Mental health

Brain problems

Mental health

It’s so predictable. Your brain will tell you in a thousand different ways all the reasons why it’s a great idea not to do something that is good for you.

Take writing this post now, for example. My brain is being super helpful this morning. Honestly, it’s really cheering me on, lobbing uplifting ditties such as ‘What’s the point?’ ‘You’re sick, just rest’ ‘It’s Sunday, who’s reading this, anyway?’ and the classic, old reliable ‘Just to do it tomorrow, instead.’

I’ve been following that ‘Do it tomorrow’ command like a mole who has lost its way home for most of my life. It is lethal. Willpower is a muscle that you must use otherwise it drowns, suffocates, dies… whatever way you want to put it. It is a recent revelation to me that you get things done by doing them.

It’s the quintessential move from the depressive mind: Fix it tomorrow. Before children, I used to spend hours in bed, not sleeping, but trying to fix my problems. By thinking about them. It’s called rumination. It sucks. You build crappy neural networks and highways, constantly reinforcing the bad stuff with really dodgy construction work. I was convinced that if I thought about things for long enough, I would find a solution.

Thoughts are so seductive. They really will have you believe that it’s to your benefit to sit and think about the same things, over and over again, until they are ‘solved’. That they can actually seduce you into putting off stuff to an eternal tomorrow is truly astonishing.

Sometimes I think thoughts and action are two such opposing states that one is death, the other is life.

Doctor, doctor

Mental health

One thing worse than being a hypochondriac is being a hypochondriac who has been diagnosed with a major health problem.

I don’t know that meditation helps with this, so I’m not going to talk about being plugged into the universe or finding peace within yourself. I’m going to talk about how bloody annoying it is. Hypochondria is another of the litany of mental health disorders I have, and sometimes it gets so bad I feel that I am on the verge of death. My brain frequently flashes forward to me being diagnosed with whatever I have too late, and dying.

Today, I’m worried that the fluttering in my heart is a sign that I have a serious heart problem. Last week, I went to see a skin specialist after months of wrestling the fear that the ‘lesion’ on my back was skin cancer. I have ‘sticky blood’ so I worry about getting a clot, even though a specialist has told me that my crazy leg growth, made up of a giant network of tangled blood vessels, will ‘unlikely’ leech a clot into my arterial system, instead continually clotting within itself. I worry, that somewhere inside me, cancer is growing. That I am blanking out a lot because I have early onset Alzheimer’s. That my gallbladder issues are going to shorten my life. That the giant hemangioma on my liver is not innocuous, as a liver consultant assured me, but something far more sinister.

After all of the births of my sons, this health anxiety worsened. There are lists upon lists on my iPhone, things like ‘ask about darkened patches at top of leg’ or ‘ask about stabbing pain in stomach – is it an infection’ or ‘ask about bouts of breathlessness’. There are actual, real health diagnosis and then there is a plethora of thoughts about them, with embellishments. Right now, the thoughts feel more harmful to my health than the diagnosis themselves.

You battle mental illness on all fronts. You need to be like a ninja, constantly brandishing different weapons and strategies just to survive the day – just to survive your life. One mental disorder goes hand in hand with another. You don’t just get the gift of depression, you’ll get a sideshow of anxiety or a good nip of OCD to go with it. You’ll have hypochondria, and its playmate will be panic.

There are solutions to the shitshow inside your head. I am committed to finding them. We are here to master our minds, not the other way around.

Halos and hailstones

Meditation, Mental health, Motherhood

We can be saved in tiny ways every day by people we meet, even just once.

Five years ago, a month after the birth of my first son, I was saved like this by a midwife at the Coombe hospital. I’d had four weeks of steadily worsening mental health. I knew a lot about depression – but this was something very different. My brain was being bombarded by a relentless onslaught of intrusive, nasty thoughts about harming my baby. These thoughts weren’t just occurring, say, every 10 minutes or so. They were happening every moment, every millisecond, with such frequency and force that I could not speak.

I didn’t understand what it was but I knew I was in trouble. I went back to the hospital and sat there. Words were not coming out, but I was crying. A lot.

This midwife took me into a small office, and said: ‘Just trust me. Do something with me, for a moment.’ I had no clue what it was at the time but I did what she said. I thought about my feet, I thought about my legs, I thought about my stomach, my heart, my breath. I followed her words and for a few minutes – moments really – I found absolute respite. Peace. It was Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, the crack: there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. Just enough light seeped in so I knew the dark could not end me. I went home to my baby, called my husband. He came home.

