Am I predjudiced....towards myself?

Once upon a time, I was the self assured young woman who declared that I would age gracefully, not mind the wrinkles that would mark my worldly experience, not dye my grey hairs.  But then something happened.  I got older.  And I got fat.

I always objected to fatism.  I could find loveliness in fatness.  I admired curvy beauties with the confidence to sing or act and not demonstrate the need to adhere to society's slim ideal.

The combination of anxiety, depression, medication, lack of exercise, lack of sleep and a new financial position that resulted in more lunches out, more coffee and more takeaways was a recipe for disaster weight wise.

My self esteem plummeted, and I found myself out to be a complete hypocrite when it came to my own feelings about appearance.  I started a major program of compensation for the fact that I now wore tunics and leggings.  I might have no waist, but I also was not going to have straggly eyebrows or a lady moustache.  I primped, preened, dyed, plucked and painted what I could.  But I still look in the mirror and see ugly.

I know in my mind that this perception is wrong.  My own thoughts on my appearance or personality are not necessarily true.

As a new year approaches, I always think of it as a time of reflection and thinking ahead.  There are lots of great things happening in 2013, none of which requires me to be skinny and pretty.  Perhaps my first resolution should be to stop being so damned self absorbed. I have had a year of wallowing self indulgence - now it's time to find more of a balance between enough self care so as to maintain a certain level of tidiness in my appearance and physical fitness, but also think about figuring out the difference between that, and pandering to my own negative self talk.

As the new year unfolds, I'll share how I get on!

Catharsis

Today I finally did it.  I got my butterfly tattoo.  It is very small, pretty and delicate...probably even Mum would approve.

 I started getting piercings done in my ears just to piss Mum off.  She had given me permission to have the first one when I was 13, but thereafter I just started adding holes just to push up hard against my boundaries.  In my 20s I got my navel pierced, and then I got a tattoo on my shoulder.  "That's quite nice" Mum said.  That took the wind out of my sails.  The shock value was gone.

That first tattoo was acquired so long ago I can hardly remember when it was.  But I do remember that it didn't hurt as much as getting my navel pierced.  So today when I went to visit the tattoo parlour with my design in mind, I was feeling confident that it would be super easy.  I've birthed four children - pain....I laugh in the face of pain.

 

I wasn't laughing.  It HURT.  A lot.  I found it was easier to look at the tattooist while she worked rather than look away.  It made the pain bearable.

 

But there is something to be said for the whole process of getting a symbol irreversably marked on your skin.  I chose a monarch butterfly - its a memory, but its also hope.  Mum loved raising monarch butterflies in our family home after we had left home.  It became a hobby.  Mum would take caterpillars inside the house to protect them from wasps, and chrysalises to protect them from the cold.  She was a supporter of the Monarch Butterfly Trust and in the last summer in the old house, she was participating in a butterfly tagging project.

 

Its a symbol of something lost, but its a symbol of looking forward, too.   Remember The Butterfly of Happiness?   This butterfly will be a constant reminder to be on the lookout for it, and to not chase it, and just wait, patiently, for it to alight upon me.

 

The pain was like a symbolic tug - something that could bring that emotional pain to the surface to manifest itself in something physical that would have a positive outcome.

 

Bringing emotional pain to the surface is a constant challenge.  A few weeks ago I embarked on a relaxing weekend away from the family in which to simply DO nothing, and have time for some solitude that I had been sorely missing for ten years.  I'm not sure that I did much 'reflecting' but it was for the most part, relaxing and enjoyable.

 

Late on Sunday morning I had brunch with my brother and his wife at Mission Bay, then decided I would just take a drive and see where the day took me.  I wound my way along the coast, through parts of Auckland I had never been before.  My route ended up with me heading towards Pakuranga - my old stomping ground - and I was irresistably drawn to carrying on driving there, and onwards to my old home.  Visiting Pakuranga has become very strange, now.  I have no family or close friends there, so I do not go there often.  Around every corner is a ghost of the former me, my former life.  Nothing remarkable had happened to the old house, except for a maple tree that had been cut down.  And then it happened.  The floodgates opened, and I started to cry.  Not to look like a loiterer, I drove away, and parked at a nearby council playing field, and wept and wept.  I didn't just weep - I howled.  I screamed.  There was nobody to hear me, and this needed to get out!

