Search Results

Wouldn't it be fairly normal to plan to follow on with your chosen career path into retirement?  I think so.  Maybe a few years before 67 or 68 (as it will be for my age group) people might slow down a little by possibly reducing hours or going into a less demanding role. In my case, teaching in a state secondary school is more like something I regularly feel I cannot bear much longer and I am in my forties.  Despite my absolute and totally unfaltering efforts, I still feel I am falling short by the tumbleweeds blowing through any imaginary positive feedback sessions I don't get and regular criticism misnamed as 'feedback' or (most galling) 'support'. The reality is that I am not supported, my blood pressure is affected and my mental health has taken and continues to take a very real and painful hit. It's not the people who pour scorn on teachers for 'finishing at 3.30 and having long holidays' whilst in reality I start planning lessons at 5 a.m., do hours of marking etc at the weekend, and spend holidays recovering at the beginning and full of dread/anxiety at the end that bother me.  It's the middle management and SLT (Senior Leadership Team) who let certain students come into your classroom 3 or 4 times a week to abuse you, disrupt the whole flipping class to the point it has to stop and continue to do so with no proper sanctions from the school.  Your own sanctions are ignored or useless in some cases and when you reach out, you are usually just asked if you have 'called home'. So, instead of contentedly settling into around 20 years of continuing to give my all and being happy to do so, I am often planning my escape.  Can I change career paths? Take a sabbatical? Cut hours and fund it by reducing outgoings or creating other income streams. Maybe this is good though...  Instead of bashing myself against this brick wall for another 20 years, maybe the universe is forcing me to go sideways into some tutoring that will fit round my own child's specific needs which seem to be forcing me to homeschooling him.  There's also the spiritual stuff which I love and feel drawn to trying to spend much more time on. We are 'a long time dead' as they say and so I refuse to settle for awful but widespread and instead will create (somehow!) a situation that works for me and maybe too all the others that I could be helping

My son told me his neck hurt and he sat down in front of me on the sofa to let me massage it after I offered. I did a little up and down the neck and then went onto the shoulders but he said it was hurting him even though pretty light. I asked if he wanted healing instead and he agreed. I started and he said he liked it so I continued and kind of zoned out like I usually do. My mind wandered to a time when I had asked for healing at a Christian spiritualist church I was going to at the time. It for a work colleague in 2008 who I knew from a summer contract at a language school. They call out the list of names that people have given during the service and I was recollecting this but realised I couldn't remember his name. This was someone I only knew for those two months and haven't seen or heard from/about since. Just then, Jared opened his eyes and said 'James'...which is the ex-colleague's name.

So I find myself in the middle of a mental health crisis and want to try to describe the feelings. This in the hope that reading about my experience can help someone better identify or even put into words what they are feeling if they are struggling to. It may also give a few people that feeling that someone else feels similarly to them to maybe make them feel less freaked out and take a bit of the stigma out of these mental health blips a little. For background, I have had two big stressors recently.  My (just turned) 12-year-old has had pretty full-on anxiety for a number of years. Intermingled has been emetophobia (fear or vomiting himself or witnessing others doing so) and misophonia (super-sensitivity  and aversion to loud or unpleasant noises). It has gradually got worse rather than better and reached a really horrific crescendo once he started secondary school this last September. So hard to sum up but seeing him so very distressed, punching himself and begging me to let him die etc has been horrific.   The second is the death of my father a couple of weeks ago which is a big thing in itself but there is also so much other horrible stuff wrapped up in regarding his widow and her family that the agony has just been intensified with all the slander of me as a person, manipulation and just complete twisting of the truth. I have also had anxiety of some kind from pretty much as early as I can remember but it has waxed and waned in my nearly 50 years and morphed into different types.  I've had a phobia of fainting that is almost gone now really although it choked me for a few years, inhibiting social anxieties and then the most horrible which I have heard called 'catastrophising' which is imagining the absolute worst and fearing it uncontrollably.  This really came to a head postnatally when I could not even look forward to stuff because I feared so much that my babies were going to die. My brain was telling me that and even a little bit positive might result in my having the worse happen to punish me for my cockiness.  Wow, that's pretty messed up I know but I really couldn't shake it and couldn't really speak of it for years, let alone write a blog post on the subject! I drew the above picture to try and show that the sufferer can be quite a bright and joyful person like the woman in the purple top with the clear eyes but this anxiety entity is telling her things like those in the speech bubble so much that it becomes her internal monologue and then becomes intrusive and obsessive thoughts...all the way to beliefs. The hand on the throat is the beginning of all the physical symptoms like tight throat and shallow breathing etc. which accompany it but hopefully the picture shows that it is imposing, intentional and impossible to ignore when it is in full flow.

