There is beauty yet

I have joined the autumnal club of retirement in which I am still a mere stripling, my leaves just starting to turn. Even so, my life is now subject to impromptu grunts and groans as bits of me approach their sell by date, seemingly quicker than other bits. Picking things up or sitting down, it’s […]

¡No Pasarán!

I am changing how and in what way I engage with politics. Politics have become as psychologically toxic to life and living as food poisoning is to our physical well being and, like rotten food, modern politics stinks to high heaven and I have no desire to eat the daily crud which oozes from Westminster […]

Depression – the beating of a war drum

No one can say how much depression is a genetically determined condition and how much it is a response to lived experience. Whilst genetics cannot be ruled out, lived experience is something that must be ruled in because depression, like poverty, is a whole lot more than just a personal weakness, problem or failing. If […]

35,740,800 minutes

I have passed 35,740,800. Thankfully the clock is still ticking, but I am now 68 (in years), but over 35 million minutes old. To be honest, functioning for that many minutes means I am now pretty creaky in most of my body parts and I have definitely slowed down a lot. As a child, I […]

The Price of Disability and Mental Health

Yesterday I completed almost 2 year of Psycho-dynamic Therapy, and the best part of this slightly scary but exciting experience is, it was my decision to leave. This may seem odd, but after dedicating more that 100 Tuesday afternoons to an intense examination of my life, I am now well enough to stop. I have […]

Why do we hide from ourselves?

I have lived with the violence of depression all my life. At 67 I can state categorically that my depression has always been about my occluded self, hidden or buried many many years ago, as far back as my childhood. What was depression but my hidden self screaming to get out? I had no idea […]

Life

Life is incredible, a unique gift of a vast and mysterious universe. Life is not a commodity to be used and abused, taken for granted and treated as if it is expendable. The whole Earth is an amazing ecosystem, located in the sweet spot, the Goldilocks, habitable, zone, of our solar system. Whatever people think […]

Beyond the age of reason

We are not rational creatures, as a descriptor of humanity, we have the potential to be rational, but even attempting to be rational has subjective bias for all sorts of reasons including regional and cultural bias. We also use reason and logic selectively, prejudice is very real, but also irrational. We make no conscious choice […]

Self sabotage

One of the reasons I am in therapy is my unfailing ability to sabotage myself. Three months ago I received my next oncology appointment for the 23 February 2017 at 10:40am. I have the paperwork, it’s written in my diary, I have lost count of the number of times I’ve checked it. On Monday (13th […]

PlAy oN – mental health

As a lifelong sufferer of severe depression I’ve heard, if not heeded, most of the well meaning advice, like, ‘pull your socks up’, ‘exercise’, ‘think about something else’. Etcetera, ad nauseam. In the process of therapy and learning to accept depression as a companion and not an enemy, I had one of those moments that […]