Exhaustion
I am exhausted. Abnormally so. I can’t handle it really. I got up at half eleven. I was falling asleep at my computer less than an hour later. Doctor gave me some tablets for post-viral fatigue, but I don’t think they’re working and I need to go back and get something else, or do something else.
But what if it’s just my mental health? Just the depression causing more physical problems than before. Causing this exhaustion.
How am I supposed to live like this? I could barely get out of bed when my anxiety and depression was so bad I didn’t want to live. I want to live now, I like my life. I’m just too tired to live. Too tired to get up or keep my eyes open.
How am I supposed to write my blog, any poetry, anything, when I am very tired. When my brain can’t even get my head around the idea that I may have to go back upstairs again once I’ve gotten up again.
I have several things just rattling around my head, a couple of posts, lots and lots of words that just get no where. I actually started this post last week. Nothing has changed obviously.
Anyway, my absence from my own blog, my own life, explained to you in a few words.
Ribbons
A poem about April Jones.
Ribbons
The ribbons have been renewed
I see them, glinting in the sunlight
- bows tied loosely on lampposts,
or tightly on trees,
most have weathered through a long winter
in which no one told the children
just because she hasn’t been found
doesn’t mean she was coming back.
Hard to explain it, murder without a body
and he really though she was alive.
More balloons are released in case she can see
from heaven or her grave in the Dyfi.
She’s there somewhere, breaking hearts
and every ribbon hanging limp and faded
I want to retie into a bow so
- so everyone will know
they’re still waiting for her to come home.
r.l.w
originally posted on my writing blog.
Hamnasium
So I’ve been really ill again. Seriously. I was well for a week before I was struck down by this wicked cough and accompanying flu-like illness (doctor’s description). A flu-like illness that was not covered by my flu jab that I had sometime around Xmas. It’s really hit me for six, hence the lack of updates and why I haven’t even attempted to take part in this years April A-Z blogathon which was so much fun to do last year.
I’ve not been very constructive. Or constructive at all. Or even dressed all that much over the past ten days and I figured the best/easiest way to counter that was to write a blog post. So what, more grumbling about being ill?
No, I bring you hamsters!
Here are my hamsters, Apophis and Anubis, in a video my wife made of them running around her Hamnasium.
Awesome right? Right. Tell your friends 
Mental Health Guilt
I am ill. I have serious lurgy. Okay, not serious lurgy, but my throat is sore, I have a cough, blocked sinus’ and for some reason I threw up this morning. I blame the snotty children, my very, very snotty niece in fact. I hate being ill, it’s really boring and miserable.
However I used love being ill, physically ill and that’s the point.
Being physically ill pretty much meant I could actually be mentally ill. If I couldn’t physically get out of bed because I was miserable or because the anxiety was just too much to bare being physically ill gave me the excuse I needed to stay in bed. People around me at the time didn’t always accept that mental health could be as debilitating as any physical health problem. Which meant the days I couldn’t get out of bed because of depression didn’t count as being ill, didn’t matter.
So a cold, a cough, the flu, anything like that, that counted as being ill. That was a good enough reason to stay in bed, stay at home.
Things have changed. My situation and my mental health are both better now, so days where I can’t bear to even step out my flat are much less, and the people around me understand better. So being physically ill, having cold really doesn’t have much of a good side to them any more. I still struggle a little with guilt from not doing anything when I am suffering both mentally and physically. That’s minor compared to what I used to feel for just feeling unable to get up for work in the morning.
No one should feel guilty for suffering from the symptoms of their mental health. No one should be made to feel guilty, or lazy, or bad in any way for being depressed or anxious.
Anyway. For me, rest, water and more rest.
Apparently the word you’re looking for is Agnosticism…
in an Aberystwyth Cemetery
I find it surprisingly difficult to be agnostic these days. I am agnostic, I was pretty sure I was an atheist – that I believed in nothing – I find that I like the idea of something greater than ourselves. Not necessarily a God, or anyone in charge; but I do like the idea of something; something bigger than ourselves. I also like the idea of reincarnation, that I was someone else before this but I think that’s for another post.
The problem with this way of thinking, this lack of a real belief system is that there is no certainty. Yes we are born, we live, we die; but beyond all this, what is there? What are the answers to the big questions. Why are we born? What do we live for? What happens when we die?
It’s that last one that gets me the most, death, what is there after this life? Are we reincarnated? Is there a heaven? I don’t know, and I don’t believe in anything enough to say for certain one way or another. I was brought up in an atheist household; well, it was never really a thing growing up – I’ve never been christened either, unlike a lot of my friends though how much that affects me now is unclear because sometimes I am desperate for answers. I would love to find religion, find it, and have faith and have that faith comfort me at night when I’m worrying about how my grandparents are, my friend, my cat, all the people I’ve lost recently. All the people I’ve ever lost.
But I just don’t believe, I just don’t have it in me. I can pretend, I can lie, I can sit in a church and enjoy the sermons and the message but I truly in my heart do not believe it and it goes far beyond my upbringing; or even my problems with being told what to do. My wife has that faith, and I respect that, love that and she respects that I don’t believe. I envy it though sometimes. I must admit. It must be nice to be sure that people you have lost are safe now.
At night, when I can’t sleep, and I’m missing my cat Micky (and don’t get me wrong, I love my kitten), it starts a chain reaction and I wonder about my friend who committed suicide, if she’s okay now, or if she still suffers somewhere. I wonder about my grandparents, my grandfather who lost his mind a decade before he lost his life. My grandmother who was ill for just as long and aware of every moment. It can snowball from these recent losses (as in, the last few years) to every loss, my uncle, my other grandparents, every damn animal and there is no real answer. Not in science, science gives me the break down of cells and beginning of new life in the ground; science is for atheists, real atheists who truly do not believe there is anything else. But I have some spirituality in me, deep down, pushing, desperate for meaning. Desperate that even if there is a hell, and even if I end up in it, the people I love will not. That the people I love will be safe, even after they die.
