white_hart | Entries tagged with mental health

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I didn't actually mean to stop posting here, I just...kept not getting round to it. And here I am three months later. Ooops.

I suspect that was mostly because term was busy and exhausting. The UCU marking and assessment boycott has been the crisis we really didn't need to round off the first "normal" academic year after three years of pandemic disruption and it has all been a bit much, really.

I haven't been swimming nearly enough, largely due to the A34 having been closed for roadworks almost every weekend since mid-May, meaning that the 20-minute drive to the river was taking an hour each way. I have been swimming regularly in the chlorine tank but that's just depressing, especially the utterly grim state of the changing rooms.

I haven't been walking much, either, even though I finally cracked and bought a DSLR and it does take great photos.

I am (obviously) quite depressed again but I'm not really sure what to do about that.

I had last week off work. We went to visit my parents (father: possibly a bit more mobile than last time but sleepy and confused and mildly cantankerous; mother: just tired) and were planning to have a day at the seaside, but the weather wasn't great and while you'd think that they're much closer to the sea than we are, it actually takes a good hour each way to get to the nearest coast, and that's just Great Yarmouth, and that felt like too much effort, especially as I'd managed to give myself food poisoning by eating bad hummus, missing the last day before my break (including saying farewell to my brilliant office manager, and the faculty garden party), and was still feeling a bit wobbly and occasionally nauseous at that point.

I am very tired. Which might also be the lingering effects of the food poisoning, or just life.

People who take/have taken HRT for menopause symptoms, can I ask how you've found it? My GP suggested that menopause might be exacerbating my existing mental health problems and contributing to the current kablooeyness, and asked me to think about whether I'd like to try HRT. My first reaction was no, because I've never wanted to go on HRT - I had a horrible time on hormonal contraception and worry it would actually just make my mental health worse, and also I was so delighted to be over the whole thing that I hate the idea of having to take medication for something I welcomed so much. (Plus some complicated gender feels about HRT making me more woman and less genderless goblin, which I should probably just try to get over because I can't change my endocrine system by willpower alone.)

But...what if the tiredness and brain fog aren't just because I've been under continual extreme stress at work for three years, and have had various non-work stresses as well? What if it is to do with menopause and HRT would help? (I was ranting the other week about medicalisation of normal life stages and capitalism not letting people just have less energy at some life stages than others, but however true that is it doesn't change the fact that capitalism is the ocean I'm swimming in.)

Anyway. What is your experience of HRT? In particular, has anyone had good experiences with HRT after bad experiences with hormonal contraception?

Tomorrow I go back to the office. There are definitely some good things about that (being able to focus on work, getting to walk round the Parks), but I am still a bit nervous. ( Masks )

I remain utterly appalled and depressed by the government's ongoing attempts to pretend there isn't a global pandemic going on, though it appears that (predictably) they have denied that there was any truth in yesterday's rumours that they would stop providing free lateral flow tests. Presumably it was a smokescreen to get something else through without an outcry, possibly a further reduction in self-isolation times.

I am so tired. I could barely manage to get myself out of bed to swim today. Finishing a simple jersey top (I just had to sew in the sleeves, which I'd already pinned and hem them and the bottom) felt like a huge amount of effort. It feels a bit early for my SAD to be this bad; the next few months are obviously going to be very tough going.

Amazingly, we have survived week 1 without anything going disastrously wrong. And I have a temp starting on Monday to cover for the person with covid (who sounds like they are starting to get better, even if slowly). And I'm generally feeling a bit better than I did earlier in the week; I increased my dose of antidepressants last week, so maybe that's starting to kick in now?

And despite the weather being forecast to be grey, and drizzly earlier on, by lunchtime the sun came out and we had a splendid swim at Parsons' Pleasure.

A view from water to a bank with concrete pilings. On the bank there is a bicycle with a wicker basket and three large round changing bags, with tall trees behind them.

In my experience, this is normally seen as an opportunity for corporations/people who have been fortunate enough never to have suffered from mental ill-health to spout platitudes about how "it's OK not to be OK" and we just need to "reach out" and "keep talking" and "help is out there". All of which I can attest, from the point of view of a person who has been suffering from mental ill-health on and off (mostly on) for nearly 40 years now, to be complete and utter bollocks.

This World Mental Health Day, I'm almost two years into a period of incredible stress at work, as well as being eighteen months into a global pandemic. I am very nearly at the end of my reserves and have just increased my dose of citalopram from 20mg a day to 30mg (having remembered that I was prescribed a higher dose a few months ago but dropped back down after a few weeks because it didn't seem to be doing much and I was deeply sceptical that more antidepressants would help with burnout) in the hope that it will stop me wanting to cry all the time. I am very definitely not OK, and I am very much not OK with this.

I don't make New Year's Resolutions, but if I had made one this year it would be to try to spend some time outside every single day, because even on the gloomiest, wettest, most dismal days, being outside helps my mood so much.

This morning I almost didn't go for a walk, because I had a meeting at 8:30 which meant I couldn't follow my normal route as I wouldn't be back in time, and when my alarm went off at 5:45 it felt like the middle of the night and I was so tired I really wished I could just go to sleep for another hour or so. When I go downstairs, though, I was surprised to see that it had snowed in the night, and my walk by the canal, just as it got light, was astoundingly beautiful, in a bleached-out, monochromatic kind of way.

A silver narrowboat moored against a snowy canal bank with an arched bridge behind it.