I know now that what the midwife was doing was something called a body scan. She had just completed training in mindfulness. She was able to help me slip out of my broken mind and into the comforting solidity of my body. She saved me, on that day.

I can’t tell you her name because I didn’t ask. She is one of the beautiful, hardworking midwives who save people like me, every single day.

I want to thank her.

ducklings

All these things are things

Mental health, Motherhood

So: prenatal depression is a thing. Prenatal anxiety is also a thing. Postnatal depression, tick, that’s a thing. And pregnancy and postnatal OCD. Postnatal anxiety, yep. Postnatal post-traumatic stress disorder, yes, that is also a thing. Some women are also diagnosed with bipolar mood disorders for the first time during pregnancy or the postnatal period. Postpartum psychosis – utterly horrifying – is also a thing.

I’ve had prenatal depression, prenatal OCD, prenatal anxiety, postnatal anxiety, postnatal depression and a truly debilitating, disgusting and distressing bout of postnatal OCD which, although very manageable now, has never fully gone away.

The reason it is so important to talk about these conditions is that lives are at stake. The lives of children, the lives of their mothers. Mothers are at risk of killing themselves because of these disorders. Mothers who show symptoms or who are attempting to tell you that they have it need to be treated with kid gloves. We all need to watch new mothers closely. And not just immediately after the birth. For a long time after the birth. These disorders can last for years after the babies have been born.

I could not communicate my postnatal mental disorder to anyone. I tried, but I couldn’t. I was too embarrassed and I was too ashamed. I was terrified that no-one would understand. I was scared that someone might even take my baby away from me. That I didn’t deserve to be a mother.

Thank God for the internet. Googling what was going on in my head and finding out that other mothers suffered from it too, gave me the courage, finally, to tell a doctor what was going on.

I got help. You can too.



to illustrate home

Talking about it

Meditation, Mental health

Just so you know, if you are reading this and in the grips of a frightening mental illness, then you need to go to a doctor. If they don’t take you seriously, then go to another doctor.

Meditation is not going to work when your brain is being throttled by depression, or anxiety, or OCD, or whatever horrible mental disorder that you are suffering from.

I didn’t meditate when I was suffering from post-partum OCD. I was too unwell. I didn’t tell anyone either. I was too ashamed. I thought I was really weird. Honestly, I thought I might even get arrested. After ten months of intense suffering – the precious, unreturnable first ten months of my first son’s life – I found a website that explained what was wrong with my brain.

A tiny stream of relief started to flow through me, eventually becoming a river which carried me to a doctor who, when I told her, said: Why didn’t you tell me before? There is help for this.

What helped me move past my post-partum mental illness was:

1. Pills

2. CBT therapy

3. Reading stories from other mothers who had it too

My OCD has not fully gone away. It bubbles relentlessly in the back of my brain, but the volume is turned down very low and it is manageable.

Meditation helps me now in immeasurable ways. It has given me back joy in my life. It has allowed me to see past the violent noise of my thoughts. It has made me see that our minds are always moving swiftly through storms and that we are not our minds. We are behind all that, totally protected.

Nothing can break that part of us.



Moles

Meditation, Mental health, Motherhood

There is a distinctly non-spiritual reason why I decided to start meditating every day. I read that meditation can give you deeper rest than sleep.

For four years, I had been either pregnant or breastfeeding. I was tired and needed more rest. I’m not a morning person anyway and now brutal, unasked for dawns invaded seven or eight times a night. I woke to feed my youngest child, or to soothe my grouchy middle child or to schooch (grudgingly) over in bed to let the eldest child snuggle up.

I started to do strange things. I’d put the milk in the cupboard instead of the fridge. Once, I glanced at the oven, yelped, grabbed the kids and ran out into the street in my pyjamas. I saw fire. It was just the oven light. Another time, I put the electric kettle on and left the room, to swiftly smell smoke and plastic as it melted on the gas hob. I needed to rest my brain. It wasn’t working. I had three small boys to look after.

The word exhaustion is used so much in tandem with parenting that it has lost its impact. People don’t feel the weight of that word anymore, they don’t see the paper-thin grey around the eyes of the person saying it. It’s not tiredness, it’s not fatigue, it is the king of the states of unrest: Exhaustion. Your brain is slipping out on you. You aren’t taking care of it. It’s trying to make an escape.