 

The loss of a tree on a piece of land that I no longer had any claim to knocked me for six.  This is a tree that appears as a little sapling in our old family photos of the house when we first moved in.  Before Mum moved, it was big enough for my two boys to climb.  And now its gone.

 

Finally, the tears that I needed to cry in November 2010 were here.  They were brutal and uncompromising, and I didn't resist them.

 

Perhaps I am learning to deal with pain.  I can allow it to happen to me - welcome it, in fact - understanding that the outcome is worth it.  I can also allow it to rise from the inside, and be released.  And feel relief.  Finally. 

 

 



Reaching the 'anger' phase

So a while ago, I was thinking everything was peachy keen, and it was time to come off my anti-depressant medication.  I was feeling much more positive, much more motivated about life, had much more zing.

Of course Murphy's Law dictates that as soon as I started to feel that way, I'd have a little downward spiral.

Someone at Solace said that the journey through suicide survival is a rollercoaster.  Its inevitable that what goes up comes down.  For a while at least.  Considering how numb I  was in the first year, I suppose I am, in a way, experiencing the 'first year' rollercoaster.  But not so much as gripping the bar with white knuckled fear as gasping at my stomach leaping into my throat...thank goodness.

Therapy has taught me how to stand back and look at what is going on, and what is setting feelings like this off.  My older son is in his last year at primary school, and is beginning to prepare for intermediate school.  We have enrolment packs and he's been on visits to two prospective schools.  He is old enough to take part in the decision making process, and so we have, together, chosen where he will go.

I am also very aware of having clear memories of my own about starting intermediate.  As he gets older, those memories of the same stages seem less and less in the distant past.

It occurred to me that I don't have anyone to discuss this big milestone with.  Most of my friends either have no children, or they are younger.  My brother has no children yet, my sisters-in-law have no children, and my brothers-in-law have much older children or they live far away. 

There is nothing specific about M. starting intermediate that worries me, but its simply that its happening that is a trigger.  This is the sort of thing I would have just chatted to Mum about over tea on a Sunday afternoon.  Just shooting the breeze. Just tapping her memories of what it was like when I (as the oldest child) started intermediate and meshing them with my own.  Reminding each other of things we had forgotten from our different perspectives.  Maybe even sharing her own experiences of things that happened during her schooling.  M. will have to take a bus - I've never bussed to school, but Mum had.  That passing on wisdom from a parent to someone who is one now.  You are a first time parent for the rest of your life, and this transition from child to pre-teen is just as scary, if not more so, than the transition from toddler to preschooler as they start stepping into the world with growing independence.

My husband already did anger - right after Mum died, he was angry.  I put off anger until now.  I am angry at her for leaving me alone to face big life events.  I am angry at being deserted when I need a wise mother.I am angry that M. can't share his experiences with her either. 

The anger is undirected, though.  I am not mad at her as such...she was unwell, and not in a position to realise the impact her choice would have on all of us.  So my anger just has to dissipate into the great wide open. 

I suppose I'm glad I feel it.  I can work with something I feel.  Its better than being numb. 

Solitude

Yesterday a friend posted this on her Facebook wall - Overwhelmed By Motherhood: The Anatomy of an Anxiety Attack

I have read this before, but every time is like a tap on the shoulder....I didn't have post partum depression or anxiety, but I know what the author is talking about.

In particular, this resonated with me:

As someone with anxiety, and an introvert, I do well having many hours of the day on my own. I sit in a quiet house, with only the damn neighbor’s yapping jerk hounds to disturb me here and there, and I write. I answer email. I chat with people on Twitter. It is a comfort for me to have that peace for so long.

I am similar to my mother in that I am an introvert who enjoys her own company.  Whether I inherited that trait via nature or nurture who knows.  It is what it is.

In one session with my therapist, she brought me to a point of realising that having married virtually from leaving home, that I had had very limited time with my own company and being responsible for only myself.  In fact, I probably had no autonomous time, as I moved from my parents care and responsiblity to a partnership with my husband-to-be. 

I have always been happy with this - it was what I always expected to do, and figured whether it happened at 18 or 28, what difference would it make?

Don't get me wrong... I love my husband, and I don't want 'out.'  I love my kids and I love my life just the way it is.