Halloween is in some ways my favourite holiday.  I like the theatrical dressing up mostly but also the fact it doesn't go on for ages and require a lot of commitment like a UK Christmas can with the overeating and drinking and the conundrum of who you want to see and when/how versus who you 'have' to see and when/how. Essentially it's an 'opt-in or opt-out' situation and I like that about it. After 8 years of living abroad and not being able to get a pumpkin mostly so making do with a butternut squash or skipping it all together, I have really liked being able to get a pumpkin extremely easily, carving it and turning its innards into soup. So, this is what I ended up with: First was the soup bit:

A professor of economics in the USA who is about to receive a Nobel peace prize was talking about AI on the radio this morning. He was likening the recent explosion around the usage of AI to historical situations with technical developments like the discovery and usage of electricity and also computers. He said that although AI will replace some of the skills that some people have, it will also enhance the capabilities of others.  He suggested that people would be advised to focus on their people skills to get ahead in the future rather than things that AI can do. My view is that there will of course be a big shake up in many areas of developed societies and this has already begun. We already incorporate a lot of technology into ordinary life but this a massive change. For me, it's really made it much faster to create teaching materials but there is also something in me that has become redundant as a result. I don't have to use my brain to create these materials as much and, although this was previously something very onerous, it was something I was capable of and gave me a feeling of achievement. I don't feel driven to rebel against this like with the Luddites but I certainly can have an inkling of the type of feelings they were having. The Luddites could smash up the machines that were replacing them but we can't really smash up AI! I am sure a balance will eventually be found.  Adjustments will be made due to the unstoppable nature of this advance in technology.  There will ultimately be no choice but to embrace it and make the best of it. The only other option is to reject it all totally and be left behind.

I heard a professor say this morning on the radio that Nigel Farage's niche of voters is the same people who voted 'leave' in Brexit. In my mind, these are the same people who have the St George's flag 'patriotically' displayed outside their homes and who might be attending (or at least honking as they go past) a demonstration outside a hotel currently housing asylum seekers. When encountering extreme views in class from students who, to be honest, are probably largely repeating what they have heard exclaimed at home, I have sometimes proffered a particular analogy which is that reacting in that way to immigration, legal or otherwise is like reading just one page of a novel and thinking you know the whole story in the other 359 pages. The other 359 pages would contain all the history of immigration into the UK, the UK actually becoming THE UNITED KINGDOM in the first place and plenty of looking at those with extreme opinions' ancestry and even recent family history. Just doing a DNA test and seeing what their make-up is could make an anti-immigrationer pause for a thoughtful scratch of the head.

So, all I set out to do was to create something out of stones from the beach as I was going to be at my husband's summer house in Greece and there would be plenty of stones to use! I had drooled over some masterpieces of pebblehood online with whole scenes made from beach stuff. So, I started to collect the stones bit by bit but it did end up a little bit like I couldn't enjoy just strolling on the beach for a few days as my eyes were always searching out potential art material! The perfect ones were the flattest ones as they could be glued more easily. So, allow me to introduced PETROS (a Greek name very similar to the Greek word for 'stone'). He didn't ask to exist but here he is and now sits on the wall in the living room of the summer house, waiting for tourists to wonder the age of the child who glued him into the pebbly and warty man-head that he is today! (Disclaimer: I am not a woman with a property portfolio with lots of homes, this place was something left to him by his father and I am lucky enough to go there sometimes when it is not being rented out)

I have had a cupboard full of partially-filled scrapbooks, poorly organised photos and many memory miscellanies from when both children were very small. I decided that this half term I would sort out my personal photos from before the children were born as this would hopefully fit in the pictured 44-paged album I recently procured. After a couple of days of doing it in fits and starts I haven’t done NOTHING but nowhere near what I thought I might. It turns out it actually more upsetting than I gave it credit for. In order to date many of the photos, I had to start to try and add years and rough months to all the various places I have lived (even if temporarily) throughout my life thus far and it’s really not a happy process. I had previously written out all the places and found there were over forty.

Sitting patiently (because it was so unusual for him to mix) while my pre-teen played football with some boys in the park, I saw this sign.  I initially saw it as 'the impossible is waiting' rather than 'impossible is nothing' as it actually reads.  My mistake version felt a bit like an inspirational line to encourage you to aim high and for things that maybe others would tell you are impossible. I was reminded of a sign on a clock tower I used to walk past on the way to work about 20 years ago that read 'trifle not, thy time is short'.  That used to give me a sense that I should just get on with what I wanted to do rather than waste opportunities because of fear or procrastination. A quick Google search informs me that this is something that has been put on sundials etc for hundreds of years to remind people that life does not consist of an endless abundance of time.

