Nine years on... 

Reprising my ancient blog (!) in January 2021 to share some thoughts about resilience, mental wellbeing and recovery in a global pandemic. 

Lockdown is tough. It is tough for so many people for so many reasons, and incredibly tough for so many people in a less privileged position than myself. People shielding, who don’t feel safe at home, or who have no home, with children with additional needs, who work in the NHS, or whose partners work in the NHS, all number of incredibly tough situations. I know all this and feel immense guilt every day because I know I am relatively lucky in comparison. But it is also tough for people with a tendency towards poor mental health, even in contexts where the bills will (just about!) be paid, you have a happy home life and crucially, access to support. I found the first lockdown extremely difficult, and the recovery afterwards even more tough. But by the time of the next (major) one – it could be argued that Manchester technically rarely properly came out of it – I managed to find a strength and resilience I did not know I had, and have got myself into a much better position.

I found myself in April 2020, thrown back into work from maternity leave with my second child, in the middle of a national lockdown. I was doing a part-time masters degree at the same time, which I had re-started the month previously and was managing ok. I had, very nervously (the level of risk regarding covid in childcare settings at the time was – and still is – a big unknown), settled my youngest child into nursery for the first time and was just starting to extricate myself from the limpet-like grip of months of baby rearing. But instead of escaping my kids by going back to work, putting nice clothes on again, going to the loo uninterrupted, drinking coffee at a leisurely pace, I found schools and nurseries closed, a small laptop invading my bedroom and living room, which had previously been a chaotic but lovely haven of cosy, happy baby rearing. I had a million and one demands hitting me all at once, all whilst wearing porridge stained pyjamas and a bemused, shocked face that had barely registered that I was now an employee, a student, a mother, an educator, a home manager, a caterer. My brain was full of chaos and I had no identity anymore, just a huge portfolio of roles I had to fill. I met the challenge by over-achieving like a maniac, baking pies and quiches from scratch, desperately developing ambitious early years activities for two kids, filming puppet play videos, staying up late to do extra work and churn out essays, all whilst breastfeeding a clingy 11 month old and consoling a confused, increasingly emotional four year old. It was insane. It was unachievable.

But I did it, I pressed on regardless, ignoring all and any demands to care for myself, staying up late to write and stuffing my face with as much sugary food as I could get my hands on in the evening. The next day, I would sleep in, unable to get out of bed after one or two night feeds, anxious dreams and late working, jaw and head throbbing in pain from clenching my teeth all night, leaving my husband to wrangle two bonkers children in the morning. I wouldn’t get dressed properly for hours and felt out of control, unable to manage the day ahead. I couldn’t keep track of time and would be utterly paralysed by the smallest decisions, like what to have for dinner. We had been pretty careful with social contact the whole time and I missed my friends and my family so much it hurt my heart.

Lockdown however, was not the worst. I knew that the recovery would be the hardest bit, when I had to manage a semi return to a kind of normality, the anxiety of being out and about, managing more social and work demands. My body was inevitably going to crash as it tried to process what had happened, and months of chaotic living, rock-bottom self esteem (due to weight gain, lack of general self-care, and an unshakeable feeling that I was failing in every aspect of life) and constant influx of physical adrenaline took its toll.

The spring and summer offered a brief respite, with happy holidays to break it up, sunshine and the chance to meet people outdoors, or even see family. The autumn, however, followed, and I felt myself sinking lower and lower into a mire. I had started sessions with my old CBT therapist a month or two previously, but had gone a few weeks without her as I felt I was too busy with work and study, which was a huge mistake. I found myself disassociating, which had never happened to me before, disconnecting from life, floating above what was happening and staring into the distance, unable to process even the most basic tasks, like reading a picture book to my toddler. I could not make decisions, I could not stop crying, I could not think, or get up in the morning. On my very worst days in October, I will not say I was suicidal, but for the first time in my life, I saw as clear as day, the twin drivers that put people in that position – the first, a feeling that the people around you would be immeasurably better off if you weren’t there and the second, an overwhelming sense of exhaustion and inability to cope with the demands your brain places on you every day. The tiredness with the chatter in my head was unbearable. I was beyond exhausted and couldn’t function. It all came to a head when my husband had to work all weekend (which he often does, due to the nature of his job) after I’d had a particularly draining urgent essay deadline that involved a few too many late nights. I found I just couldn’t be on my own with the kids, I couldn’t function anymore. 