But this revelation was such a shocking one to me that I actually cried all the way home from that session.  I literally thought 'What the hell have I done?'

I do feel like I have lived my life outside the rules.  Most of the time I don't mind, but some days I just wish I was like everyone else.  Got married at 19, had babies starting at 25, haven't bought a house, haven't got a tertiary qualification.  I don't fit into the handy little box that is middle-class Pakeha New Zealand.  But I don't feel like I fit into any other box, either.  Some might argue that is a good thing, but at the end of the day, people always like to belong somewhere.

After my reaction at my realisation that 'me' is wrapped up in so many other people, it made me far more conscious of making an effort to extract 'me' from everything else.

So, I put aside all my 'perfect mother' aspirations, and decided to be 'good enough' mother.  I put my preschooler into an extra day at daycare so I could have a 'self maintenance day.'  This title was coined by a friend, and was very fitting when I would use this day to go to the therapist, osteopath, doctor and so on.

As I move away from outside management of my mental health, I have changed self maintenance day to being my day to just do things I want to. 

I think my revelation about a lack of autonomous time wasn't about me regretting my choices to live an unconventional life as a younger-than-average wife and mother.  But it was more about how, since having children, I have not had these lengthy times of restorative solitude. 

Now its time to claim them back.

The Butterfly of Happiness

Yesterday my husband was really sick with a gastro bug, so I decided to get out of the house for the day, and embarked on something once familiar to me when he used to work Sundays - a family outing minus one parent.

As you so often do in the car and no other place, we got talking about serious issues.  Since Mum died, my five year old daughter often expresses her concerns about me dying.  She's asked me when I will die, and I have tried to be honest without being alarmist - I have said I don't really know, but probably not until I'm really old.

In the car we got talking about their grandparents (all of whom are dead) and about how long they lived for.  Sadly, my parents-in-law (whom I never got to meet) and my own father all died from smoking related illnesses.  My father was 70 when he died, but I explained to them that he might have lived a lot longer if he had not been a smoker for nearly half his life.  My 10 year old son, at times like these, exposes more insight than I usually give him credit for.  He pointed out that when my father and my husband's parents started smoking, that people didn't understand that it was dangerous.

I had tried to my my daughter understand that Nana died when she was pretty old - difficult for her to grasp.  "She was more than TWICE my age!"  Hmmm....?

One of the older boys pointed out that Nana had committed suicide - they know what it means.  So I talked to them about how Nana had been suffering from depression.  Insightful 10 year old said that she was sad about Granddad dying and that she had to move house.  Which was kind of true.  I said that she had been through a lot of change, and it was difficult for someone set in their ways.  I explained that depression is like being sad, only worse, because its hard to feel better.

I said that Nana chose to die because she was so sick that she didn't feel there was a way out of feeling that way. Insightful 10 year old said "So she decided it would be better to die than to feel that way?"  Right on, kiddo.

I also explained that I had the same illness after Nana died, and that was what happened when I wasn't feeling well last year, but that I had medicine to help me, and that I went to a therapist as well.  I could see a way out.

This seemed to satisfy even Worried 5 year old.

But this isn't the first time my mother's and my happiness has been compared.


In one therapy session, I got to talking about reasons why I was sad, upset, feeling lost and so on.  I talked about brushing my daughter's hair, and tying it up in the ribbons I'd had as a wee girl.  Those sorts of moments are special, and my daughter had been getting to an age where she was enjoying dressing up and having her hair done.  I wondered why Mum didn't feel like even those kinds of moments weren't enough to keep her here with us.

The therapist gave me this quote.

“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Perhaps at the point Mum was at, she had been beset by so much grief and change, that she was actively pursuing happiness, and had forgotten that sometimes you just need to be patient, wait for it, and find it there with you where you didn't expect.  I think she had been making so much effort to be happy, that she wasn't seeing the small things that would have brightened her life.  She was trying to enjoy her garden, trying to enjoy the company of the people in her new surroundings (a retirement village) that maybe she didn't just stop to smell the flowers that were already there.

To be fair, depression makes this acceptance of the butterfly of happiness much harder.  Depression is the cat that grabs the butterfly and shreds it before it gets to land on your shoulder.  Sometimes you can get to the butterfly before the cat.  Sometimes the butterfly is a survivor.  But some just don't make it....