Meditation helps. It faces up to the exhaustion and it says: Your number is up. It’s time to rest.

setting out for change

Goddess

Mental health

‘After winter, must come spring/ Change, it comes eventually’ – Lauryn Hill

If you are stuck, you can be sure that change will come. If you are trapped, frozen, while the vagaries of life swirl around you, please know: change will come.

Change is a goddess, replete with gifts. She is the mother of the earth, she is vibrant, she knows shit. Unlike her name, she doesn’t linger on every upstream and downstream – she is the ocean. She doesn’t indulge whimsy; she’s solid. She’s not faint-hearted. She’s not gentle. She’ll come and get you if you hide from her. She’ll ask you nicely at first, but then she’ll get more insistent. She doesn’t give up. She will never give up on you.

Don’t be afraid of her. She wants you to grow. You are her child. She wants to feed you, and she is resplendent with the sweetest, most succulent fruit. It’s ripe. Take it – there is no poison apple in there.

Change will indulge you. She’ll let you rest under the covers for a while, shutting out the world. She will watch, always curious, her heart bemused by how you resist her. You will stumble and fall, just like a child learning how to walk. Change will be there to catch you.

Go to her. She loves you.

Stoned

Mental health, Motherhood

A few days ago, I sat in the garden, washing and drying stones with one of my sons. We rinsed and rinsed again with the hose, watching as the cloudy pool of water eventually turned clear. Methodically, we lay the stones out one by one, examining and then carefully drying them.

The previous hour had been spent collecting the stones in the field out the back of our house. It had been diverting; all three of my children were enthusiastic, each searching for the ‘best’ stones. Anything that keeps them busy during this lock-down is a boon. Zoom meetings and video learning do not work. They are too young. They jostle for space in front of the screen, they press random buttons, they become fascinated with their own image on the camera as opposed to listening to whoever is talking to them (like most adults, I guess).

So on this day, with my creative capacity to amuse them waning, we turned to stones. By the time we came to washing and drying them, the youngest and the eldest had drifted off to more pressing tasks. The eldest, to whisper stories to himself as he walked around the garden; the youngest to ruthlessly poke woodlice under the crumbling pink bench by the gate. The middle child remained still, lifting each stone, studying it and lovingly wiping it with a towel. I did it with him. He was content, absorbed, in the moment. I was too. Tending to those stones was kind of wonderful.

For the half hour it took to do them, I stopped worrying about the future. Whether I’d die if I caught Covid 19. How my body, which ably houses a rare underlying health condition, would fight it off. And I think we all feel that way. Yes, the best thing is to avoid getting it at all. Take all the proper and necessary precautions that we can.

We also have to live our lives, and ideally not under a black cloud of fear and worry. Mine has got out of control recently, so I must rein it in. I can’t live in such acute fear. It’s too much. And you can worry about anything if you set your mind to it. That battered old warhorse of a phrase you could get run over by a bus tomorrow is genuinely useful here. We have to just live day to day, with our families, or on our own, however we find ourselves.

That’s why the stone-washing day was so damn pleasant. There was a task, it needed to be done, it was done.

Worry didn’t come into it.

Amigos

Mental health, Motherhood

I’d thought that the ever-present stress that is the pandemic hadn’t affected my children at all. Yes, they had to wash their hands a lot more often; they saw me glued to the news for stretches of time, whereas before I’d diligently hidden my furtive information gathering, worried that the mere sight of a phone in my hand might somehow harm them.

[An aside – I’m writing this while my youngest, two, is lying on the floor yelling chocyat NOW, chocyat NOW! because we are on holidays in Wexford and I’ve been less precious about what they put in their mouths. It’s hard to concentrate but I’ll keep going, otherwise it might be another month before I write one of these posts.]

Now that they are allowed more freedom to play in the park they come back with garbled stories – did I know that all rabbits had coronavirus? Did I know what would happen if coronavirus killed all the adults and all the children took over the world? (They’d rob banks and be allowed to drink coca-cola, that’s what). Did I know they weren’t really bothered about coronavirus apart from – apart from – we don’t want YOU to die Mama.

Yet something has changed for them. It is particularly noticeable with the eldest, who is six. He has a new friend, called Fang.