To cut a long story short, I had to get away from the house (within what was considered possible and safe at that time) and the kids.. I managed this and started the process of getting better, which included a couple of weeks’ leave of absence from work and lots of professional and family help. I would absolutely have considered going on medication to get me out of the hole I found myself in, but having been on it before for post-natal anxiety and really hating the side effects of going on and off it, I wanted to avoid it. My therapist agreed and said she thought I was capable of using techniques to turn myself around. I knew that, with some very hard work, I could access ways to get me out of a really scary situation, but if for a second I ever thought I couldn’t, I absolutely would have gone on anti-depressants. Medication can be a ladder to pull you out of a dark pit if you have no other methods and is vital for many people alongside therapy or psychiatric care.

By December, after a lot of work and essential family support, I was feeling so much better and in a solid place to meet the challenges of life. A huge part of this was obviously having childcare, and being able to meet people outdoors (and indoors, over Christmas, briefly, which for Mancunians was a treat beyond belief, as up until then we had pretty much had one person in our house since March). With all the disastrous news on the horizon, I was dreading the new clampdown and it left me seriously questioning whether I would be strong enough to cope – and if I was, what would the crash afterwards be like?

However, overall, and in the grip of the worst point of the pandemic yet, I find myself generally more able to deal with doom-laden, horrendous headlines, more resilient to stresses and more capable, at least, of identifying how I feel before it gets out of control. The most powerful thing I have learnt, with support from a CBT therapist, is that your behaviour informs your mind. I never, ever truly believed this before, and felt that if the world was a disaster then it was simply a disaster, and there was absolutely nothing positive behavioural habits could do to change it. The feeling of dread and worry about everything was still going to be there if you went for a nice walk. But the last few months has proved myself wrong. I have developed techniques to improve my resilience and send my brain on more positive and helpful pathways. Behaviour really and truly does make a difference.

By doing better, by living better (within the very tight limitations we have to exist in), by being kinder to myself, I have found myself stronger and better able to cope. I have pulled myself out of the deepest, darkest hole I’ve ever known. I still have many, many wobbles and really tough days, but I feel like I can function, and even have joy and hope. Now things are different this lockdown, and these are things that have helped prepare me (and my family) to be more resilient:

• Making sure I talk to a trained professional every fortnight about my feelings, and to implement the techniques she suggests (I took the difficult decision to pay for this, as we can (with a bit of difficulty and belt-tightening) afford it, waiting lists for NHS are too long and often do not provide the frequency and length of support I need, and she has known me for years and how to help me – it’s pricey but we find a way to scrape the money together because its one of the most important tools I have – I know it’s a privilege many cannot afford).

• Following the CBT format for combating low mood – BACE – Body, Achievement, Connection and Enjoyment – every day aiming to fill each of these categories, from washing your hair, doing some yoga or exercise (body), replying to emails at work, tidying a junk drawer (achievement), talking to my husband properly in the evening or going for a walk together without the kids if they are in childcare, calling a friend (connection) to reading a novel, sketching, watching comedy (enjoyment). Even if you don’t manage to achieve this balance, you then know why you are feeling rubbish and can identify a behavioural change, instead of it feeling like you’re struggling for no reason.

• Using the CBT worry tree to set aside things I do not have space to worry about, and have no control over.

• Getting up straightaway in the morning, no excuses. Swinging your legs over the side and dragging your tired ass up, even if the kids have woken you up at 6.30 by poking you in the face. Again. Getting dressed straightaway before you go downstairs if you can.

• Going for a walk first thing in the morning, before a shower, before anything, ideally by myself if possible. No podcasts, no headphones, just walk round the block for half an hour, breathing in the air, putting one foot in front of the other. The rest of the day will be ok. You have started by doing something positive.

• Prioritising things which make me happy (wild swimming in a local lake every week with a friend has seriously, dramatically improved my mental health) and working with my family to make this happen whilst not feeling guilty about it.

• Taking time to notice the positive, however small – noting down good things that have happened, talking about nice or pleasurable things, from a nice coffee to the shine of sunlight on the lake. Writing down three good things that have happened in the last 30 minutes works well.