However, it provided a valuable analogy for me to apply to my own life, and it gave me insight into how my own mind works.

I suppose I am more like my father, who would happily have entertained hoardes of butterflies around him.  He found pleasure in simple things... polishing shoes, growing vegetables, a drink at the local pub.  We noted after he died how he would really have had to be at death's door to not make it to his local watering hole to see his mates - even when he was getting more and more unwell with his COPD that he would still grab life with both hands and run..well, walk..with it.

I know Mum's capacity for happiness was there once.  She wrote about sitting with a cup of tea waiting for us to come home from school, and feeling full of joy.  All her dreams had come true.  So perhaps this happiness was the kind that had been pursued, and found.  And now so much of it was gone, it was too much to bear?

My therapist believed I have a greater capacity for happiness.  I think this is true.  I have my moments of anxiety and doubt and fear, but I can still take great pleasure in brushing my daughter's hair, in having my little preschooler give me a huge bear hug, in breathing in the cool fresh air on a bush walk, in the sound of the ocean as I drop off to sleep camping at my favourite beach.

I hope my capacity for happiness stays with me.  I think I have the tools and desire to make it so.

Get that woman into therapy now...

This was a jokey line that my husband and I used to use when we watched The X-Files.  Agent Scully was always finding her way into a jam...and you know, stuff like being abducted and probed by aliens would likely cause many psychological problems.

At that time, it never would have occurred to me that one day it would be me in therapy.  But today I graduated from it.

Right after Mum died, I didn't really feel I needed counselling, but later, even before my breakdown, I knew things weren't quite right, and I started a search for a good therapist.  I had recommendations from friends, from family, from someone with insight into which therapists were best trained in cognitive behavioural therapy.  I had numbers, I had names.  But I didn't do anything.

Leaving things in my own hands doesn't always work well, and I found I had to wait until I was pushed to crisis point before I could make that step.  Once I had the breakdown, I went to the GP and told him point blank that I needed to be referred to someone.  I needed to be told what to do, where to go and who to see.  I received six funded psychotherapist sessions and was on my way.

Enter Linda.*  With appointment duly arranged, I turned up at the unassuming offices that made up the substantial practice that Linda was a part of.  Linda met me at reception, and led me up to her office tucked away upstairs.  She was a striking looking woman in her early 40s with big green eyes, who walked like a dancer and always had grey regrowth showing at the roots of her long brown hair.

Fortunately, I had been pre-warned by a friend that I might wonder what was being achieved in the beginning.  There was a bit of knitted eyebrows, nodding, 'Hmmmm..' and 'tell me about your mother.' 

But over time, we managed to get to the bottom of how deeply my loss had effected me.  Linda helped me understand the gravity of what had happened, and helped me deal with how my body was processing what was going on in my mind.

But not only that, she helped me get to the bottom of other anxieties that had plagued me for years.  Health anxiety was a major one for me.  A headache or pain anywhere on my body would set me off on a spiral of anxiety about having a brain tumor or a heart attack.  Linda helped me understand that this was likely a physical response to what was going on in my head.  Not only this, she taught me about how to stop pushing against my feelings, and start accepting them and working through them, rather than shoving them in the closet and pushing the door shut...even if all my baggage wasn't going to fit in there.  Banging up against a brick wall doesn't get you very far.

Today I started our session by saying that I was thinking of ditching her, but how would I know I was ready? So the hour became a retrospective of the last six months, and what I had achieved.  Linda has the skills to get into my head and to come up with something pithy that perfectly describes what I am thinking but fail to articulate, and many of our breakthroughs will stay with me for life.

In 'Serendipity' my mother talks about the profound effect her psychotherapist had on her life in 1972-73.  She considers him her lifesaver - to the point that she was still contacting him periodically decades later.

Going to therapy is interesting, because you develop a very intimate relationship with someone over time, yet of course that relationship is always one sided.  Mothers often talk about the relationship they have with their midwives.  Perhaps these sorts of professional relationships are unique because those particular practioners are present in our lives at times when we are going through great change.

With Linda's help, I am able to understand that I have been through a life changing experience.  Something in me is different, and something in me is missing.  As Linda said to me today, loss finds a place to settle.  That feeling is never gone, but finds its place in your new life - the new life you have without that person.

