Half Full or Half Empty?

Throughout my life, I have been an optimist. I’ve always managed to work through whatever the trouble was and come out the other side if not exactly smiling, then content that I had reached an acceptable compromise. I didn’t see problems, just a situation where the solution that hadn’t been found yet. Most definitely a glass-half-full kind of person. Patsy is the opposite; a glass-half-empty person topped up with toxic waste and nuclear contamination. My optimism has provided a foundation of strength to build on and to help carry me through the last two and a bit years without Evie. I have always ‘known’ that no matter how crappy I felt, that eventually, I would break out the other side and get back on an even keel again. It meant that I was a heart-half-full person. And so it was from 11 Jan 18 when Evie died until a couple of months ago.

Covid-19 changed all that. It took away all of my coping mechanisms; every last one. It took them away for just long enough to overcome the heart-half-full optimism and tip away the rest of the contents. Trying to run two charities, both under immense financial pressure, deal with all the usual home problems (why is it that all the electronics break at the same time?), keep half an eye on an elderly mother, deal with lockdown and just functioning day-to-day became too much. Father’s Day was the final nail in the coffin. It was the lowest that I have ever felt. I just wanted it all to be over. All of it. I found myself staring at the myriad of pills that we have in the bathroom running the calculation in my head. I did nothing because I had promised Patsy that I wouldn’t leave her on her own.

For five sessions with my counsellor, we worked through what was going on and why. I had doubled my anti-depressants with little effect. I wanted to double up again, but she said that wasn’t the problem. I was throwing myself at work, trying desperately to bolster the finances enough for the Charity to survive. A strong performance by Evie’s Gift during the 2.6 Challenge in April, and a successful Lottery bid bought us a 6-month breathing space, so I was able to park that for a while. The problem there hasn’t gone away, but I had bought myself some time. Time to focus all of my attention on work. The Rainy Day Trust was a different matter altogether. Bid after bid was turned down, including three to the Lottery. Even businesses that had supported us previously were ignoring pleas for help. Again and again I asked for help and was ignored. I couldn’t figure out why I was pushing so hard to get RDT into safer waters when no-one else seemed to care. I knew that I was putting myself under increasing strain and that I needed some serious time off; many weeks, not just a few days. My blood pressure went nuts, I had trouble sleeping, I had chest pains, headaches, I was angry and frustrated at everyone and everything. I was permanently shattered. I was running out of energy by late morning every day. Motivation was non-existent.

My counsellor explained that I needed to go off sick for a couple of months before something major broke. I knew she was right, yet I found excuse after excuse not to do anything about it; “one last push on trusts and foundations”, “what if I boosted the corporate partnership plan”, I had papers to get ready for committee meetings, there was the Lockdown Street Fayre coming up. They were all just excuses. I knew that she was right, but I couldn’t accept it.

She asked me directly “What will happen at work if you are off sick for a couple of months, will the Charity collapse?”. I hesitated. Not much really, the Board would be forced to find someone to cover and just keep things ticking over as they had done when Evie was ill. She asked if I was frightened of losing my job. I wasn’t. I’m not. If I lose my job, then I’ll deal with it. We attacked the issue from a number of angles, probing, digging, looking for an answer. After a great deal of discussion we worked out why I was still pushing so hard when I knew it was fruitless to do so, and that it was actually doing me harm. Work is the only thing keeping me upright at the moment. It gives me a purpose. It provides routine and structure. Without it I would buckle. Completely. It is the only anchor that I have left, but it is a self-destructive one. The more I hang on to it, the more damage is done. It is a balance of risk. Keep pushing at work to keep me upright, offset by the exhaustion and strain that it is causing, or take a lot of time off sick and lose the only support that I have, and risk a breakdown. How on earth would I get back from there? That’s what frightens me. I don’t know how I would manage to get back on my feet if I fell that far. I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. I was terrified of hitting the bottom of the pit. Then realisation dawned. I was at the bottom of the pit.

Shedding the Wednesday Wisdoms for a while was a way to try and lighten my load. It had started to become an obligation, not an outlet. I felt compelled to get one out every Wednesday even though I had nothing to say, or I was just too tired to think. It just increased the pressure on me. WWs were supposed to be about me using writing as a tool to cope, exploring the pain and if possible, providing some solace to others as a side benefit. It wasn’t doing that any more, it had become work, a chore; another pressure that I didn’t need. I was giving more time and energy to thinking about how it would be perceived by others, than what it meant for me. Each week I would check the analytics to see how many people had read it. I started thinking about subject matter that might draw more readers than what I needed to express. I had allowed the comments of others to define and decide what I wrote. That’s the wrong way around.