Also, thanks to

jinty I realised last night that the lockdown guidance around exercise has been updated since I checked it on Monday night.

If you (or a person in your care) have a health condition that routinely requires you to leave home to maintain your health - including if that involves travel beyond your local area or exercising several times a day - then you can do so.

Given how important swimming is to my mental health, I think I can consider that this applies to me, and I can actually carry on driving to the lake to swim. It's not like I have any options closer to home; the river near us is too shallow, the Thames is too fast at the moment, and even if it wasn't, I wouldn't swim alone in winter so one of us would need to drive. I do feel slightly trepidatious about it*, but I think it is OK really...

* I don't know if it's because I've spent most of my life trying to work out the rules that everyone else seems to know automatically, and, in my childhood, being shunned because I got it wrong, but I have an absolutely terror of accidentally breaking rules, and struggle even more with the idea of breaking them deliberately

I'm fairly sure that it shouldn't be warm enough in February to go out for a lunchtime walk without a coat on, even for someone like me who tends to shed layers rapidly after 10-15 minutes of brisk walking at any time, but I'm so delighted to have some sunshine and warmth, and it does my mental health so much good, that I almost don't mind.

I am very fortunate to work very close to the University Parks; a basic circuit of the Parks from my office is just under two miles, which is about as much of a walk as can reasonably be fitted into a lunch break. Occasionally, for a change, I go exploring into Mesoptamia (yes, it's really called that; a path between two branches of the Cherwell. Oxford is nothing if not deeply pretentious) and this week I tried crossing the bridge in the Parks and discovered a circuit on the other side of the river, out to the sports grounds and back via the Marston cycle path. Everything has been looking particularly lovely in the sunny weather, and there are snowdrops and crocuses and all the winter-flowering cherries have been coming into blossom.

A selection of the pictures I've been taking this week*:

And even though it's really still February, and only the end of week 6 of term, which means that I'm exhausted and still have two weeks of term to slog through and approximately fifteen million things to get done in them, when I came back from my walk yesterday I felt full of sunshiney joy and actually, properly happy, which is a complete turn-around from a couple of weeks ago when it felt like it had been overcast for ever and I was sunk so deep in gloom it felt like I might never climb out again.

*I tend to post pictures to @sadie_whitehart on instagram as I take them, mirrored to @white_hart on Twitter, if you want to see more of them and don't already follow me on those.

I have been struggling mental-health-wise lately, and needed some comfort reading, so I reached for Fire and Hemlock, which has been my top comfort read ever since I first read it about thirty years ago. Despite that, it's a long time since I last actually read it from cover to cover, rather than just re-reading my favourite parts.

Fire and Hemlock is Diana Wynne Jones's take on the ballads 'Tam Lin' and 'Thomas the Rhymer'. It's not a retelling of either, but it takes as its central premise the idea that the Queen of Elfland in each ballad is the same person, and that Tam Lin and True Thomas are just two of her long string of human husbands. The latest husband is cellist Thomas Lynn, who has succeeded in divorcing the Queen (currently known as Laurel) when he meets ten-year-old Polly, who has accidentally gatecrashed a funeral party at Laurel's house, and Polly invents the story of Tom's secret alter ego, the hero Tan Coul, and herself as his assistant. Over the next few years, their relationship develops through a handful of meetings and numerous letters, as well as the books that Tom sends Polly from bookshops up and down the country, and yet, at the start of the book, Polly finds that she has forgotten Tom, having done something that caused him to vanish from her life and her memory and be drawn back into Laurel's clutches.

It's a complicated book, although at first glance it seems straightforward. The supernatural plot runs in a mostly-quiet counterpoint to the normality of Polly's 1980s childhood and the difficulties of her parents' divorce, occasionally building up to a crescendo and then dying away until the next time. There are lots of layers of meaning and references to myths, legends and other books; as well as the two ballads, the structure and imagery owes a lot to Eliot's Four Quartets (which I didn't read until long after I first read Fire and Hemlock), in particular the mixture of reality and unreality, Nowhere and Now-Here, that runs throughout the book. Even the good characters are often not very nice; Tom and Polly's friendship is clearly genuine, but that doesn't excuse the fact that Tom is using Polly to try to get free of Laurel, and that in turn doensn't excuse her betrayal, and there's an awkwardness about it as Polly's childish affection becomes a teenage girl's crush which is no less difficult to read for being very true-to-life. It's not an easy read, and even now I'm not sure I completely understand it*.

It remains one of my favourite books. I love the way the story builds up, with the truth gradually being revealed rather than coming as a single revelation. I love that Polly makes terrible mistakes, picks herself up and does what she can to set them right. I love the way DWJ's typical sense of humour pervades the book. And more than anything, I love the way this book describes the emotions Polly feels, the bleaching all-pervading uneasiness and the jet of misery that wells up inside her, because those are such perfect descriptions of the way anxiety and depression feel. I was pretty familiar with both of them by the time I first read the book but didn't even know that other people felt the same way, let along having ever read descriptions of them that I could identify with this way. So I love Fire and Hemlock more than any other of DWJ's books, and still turn to it when I'm struggling, because it's the book that told me I wasn't alone in feeling this way, and that the monsters in my head could be fought.

* One of the essays in DWJ's Reflections** talks about all the layers of meaning and influence she included, and it's worth seeking out.

** Flicking through Reflections after finishing Fire and Hemlock this afternoon, I also discovered that one of my Faculty members is DWJ's son and possibly the original of Sebastian Leroy.