After this debrief session, Linda said 'You'll be fine.'  And you know, I think she's right.  There will still be ups and downs.  But yes, I think I'll be fine.



*Not her real name.  And it feels really weird calling her something else.

Finding Solace

I have only ever been to one support group in my life.  Its not unusual for young Mums to attend coffee groups and new mothers' groups, and that may be the full extent of many people's experiences of the support group environment.  For men, nothing may the extent of their's.

Right after Mum died, I was advised about several support services.  Victim Support met us at the retirement village after Mum was found.  We received information about free grief counselling through the funeral director.  And I was told about a group called Solace - a group that existed to support people who had experienced loss through suicide.

Of course, during my year of denial, I decided I didn't need counselling, and I certainly didn't need to go and share with a group.

Of course my mind was changed about many things since Mum's one year anniversary. In February, during a discussion about finding time to do things for myself, my therapist suggested I go along to the Solace support group that coming weekend.  I figured it was worth a try.

Initially, I was nervous.  I got to the venue late, and couldn't see clearly where to go.  I found the right door to the room where they were meeting, and walked in on a surprisingly large group of about ten (which I later found was, apparently, a small turnout..!)

I had been apprehensive about what I would find.  I thought the group would we weighted with parents who had lost children (because, after all, youth suicide is in the media all the time, right?) and that my situation wouldn't be relevant a year on.

How wrong I was.

There was a mix of people - all ages, all walks of life.  The time between their loss and that meeting day varied between months and decades.  But none of that mattered.  What mattered was that we had all, at some stage, experienced a loss we were finding, or had found, difficult to understand.

I immediately felt a connection with this group where I knew I could talk in a non-judgemental space.  And I think with suicide, sometimes you need to talk about things that might be 'controversial' to others, but the people who have been through that loss know what you mean.

If you or anyone you know has experienced loss through suicide, I would highly recommend getting in touch with your local Solace group - there are two (that I am aware of) in New Zealand.

Like anything in life, nobody understands like someone who has been there and done that.



Find your local Solace group here:

Auckland

Hamilton

The letter that shatters illusions

As if my ANZAC Day couldn't get any more strange, this was also the day that I finally received the letter from the Coroner which outlined her inquiry into Mum's death.

This was the closing piece of documention to 'her case' and lays out to the best of anyone's knowledge, what really happened.  Its gives us something to have put on a death certificate.  Its case closed.

At Mum's funeral I talked about her carrying out 'rational suicide' - consciously making the decision to end her life because a future of ageing was too difficult for her to face.

My therapist has pointed out that suicidality is not a moment of psychosis or insanity.  It is a decision someone makes consciously.  But the reasons for the decision are not always rational.  So perhaps I was only half right.

However, with the arrival of this letter, it became apparent that Mum's suicide was not the result of rational thought processes and the romantic notion of departing this world at a time of her choosing.

The coroner's letter brought into focus the bits and pieces of evidence, of belief, of writing and correspondence,we had found, and had thought - into one final conclusion.

The letter answers as many questions as it can, based on interviews with various people who saw Mum leading up to her death.  Whatever is left will remain a mystery forever.

The final picture isn't one of noble rationalism but of stress - distress - and depression.

Maybe we always knew it was true, but the illusion was easier to live with.  But illusions are like drugs - they'll make you feel good for a while, but eventually you have to work through the truth.

The revelation that Mum was, in all likelihood, depressed and suicidal in the weeks leading up to her death is like a knawing ache in the bottom of my chest.  It inevitable that we should wonder what we could have done.  Its sad to think that she took so much trouble to die because she may have seen it as the only way to escape the crushing negative feelings she was experiencing. 

I don't feel overly upset, or angry, or even consumed by the 'what ifs?'  But I am a master of denial...so maybe that is an illusion too.......

Please, please, please...if you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, seek help...

Lifeline 0800 5222999
Helping young people with depression http://www.thelowdown.co.nz/

Local DHB crisis support http://www.mentalhealth.org.nz/page/303-In-Crisis

My strange ANZAC Day

I can only make assumptions about what most Kiwis (and Australians) do on ANZAC Day, as I feel like I'm not one of them.

ANZAC Day might be just a holiday, perhaps for some its about getting up early for dawn service, then heading home to spend it with their families.