• Being realistic about what I can achieve – making the kids beans on toast for lunch rather than homemade vegetable stew, putting my studies on hold, stopping trying to be an overachiever at work and getting things done without putting my mental health at risk – e.g. taking regular computer breaks, getting outside and not stressing if non-urgent tasks don’t get completed.

• Setting an out of office message to manage expectations if busy at home or work, blocking out time properly in my outlook calendar with actual tasks and using it to manage my hours at work. Being more assertive in saying no if I can’t do something.

• Not using or reducing social media. Deleting the Instagram app cut my daily phone use down by half and made me feel lighter than in ages. I follow a lot of activists and political accounts as well as friends and lifestyle bloggers and whilst some of it is valuable, the chatter it induces just isn’t necessary. I had already moved off twitter but using Instagram even just every now and then on a browser instead of everyday on my phone was lifechanging.

• Only engaging with the news at one point in the day, not searching for headlines and going down rabbit holes. Just looking for need to know information at one given time, rather than throughout the day.

• When the kids are not in school/nursery and the dread of home-schooling beckons, setting up a loose weekday schedule, with a walk first thing, lunch, home schooling and/or story time, followed by coffee (or milk) and biscuit time at 3pm, then telly/chill time for the five year old, bath and bed. As well as helping keep my brain a bit clearer, it helps us all to break the day up and my reception age kid loves knowing what’s coming next instead of just howling ‘I’m booooored I want netfliiiiiix’ all day (she can watch Netflix all weekend, don’t get me wrong. I’m only human). Biscuit time has literally transformed everyone’s lives! Such a small thing has made such a difference to our happiness as something to look forward to.

• Maximising social contact where safe and within the narrow boundaries set for us. So a weekly video call with university friends, going for an evening walk or run with a local mum from school, making sure I talk to my parents as often as possible.

All of these things have really helped and for some reason when all put together I have ended up in better position than I ever thought I could. If there is any silver lining from this year, it has shown me a new resilience I didn’t know I had, and when I feel stronger I am better able to help others too (without internalising their stress and sadness, like I used to). I hope that the things I have found helpful might also help someone else (although many of them are now so widely known as good wellbeing practice, and if you have a good employer, they are hopefully talking to you about these kinds of tools).

Another thing that really helped was a friend lending me a copy of Frankie Bridge’s book Open, which if I’m honest I would never have picked up on my own. It’s well written and absolutely not a self-help book - its key message is that you need professional help if you cannot function properly due to bad mental health. This is my absolute take home from the whole experience and I am passionate about finding ways to support more people to access free advice when they need it. Maybe a new career beckons, who knows? But if the government does not prioritise getting free wellbeing and mental health support to us all (especially NHS staff and key workers) next year there will certainly be a immeasurably huge public health crisis. It doesn’t have to be so hard – and what’s more, we know the ways to fix it. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a new, separate and bigger than ever before, National Mental Health Service (or at least a Youth Mental Health Trust), with practical support in every town, village and city set up or something? What a legacy that would be. 

Writing About History

Have been reading a lot recently, notably best selling 'award-winning' books alongside more obscure and gritty things. Really liked Andrew Miller's Pure (more of which later some time) and Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles which was a highly readable guilty pleasure, plain and simple.

Am very much addicted to Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, great for an ex-Renaissance student and general history fanatic. I really like Mantel's quote that Cromwell... 'is a modern man, he was a great reformer, he was a revolutionary who had no recourse to a corpus of revolutionary doctrine, which is what makes him so extraordinary'... her point seems to imply that Thomas Cromwell's general adherance to the standards of the time is pertinent too, presenting an interesting and essentially humanised way of looking at an iconic historical figure.

Maybe I'm reading between the lines, but she seems to imply that these people do not set out to change the world, it's not an overblown Hollywood-style blast of ideology that does it, but rather a slow burning, self-motivated, self-interested, adaptability to the world, survival of the fittest kind of attitude. This is very interesting, and something I aim to convey in my own work, which like Mantel's, is pretty obsessed with exploring the humanised, personal stories of historical figures. Hopefully one day, I will like Mantel, be able to take sources contemporary to the time, write with a rigourous and absolute historical accuracy, yet also be able to creatively investigate the stories behind them.

