Just in case any of you wanted to read another post from me, to make up for the dearth of writing on here recently, I wrote this post for Black Dog tribe.
Archive | September, 2012
Call of the Wild
It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power. – Alan Cohen
Instinctively I have always known, even when I was a small child, that life is movement and change. Possibly because I had in my parents such perfect role models for how not handle growth, progress, and new experiences. Always resistant, resentful, and reactionary. Possibly it’s simply that, in those who have it, wanderlust is innate.
I think I was also heavily influenced by the works of Jack London, I read White Fang so many times that my first copy fell to pieces, C.S. Lewis and the Brontes.
Oh, and the Animals of Farthing Wood.
I liked any stories that drew strongly on the natural world.
As I’ve grown older I’ve aimed to put the lessons I learnt from nature about growth and adaptation into practice. Even the flower, rooted as it is it to the ground, must move toward the sun. With this in mind I have never hesitated to uproot myself to different parts of the country, and even the globe, in search of new experiences to help me grow.
Until recently I’d never stayed in one job, one place, or one social circle for all that long. Then I had my breakdown earlier this year, and finally accepted that I had depression and complex PTSD.
Ever since then I’ve been afraid of change. I’m been trying with all my might to hold on to the present to stop it moving, to try to keep everything exactly the same in the hope that it would provide me with a foundation to rebuild my sanity upon.
I realised today that this is why my depression scores are getting worse week on week when I visit my therapist. That this is why I’ve been so hopeless every day for the last week. I’ve been trying to rebuild myself on a foundation made of rocky ground, and I need to grow past it if I’m going to make any more progress.
Where I’m at right now is only feeding my illness. I’m not getting any of the things that I need to grow, either personally, professionally, or spiritually, and it’s making me more and more frustrated.
It’s time to ring in the changes.
I’m looking for a new career, a new home, and a new outlook.
Related articles
- Where Would I Be Without C-PTSD? (makeupandmirtazapine.com)
Where Would I Be Without C-PTSD?
“In the course of a lifetime what does it matter?” ~ Sharon Creech
Since my psychiatrist believes that I’ve had complex PTSD and major depressive disorder since I was at least eight it’s perhaps impossible to say what sort of person I’d be, or what sort of life I would have had, without it. But it’s maybe a little easier to pin down some of the things that my condition is responsible for, or at least where it has been a contributing factor.
If I didn’t have C-PTSD I wouldn’t have grown up feeling like I was completely separate to the rest of the world and that I had no business trying to belong. While this made the entirety of the first sixteen years of my life almost unbearably lonely, it did make me desperate as all hell let loose to break away from the community that I grew up in, a cross between Stepford and Royston Vasey, and meet some more liberal, less parochial people. Which was, y’know, probably for the best.
Never having experienced the feeling of ‘fitting in’, I haven’t experienced the pressure to conform when to do so would be contrary to my own wishes, happiness, or best interests.
Having C-PTSD means that I have no conception of a future. This makes saving, planning, dieting, or being otherwise responsible an almost unwinnable battle. But it’s also probably responsible for the irrepressible spontaneity that saw me take off to spend a summer as the only resident of a Rio hotel who wasn’t renting her room by the hour, purchase flights out to Beijing and out of Singapore, on a whim, with no thought to what I might do in between, or move to the other side of the country at less than forty-eight hours notice.
Some of the best decisions I ever made.
If I didn’t have C-PTSD I’d probably have taken the sensible decision to remain with the same global finance company that employed me straight out of university. And my soul would have died long ago as a result.
I might well have bought a house and lived in it, instead of uprooting myself to a completely different part of the country every couple of years.
But then I would never have met so many wonderful and interesting people. And the part of me that still idolises the Littlest Hobo would have been condemned to living in terminal frustration.
If I didn’t have C-PTSD I would probably have never wanted to kill myself. I’m as yet undecided as to whether being able to write about it is enough to compensate for that particular trauma.
Further Reading:
Grab My Feed
Let’s Socialise
Gimme Some Lovin’
Good Reads
Copyright
Make-Up and Mirtazapine by Make-Up and Mirtazapine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at makeupandmirtazapine.com.