As a child, and particularly, a teenager, I dreaded ANZAC Day.  All that day meant to me was my ex-serviceman father leaving early in the morning, and returning home later in the day absolutely smashed off his face, and sleeping it off in the garage.  As a child it was weird...as a teenager it was humiliating.

Of course, Dad coming home from the RSA drunk was nothing new, and was simply part of our lives growing up.  I constantly worried about what other families and my friends would think of me.

In Dad's later years, as I became more aware, I started to understand the toll war had taken on him.  Dad served in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps for twenty years, and saw active service in Malaya, Borneo, and, perhaps most significantly, Vietnam.

My self-centred humiliation about my father's behaviour on ANZAC Day, or any other day of the week where alcoholism ruled the roost, changed to contempt for governments who send young men to ill conceived wars to have them return battered and scarred, with wounds we cannot see.

As Dad grew older, I came to accept he was unwell, but putting up a jolly good fight to live life to the fullest in his post-Army life. 

By the time he passed away in February 2010, we had made our peace, and I am satisfied that he left this world knowing his family loved him.  On his final night, I remember feeling all the bitterness for how he had made me feel over so many years simply fall away. 

On 25 April 2010 I attended my first ANZAC Day Dawn Service at the Auckland War Memorial Museum - the same place my father marched every year since the late 1970s.

I find ANZAC Day as the rest of the country sees it very difficult to understand .  Rhetoric about the 'dawn of our nationhood' or how young men 'fought for our freedom' sounds hollow in a country where children are living in poverty, suffering third world diseases, public assets are about to be sold, workers are being starved into servitude to multi-millionaire employers, and huge tracts of land can be sold to the highest foreign bidder.

I am sure the young men who went to their all too early graves in 1915 - and in subsequent wars - believed they were saving us.  I know my Dad did, even if the facts about the war he served in tell a different story.

So, ANZAC Day becomes my father's memorial.  I do not hear Reveille and think of our 'nationhood.'  I hear it and think of my father polishing up the copper coffee urn he would take to the RSA.  I don't feel stirrings of patriotism when I hear 'Advance Australia Fair,' but remember his insistence on saying 'daance' rather than 'darnce' even when everything else he said sounded like a Kiwi.

I think its important to remember our lost soldiers, but perhaps I don't think of them in the same way as everyone else - I think of them more as pawns in the greater global scandal that is war, rather than heroes, conquering or otherwise.

The war made my father a shattered pawn.  That despite all the damage war did, for the most part, he gave us a happy childhood, and that is what makes him a hero to me.

Grief is universal

Thank you Unspoken Grief for this.  Their website aims to support those touched by miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal loss.  But the message is universal.

Freakin' out over four decades

Today I got the bad news that a health professional that I respect and admire had committed suicide.  This was a real trigger for me, and prompted me to finally put this post in writing...

Much of the body of  'Serendipity' was Mum's story of her journey though her mental illness and treatment.  The details of this journey were always hidden from us, although my brother had been told some of the story - hence we had a term for this period of her life - 'The Freakout of 1972'  I never talked to Mum about it, because it had not been her that had told me.  I felt she would tell me if she though it relevant or necessary.  It turns out that she only felt it to be either of those things after she had gone.

In an earlier post on this blog, I talked about what grief looks like.  It turns out that was simply the air punches leading up the the whammy that would knock the wind out of me. 

For most of 2011, I managed to hold myself together remarkably well.  Friends would express sorrow about Mum's passing, and ask how I was.  "I am fine...really," I would say.  And I believed it.  My brother and I sorted out Mum's affairs and tidied up loose ends, and I was fine.  I carried on my paid work, my unpaid work and I was fine.

November 2011 loomed - the first anniversary.  But I was going to be FINE, right?

Enter the surprises that grief had in store for me. 

Right after Mum had passed away, I had been to see my doctor about chest pains and increased anxiety.  See a counsellor, he had suggested.  Because I lived outside the PHO district, this was tricky - he couldn't refer me to anyone, and I was left to my own devices.  My own devices aren't particularly reliable, so despite gathering some phone numbers, that was as far as my actions proceeded.

