not easy to start a new life at the age of 61 for my husband, starting from scratch in a country he had not lived in for over 20 years.  

With what I thought was an amazing opportunity, I got an online computer job writing web content for the SEO of a pharmaceutical company – yes, writing about Viagra and all the generics for erectile dysfunction.  No one else wanted the job, so I took it.  I know one hell of a lot about impotency and soft and flaccid penises now.  The remuneration was wonderful and for a month, we were starting to float.  The following month, the person in charge dropped the ball and all the writers were fired, without pay and with immediate effect.  After chasing the story down it was found that the pharmaceutical house was nothing but an online drug dealer.  So that went out the door.  Back to flying those kites under the carpet.

Then I got very sick. I was drowning in my own fluid.  Discovery are amazing – they have come to the party and I am being home nursed with drips and all the paraphernalia I need.   While I have been lying here, writing and thinking and pondering and reflecting over the last three weeks, I have had to take a good long hard look at what I want from life.  Being one in ten million people with this disease does not make me special – it makes me a problem.

The crying and the grieving has been done.  It is time to dry the tears and get on with the business of living.  My spirit does not belong in this body. I am like the old lady struggling to move down the street, but her shadow is a young girl dancing with abandon.

I made the decision to share my life, every bit of it - the nice, the good, the ugly, the bad, the not too bad and the not too nice; leaving nothing out…telling the truth 100% of the time.
There are many reasons for my decisions. Some are:
  • Giving the abused child of my heart a voice 
  • Allowing my soul to soar with freedom
  • Making myself transparent
  • To be truly authentic I must be brutally truthful about everything that has been, is and will be in my life 
  • To allow those who have been damaged by part of my own past to come to terms with their healing as well 
  • To show that child abuse affects a person their whole lives but that there is a way to become a survivor
  • To become a ferocious activist for prisoners - particularly for those who are incarcerated for crimes they did not commit
  • To inspire, help, encourage and provide my own brand of quotes for people to use to reflect on their own lives and to just have a good laugh
  • To do what I love and love what I do and that is to write – so the books will come, the blogs will come and … we shall see what the good Lord Himself has in store for me.

There will be those who will not like what I write, but that is their business and not mine.  They do not have a gun pointed at their heads forcing them to read what I write.   But I do know now that there will always be thousands more people who will appreciate truth rather than the bullshit that is spoken so often

I want my life to have meaning and I want to leave a legacy with my stories for my grandchildren to know who I was one day.  What better way than to tell my own truthful stories. 
I am now a freedom writer!  And probably an impimpi as well!

Friday, August 12, 2016

A Good-bye Letter to me from me

My dear Dianne

I know how you struggle to accept your limitations.  I know what it was like to be able to do as you pleased when you pleased.  I know what it was like to think nothing of getting up, showering, dressing and putting make-up on.  I know what it was like to feel energised and to look forward to a day of excitement.   I know what it was like to be healthy; not giving your body a thought..that it was just a vehicle to carry the essential you towards what you wanted to achieve. But that Dianne is dead.  She will never come back.  What you need to do now is bury her; mourn her and grieve. So I have to bury her now; not later but right now. She is gone.  She won’t come back.  Only by doing that will you be able to close that door on the past and begin again to create a new Dianne, another one who is content and who regains a sense of self-worth and self-esteem.  The old Dianne lived a life of meaning.  Chronic and debilitating illness has robbed her of everything that had meaning.  She feels left out, alone; with huge feelings of doubt regarding her abilities and her life.  Life has very little meaning now.  She thinks a lot about suicide.  Suicide is just a nice word for killing oneself – of removing the pain and shame of not being able to do much and not having a sense of living a life of worth.  She struggles to find peace with these invisible ropes that bind her to her room and bed.  She struggles to connect with others and a simple answer to “How are you?” becomes a nightmare. Does she lie and say she is fine or does she take the chance of telling the truth only to find that her answer makes no sense to the one who asked.   Or worst still the response is “But you don’t look sick”, or “I am also tired”.  The responses that are meant to make one feel better when they say “Hope you get better soon”, irritates because no thought goes into what they are saying.  She knows she will never get better!   She hates not being able to care for herself financially and often physically.  She struggles to do the basic things like shower or change the bed linen.  These are tasks that were so easy before that she never thought about them.  She just did them.  Now she spend hours and hours doing these things in her head, but never managing to do them herself.  She has to ask someone to help her and finds that degrading and humiliating.  She HAS to find meaning and worth in a new life.  She has to find something to fight for and to live for that is bigger than she is.  She must have something that is life-affirming and that will give her life meaning; something that will force her to think about someone else who has no voice or who has been unfairly punished or put into a situation that is prejudicial or discriminating.    I want to be able to write to a new Dianne; a Dianne who loves what she does and who feels like she is living a worthwhile life again. This struggle for psychological survival and self-esteem in our culture is going to be a difficult task.   But the new Dianne can do it.     Hello Dianne – I am going to have an exciting time discovering a brand new you.  With love and gentle healing – be patient with yourself.  You will be OK.