Although for those who like to read too much into these things, it must be noted that Mantel likes to 'insist that the past be valued for its own, not as a rehearsal for the present. So when I'm writing about the economics of the 1530s and the glint in Cromwell's eye that is a welfare state, I am actually writing about the 1530s, I'm not just making a giant parable about events today. I think you see, that we have to honour and respect those people, they walked and talked just as we did. They're no less people because they happen to be dead. They were not a rehearsal for us, so we have to respect their stories in their own right.'

This is fascinating, and really relates to the discussions about historical interpretation, the reinterpretation of the past and its people, in Hollinghurt's The Strangers Child. I really hope that when I write about historical subjects, whether it might be Elizabeth Simcoe or the Glasgow Mill workers, I can like Mantel, avoid Brechtian placards saying what will happen next, and rather use the 'classic novelist's technique' and 'really go inside the consciousness of one person, seeing the world through one person's eyes'.

To put it simply, writing about history is to move past the knowledge that ultimately, the truth of the matter will never really be available to us. It is, as Mantel says, above all to be 'content with making a story that will stick...with putting pictures in your head, which cannot easily be got out again'. What a great thing to aim for.

To see a world in a grain of sand

Bright Star was on TV tonight, a beautiful Jane Campion film about John Keats and Fanny Brawne. It makes you swoon at the tortuous romance of it all, the beautiful poems and odes their love gave rise to. One of the loveliest examples is Last Sonnet...

Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
   Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
   And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

But actually, what I love more about Keats than the romance and torture of his love poetry, is observational work, in which inspiration is taken from little objects and innocuous trinkets. Poems such as On Receiving A Laurel Crown From Leigh Hunt or On Receiving A Curious Shell, which use observation and daily activity to explore their themes. They find stupendous magic and elaborate tales in the everyday.

That is far more inspiring; the ability to articulate and explore huge themes such as life and death in an immediate way, just from your experience of the things around you. Poems such as On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time:

My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time -with a billowy main,
A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.

Good old Keats. Sentimental maybe. Important definitely.

The Stranger's Child

Plenty more course-related reading and writing awaits. But for now, the most recent book that has inspired the way I think about writing and literature is Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Stranger's Child'...

I'm not sure I agree with The Guardian's view that Hollinghurst has a 'strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today'. For me, that title is usually accompanied by a tingle of excitement, a gasp of delicious enjoyment at a phrase or sentence when reading. Hollinghurst certainly has some nice turns of phrases and poignant truths inherent in his words, but does not make me gasp with delight.

However what the novel does provide, is a fascinating ponderance on how literature reflects the society we live in, on how far we can ever trust narrators or narratives, on the ways in which the written word can become twisted and reinterpreted according to the age it lives in.

For me, art is escapism, fantasy. Gritty social realism was never my forte. But Hollinghurst has produced a book that manages to be fantastical, romantic and historical, yet reinforces the fact that there are necessary social projections inherent within all artistic works. Very clever.

Art is not to be trusted, Hollinghurst says. Yet art somehow, like 'The Stranger's Child' itself, still manages to tell us something truthful about the world we live in.

This is ultimately what, even in my most sentimental, fantasist and escapist work, I shall aim to achieve.

To begin...

I've wanted to start a blog for a long time.. it seems to be a good way of collecting together the thoughts, sources and ramblings associated with my passion for art, history and literature.

Starting a creative writing course at the Open College of the Arts has finally put words into action, and already I'm finding myself inspired by taking part in practical creative work.

Art can seem all too often like an epic and mystical undertaking, whether it be painting or writing poetry. The OCA course has already helped me view artistic endeavour as more of.. a craft.. a vocation.. in which a vast toolbox of tricks and lessons can be utilised. It is certainly an easier way to break down and approach the creative process, rather than sitting around waiting for bolts of stupendous inspiration. AHA! Art is a skill, a job, not a mystical calling!

The great Werner Herzog has articulated this better than me... here he is, speaking during the making of Fitzcarraldo, in the documentary film Burden of Dreams (1982)...

It is not only MY dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well and the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them.

And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It’s as simple as that.

I make films because I have not learnt anything else, and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty, because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

- Werner Herzog, 'Burden of Dreams', 1982