Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Oct 22, 2008
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days, that all these memories come flooding back to me.
Progression
I was browsing through this site when I came across an article someone had posted about SAD (seasonal affective disorder), and how they coped with it. To me it was one of those new names for things that have been popping up in recent years, with all this political correctness and new fancy sounding titles for jobs and the like. They seem to have come up with some right crackers as well! I read a few of the funnier ones on that ex-service site I am always on about. In fact it was on that site where I found out a lot more about PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), and if that wasn't bad enough, I was diagnosed as having just that a few weeks after I learned what it meant. Yet before that I was being treated for depression, which they said was caused by the lack of sleep and constant back pain. I was being told that I had so many things, that to be honest I was simply not believing anything they told me any more, especially when my doctor told me that I was suffering from anxiety: I mean, how can you go from being treated for back pain and then go on to anxiety? Then I found myself drifting away from people, and finding it really difficult to be in amongst a group, and started having these panic attacks when I was in crowded places. It was round about then that I knew something was wrong. After a visit to the doctor I was put on the waiting list for therapy, and told that it would take about a year, so I had to make the best of things until my turn came. It just seemed to get worse after that, and I found that I could not concentrate on anything for long. I became short tempered and irritable, and as if that was not bad enough I started to stutter when talking to folk - I had to arrange what I was going to say in my head, before I could actually say it. This only made me feel more of an outcast, so I started spending more time alone. I was contacted by our surgery saying that an appointment had been made for me to have some counselling, in order to help me through the waiting period to see a therapist. Of course I had no idea what this entailed so I was bit apprehensive to say the least.
My fears were soon dispelled, however, when I attended my first session, as the counsellor called it. She was a bit younger than me, but I soon felt comfortable being there and talking to her. After a few preliminary questions she started to ask me questions about events that I had been through previously in my past. I found it really difficult to talk about those sorts of memories, and even after all the sessions we have had, I still cannot bring myself to recall or talk about them. She told me that we might be able to achieve that in the future, which I very much doubt, as I can't seem to handle even thinking about them. Anyway, despite all that I still feel a lot better than I did before. At least I have someone I can talk to, who tries very hard to understand, but I don't think she really can, as these events are one of those sorts of things that you have to actually experience yourself before you really grasp the whole situation, like divorce for example. That is a subject I heard quite a lot about when I was working away from home, as a few of the blokes I was working with were actually going through a divorce at the time. They used to tell me some right horror stories, so bad that I never actually believed them at the time. Yet, a few years down the line, I found out the hard way that what they had told me was in fact the truth. When we eventually got access to my house, after all the financial settlements were sorted out and monies paid over, we got into the house only to find that my ex-wife had stripped it bare, right down to removing the electric light fittings leaving just the wires dangling from the ceilings, and had even removed all the carpet grippers throughout the whole house: in fact it looked like the whole place had been professionally stripped.
There I go again, I have drifted miles off course - the point was that there's a lot of things in life that you actually have had to experience before you can understand them when other people talk them over with you. The weird thing about it all is, that some of the events she wanted to bring up happened over thirty five years ago, but at the time we just used black humour to forget about them all. Yet others were more recent, but just as difficult to talk about. My description of them is, it's like they have been deleted from the screen, but are still on the hard drive waiting to create more space when it's required, and I would rather fast forward or press pause than go into rewind. I know that's an unorthodox way of putting it over but it's the only way I can explain it to other people in the hope that they understand.
The year of waiting passed and I have since had several sessions with the therapist. She is very understanding, and it's just like talking to the counsellor I used to visit while waiting for my therapy to start. I was not as nervous as I thought I would be, in fact I feel relaxed at the time, yet I always feel extremely tired and thirsty when I get home after those sessions. They appear to drain all my energy, and that is another thing I find hard to explain to Mk2 when I get home.
To go back to the subject of SAD that I mentioned earlier, I found a way of making myself feel better, by using one of those Halogen heaters in the room with me. They are really bright, and give you the impression of being in sunlight, and are quite cheap to run as well - to have two of the three sections on is the equivalent of having two 100 Watt bulbs going, so to sit in a room with them going I don't feel so bad. And it gives off a good heat as well!