What finally gave me the insight that I needed was when Eggshells was reviewed by The Compassionate Friends. It was clear to me that the reviewer didn’t really like it because it was too ‘angry’ and very different from their own experience as a bereaved parent. And that’s fine. We are all entitled to our own views. There were no derogatory comments, but no good ones either; damned with faint praise. But that doesn’t matter, it honestly doesn’t. As I said in the book, I didn’t write it for others to read, I wrote it as an honest, true reflection of how I felt as an outlet for me, a way of releasing the pressure. It was cathartic to unload that much pain in one place and then get it out into the public domain. Only the full end-to-end process of writing, editing and publishing was good enough to gain anything from it. I still don’t really care if other people like it or not, because it did the job it was intended to do. It helped me. The insight then is that I had forgotten the cathartic imperative when I was writing the WWs. I had been distracted by other’s comments on it. I needed to get back to the place where I wrote what helped me, what took the pressure away. I shouldn’t be writing to please others or make it palatable. If others gain from it, then that is a bonus. The tail had been wagging the dog and it had to stop.

So this post is going back in time, back to place when I started writing ‘Eggshells’. Wednesday Wisdom as such is no longer what I need to write to heal. From today going forward it is just plain Eggshells. It is me putting down on paper exactly how I feel, whenever I feel it . It might be on a Wednesday, it might not. It almost certainly won’t be every week. It will look at all sorts of things once again, some good, some not so good. How Covid-19 has impacted on me in a far deeper way than I had expected. How finally, I realised and accepted, that I could no longer cope. I was trying to do too much for the wrong reasons. Life right now is shit. It has never been worse. I can only imagine that the loss of my coping strategies, alongside the additional isolation that Covid-19 has brought, have, in combination, broken the camel’s back. I don’t have a solution, but at least I’ve recognised what’s going on. I am still working stupid hours, but I am slowly figuring out that keeping RDT afloat to the degree that I want simply isn’t possible. I can’t do it alone which is what I have had to do, and I have set the bar too high. I have accepted that if others don’t care enough about RDT to help, then I cannot do it alone. The impact of C19 on the Charity is too big a problem for me to tackle by myself. The wider economy’s problems are beyond my capability to fix.

What follows in my Eggshells posts over the coming weeks will be a reflection of what I really feel once again. They may repeat themes that have been gone over before, but that is because that problem is still an issue for me. If you don’t like them, then I’m sorry, but I am not going to soften them. The honesty is the key to healing. Somehow, I have to shed some of this pain, get it out of me and onto paper again in a way that feels like a release. Things have definitely taken a turn for the worse this summer but hiding what I am going through to make easy reading for everyone else won’t help me deal with it. If I write to make it easier for you to read, then not only am I not being true to myself, but I am also not being true to Evie. To do that would be pretending that her death hasn’t mattered, and that isn’t acceptable. If being honest costs me friends, then that is a price that I am prepared to pay. I’ll no longer post it on the Evie’s Gift or Compassionate Friends FB pages either; it’s either the wrong audience or not appropriate. If you follow a link on the TCF FB page to read the blogs, then you will either need to ‘friend’ me on FB or register to receive notifications from Square.Space when they are released.

I have to recover. I am not going to be a dinner party conversation piece - “do you remember Bryan? Poor bastard lost his daughter, then broke down and took his own life. Pass the salt please, did anyone see the match last night?”.

I’ve said that fixing the economy is beyond me. But more importantly, fixing myself is also beyond my capabilities right now. I don’t know how I’m going to fight my way out of this place of darkness. But I do know that I can’t do it alone. In a ‘first’ for me, I have asked others for help because my brain isn’t working properly any more. I’m going to write and see where that leads me. As in the original ‘Eggshells’, it will be raw, honest and true to my love for Evie. I can’t predict if the optimistic, heart-half-full version of me will ever return. Optimism or pessimism are irrelevant now because:

A heart half full, or a heart half empty is a heart half gone either way.