Fang is a big cuddly owl and my son has formed a strong attachment to him. He puts him down for naps. He feeds him at each mealtime, from his own plate: a forkful for him, a forkful for Fang. He cuddles him during TV time. He talks to him a lot, whispering stories about castles and ninjas and battles and storms. He sometimes talks through him, too: Mum, Fang wants a cuddle. Mum, Fang is tired now, he wants to sleep. Mum, Fang’s feeling sad right now.

[An aside – the chocyat chanting toddler is now hanging from my neck, perched at the top of my back, whispering rhythmically in my ear: bwing me chocyat, bwing me chocyat. Perhaps he’s hoping this gentler approach might work. It’s hard to concentrate but I’ll keep going, otherwise it might be another month before I write one of these posts.]

My son won’t go to bed without Fang. He won’t go in the car without Fang. He takes such good care of him. Maybe inspired by their brother, the other two have found similar friends, and though the relationship isn’t quite as intense, it is there. The four-year-old has a dragon, called Peak, and the chocolate terrorist has a baby bull, called I. Where I see my three boys at home, I usually see Fang, Peak and I in tow, either under their little arms, or nearby, strewn on the floor but distinctly not lost.

I had always wondered about the cuddly toy thing, because no matter what stuffed toy I gave them previously – rabbit, teddy, lamb, dog, kangaroo – they had shown no interest whatsoever, even a sociopathic coldness towards them. I actually tried to force them to bond with plush, soft things – look! Here’s your teddy, aw, night night teddy but they would just look at me blankly, turning their backs as the sweetly staring creatures fell idly to the floor.

Now, and only since the pandemic hit, these three stuffed toys have shot to the top of the toy hierarchy. My eldest son cannot do without his new friend, who is providing something no-one else can. His ardent commitment to this relationship is no coincidence but a direct result of worry he’s absorbed about Covid-19. All three of them, even the two year old, have needed this extra crutch.

[An aside – my youngest, not short of attention all morning and the recipient of a fine big lunch, has resorted to hitting me. It’s hard to concentrate but I’ll keep going, otherwise it might be another month before I write one of these posts.]

They are so smart, these kids. They know stuff, just like we do. They can’t fully express it or really explain about how they are feeling but they absorb the mood around them. They bathe in the world, and they soak in stress. They can hear you when you complain. They internalise it. They piece together snippets of adult conversation. They hear bits of grim news, maybe on the radio when you are turning the dial to a different channel. They can tell something is wrong by the look on your face.

Only now, and specifically with the meteoric rise of Fang in the household (an owl to whom even I have become attached), can I see that this shift in the world’s axis has had a monumental affect on my three small boys. They have changed. They are different.

Interdependence

Friendship, Mental health

I think all the time now about how dependent we are on each other. I’m not sure how clear that was to me before the emergence of Covid 19.

There’s the obvious thing we must rely upon each other for: keeping each other safe. We have to hope that others are taking the same precautions as us. We have to trust the people around us, in every situation. We have to rest on faith or a feeling that the majority of humanity wants their respective community to heal and look after each other, in less urgent times and also in the wider context of a pandemic.

Then we get into intangible territory. Like, you are me and I am you shit. We are all one. My actions have ripple effects on yours, and yours on mine. Your pain is not my pain and my pain is not yours – but pain is universal. We all tug at alternate strands of the same human pain at different times in our life. Nobody escapes. What do I mean? *shrugs shoulders.* I don’t know. I’m still working it out. The last rake of years have brought me to the point where I now deeply understand: I need community like I need air, food and water. I need to understand my place in the world, just like my children do. In fact, I think my understanding of my place in the world is integral to my children’s sense of belonging as well.

I’m guessing I’m not the only one who feels this way, but this whole stinking coronavirus shebang has made me question everything.

Have I made the right choices in life? Have I contributed positively to society, to the people around me? Have my actions been purely for my own benefit, or have I had other people in mind also? I don’t mean my children. It’s pretty easy as a parent to act for the greater good of your children. Or at least, you instinctively try.

I really don’t think you can be happy (whatever the HELL that means) unless you are intrinsically engaged in making other people happy too.

In the past, I have, on occasion, stepped back from any offering of community. Honestly, I was suspicious of it. What is this thing where people do things for each other and expect nothing in return? What is this… this… interdependence?

What is it when you read or hear a story about someone who is suffering and you can feel their pain even though you do not know them or you have not met them?

It is – being human.