Over the last year or two I have dabbled a bit with ancestry.com and found an interesting character called Belinda but more about her later... In short, she was my great grandmother and brought my grandfather and other children over from Ireland about 100 years ago. One stolen afternoon last year at the end of summer term, I was off timetable due to always being so every Thursday afternoon for training but actually, the last training had happened the week prior though so essentially I was free for the afternoon. I left all the other poor souls at a sports' day in one of the first hot days of July.  I went to a nearby pub and had lunch...a hanging halloumi kebab, rice, salad and garlic bread if you are interested!  While eating, a multi-generation family came in and one of the males had a very strong southern Irish accent. My first very weird thought was to tell him I had Irish family but of course I didn't as there was a real risk of them all thinking I was some desperate bar-lush.  I even had an imaginary conversation in my mind where I described where my relatives had hailed from and how although I had been to Dublin, I had not been to the area just outside of it that they came from to my slight shame. (Only slight because I didn't know the location until just recently). In my imaginary conversation I hoped that expressing an intention to go there very soon would 'do'.  I then suddenly remembered being in Dublin all those years ago and how I felt so comfortable that I weirdly decided I was going to move there, even asking Lucy to do it with me and she had to tell me she didn't want to leave her university course etc.  I think I was at university myself at the time but somehow a job advert in the centre seemed like all I needed.  Anyway I didn't move there and haven't been back since but that's the explanation of my affinity with Ireland.

Without going into the legitimacy of reincarnation at present, I want to get down what I have 'learnt' about what my soul has been up to before. I have been told by many that I have had many...but...these are the ones I have 'seen' in regressions during hypnosis and meditative states. I am going to stop putting inverted commas around words like learnt and seen now because I hope you can already see that I am not trying to state this is all undoubtedly true. The view from the bed - I was in bed with very laboured breathing in what we would describe as a stately home these days. A sash window had a view of a well-kept expanse of lawn and garden. My son had come to see me and was standing at the foot of my bed, crying silently with his hat taken of and held against his chest. In his other hand was the hand of a little girl with brown eyes and a mob cap. I assumed in the vision that I was his mother and dying but no words were spoken. The jealous blacksmith's wife - I am fairly sure I was a younger version of the dying woman above. I was walking down a muddy lane with businesses on either side. My skirt was so long that it was dragging in the mud and, although I was aware of that, I knew I couldn't do anything about it. To my left was a blacksmith's and inside was my sister who hated the fact I had 'married up' (stately home) and she had 'married down' (blacksmith's). Her eyes recognised me and burned with jealousy. Drowned mother of two - wearing a white cap with strings having down either side of my face, mother to two little girls so close in age that people believed they were twins and father away at sea. We lived somewhere very cold and remote at least in part due to the fact we were not supposed to be together really as families (or society perhaps) disapproved. Stuck with no food I went fishing alone and fell through the ice, drowning while knowing my little girls would be left so vulnerable. They died and when my husband came back he found this scene and me nowhere to be found as under the ice, believing that I had abandoned our children. I, of course, couldn't tell him otherwise. Seaside entertainer - last century in (likely a UK) seaside town where people go for days out and holidays. I was a male, unmarried and childless, working as some kind of entertainer like a clown on the seafront. I would lunch in a pub and have beers and pies. I died by being hit head-on by a bus or tram. I felt the impact dentally before dying. Greek noble woman - spending lots of time alone in an outdoor swimming pool with mosaic tiles. Hayfever sufferer next to mountains - male I think and on a contraption pulled by a horse or mule. Out in the open air daily and knowing that if I rubbed my itchy eyes just once, the effect might be instant relief but the end result would be much worse. A soldier on a horse - spear going into and through my right thigh and killing me as unable to remove it. Victorian woman - killed in domestic violence situation next to a stone fireplace, the blood from the fatal head wound pooling around my head as I died.

Boundaries. Maybe not what you were expecting it to be. A word that is thrown around these days as something that we should have, should communicate and other people need to respect. The fence in the picture is a pretty permanent and clear physical one between two gardens. The ones I am talking about are much less obvious, accepted and unmovable. When someone is hurting you emotionally or psychologically, it's because they can. We give them access because we are physically and mentally open. If a random man in Australia who doesn't have my phone number wants to hurt me, he can't. He has no access. However, people who we are in the same location as for whatever reason, do. More relevantly, the people we are emotionally close to have the most access of all. They can be our relatives. So, although we can understand the idea of boundaries in theory very well, actually implementing this in any meaningful way is much more complex. Very basically, the 'boundary' is the last point that you are comfortable. When someone 'pushes your boundaries', they are starting to make you feel uncomfortable emotionally, psychologically or even physically. If someone 'crosses your boundaries',you will then feel very ill at ease or even hurt/violated. Unlike the fence in the picture,your 'boundary' might not be too obvious.  For example, someone might feel very free in talking about money. They might even ask you how much you earn or how much you paid for something. If you feel uncomfortable and don't want to answer then your 'boundary' has been approached. However, the person asking is, at that point, unaware that they have done anything other than just asked you a simple question. The onus is then on you to make your 'boundary' clear. The skill then comes in how you do so a very bolshy person might just say "that's a bit rude. Don't ask me that!" But, of course, this is likely to cause a great deal of awkwardness. Finding a softer and more palatable way to deliver the same information is key.  As is often the case with examples this is pretty simple and real life is not so black and white.