Having suffered from chronic hyperventilation syndrome for ten years, I had noticed this was becoming increasingly hard to self-manage, and decided to take myself to see a physiotherapist at Breathing Works .  But, before I did that, I wanted to rule out any physical reasons for my feelings of shortness of breath, so went to a new GP in my local area.  He was great, and we talked about lots of possibilities around what might be aggravating my condition.  We talked about anxiety, and different approaches to handling it.  I'll get around to that, I thought....

I started seeing an osteopath about the tension in my back - although rather than it causing the hyperventilation, it was a symptom of it.  I also saw the physio at Breathing Works, which was great in terms of reinforcing some of the knowledge I already had, and providing practical exercises to do to help things improve.

So far, so good.

November rolled around, and I was off to two day meeting for the volunteer organisation I sat on the Board for.  Everything was fine for the first day, but I severely underestimated the impact the location and timing of this meeting would have on me.  The last time I had seen Mum was immediately after the same meeting the previous year when I had dropped by afterwards on the way home, and even over that weekend she had come to take my toddler son away for some respite from boring adults sitting around talking.

On the Saturday morning I began hyperventilating, and needed to lie down.  I decided I needed to leave the meeting, and managed to get myself home by singing along to the radio to stop myself panicking and hyperventilating.  Once home, I went to bed.  Later that afternoon I had an episode of uncontrollable shaking.

I decided I probably needed to see the GP about the hyperventilating again, and after reading some info from Breathing Works, figured I had better get my iron levels tested. (It turned out they were low, but I didn't find this out until a bit later - low haemoglobin is a trigger for hyperventilation syndrome)

I went to work as normal on Tuesday.... but I felt anything but normal.  I had another episode of shaking when I woke up.  Something was just 'not right' - I felt a sensation of constant built up tension that had no release valve.  I lasted at work until about 11am, when I decided I needed to 'get out of there' and see a doctor.  I didn't even try to get into my regular GP, but went to the local Accident and Medical clinic, where I spoke to the doctor on duty about what had happened over the weekend.  He gave me a small prescription of Lorazepam just to 'take the edge off' and provide some support while I sorted myself out.

The next day I went back to my GPs clinic again, and saw a different doctor.  I explained what had happened, and said that this time I think I needed outside help at setting myself on a path to recovery.  Leaving it up to me wasn't working, so could he please refer me to a therapist and give me some medication. That in itself was quite a big deal, as I had resisted the idea of medication for a very long time.  It is a credit to the doctors at this surgery that they do not treat medication as the first or only course of action, but recognise it as part of a package of treatment options.  The doctor gave me a three month prescription for citalopram and put through a referral to that PHO's psychological services. 

That night I took my first dose of citalopram, and overwhelmed by my anxiety about taking drugs for my brain, had the mother of all panic attacks.  I felt my body going hot and prickly, it was hard to catch my breath.  I was so terrified I was going to die that I got my husband to call 111.  I couldn't even tell the operator how I was feeling because it was so hard to catch my breath.  The first response paramedic arrived and took all my vital signs...which were all good.  Terrified of this happening again, I went into hospital for observation for the night. 

This was a turning point in terms of my anxieties and panic attacks.  Panic attacks produce frightening symptoms that the sufferer can interpret as life threatening - chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness.  Having been in the hospital and having my vital functions as assessed as all normal is possibly the best thing that could have happened.  I can feel reassured that chest pain does not mean I am going to die.  My heart and lungs are all fit and healthy.

My subsequent work with my therapist has revealed that I had seriously underestimated the gravity of my loss, and that I spent a year essentially 'in denial.'  My body couldn't hold in that tension and raw emotion any longer, and reacted with panic, anxiety, and I now think, depression.  I needed help, but I had to reach a crisis point before I would admit it and before I would really push to ask for it.

Anxiety and depression are such difficult beasts to tame.  Mostly the problem is in recognising them in the first place.  Then getting to the bottom of why they are lurking in that corner in the shadows.  If you leave them there long enough, eventually they will turn into the monster that becomes bold enough to step into the middle of the room and roar!

I could recognise my anxiety easily - depression, less so.  And although I thought I had grief pegged - how wrong I was.

I realised later that the first pages of "Serendipity" describe Mum's early encounters with the psychotherapist that changed her life, and enabled her to achieve all the things she dreamed of. 

In March 1972 she began that journey.  Forty years ago. 

I am Serendipity's Daughter, indeed.