My View

“Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.” 
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

It is early morn on my first birthday. The northern Scottish sky is still heavily laden with winter night, struggling to throw off its deep slate grey cloak to reveal this feast day. My little, plump legs learnt to toddle two months ago, and they unsteadily carry my excited self into the darkness of the sitting room. I am greeted by a tree, glittering and twinkling in a corner. It is underplanted with presents; one is unwrapped, and has lights glowing from inside. It is a dolls house, made entirely by my Daddy, made just for me, his baby daughter. Christmas or birthday present? I know not. It is my very first memory, my first birthday and my second Christmas Day, a loving diary note tucked joyfully into my heart for me to freely unfold whenever I choose.

A newly wed bride and her groom hug me tightly to them, a genuine, smiling, warm embrace which sets right so many wrongs in my head and my heart, lighting a happy glow which slowly extends to all four corners of my being.

I am cleaning. Its a drudge. My iPod is on shuffle. The jangling, acoustic chords of G N’ R Lies’ sixth track fill the room and, shunning self pity, I jilt the Dyson and don’t give a flying fiddlers fart who can see me leaping with abandon and my hair flicking in all directions.

I am six. My brother is four. We are on a long, long journey; endless motorways, shadow flickers of bridges skimming overhead, hot acrid tarmac, traffic, fumes, boredom and bickering, shining pale golden summer barley fields, gargantuan steaming cooling towers, the fine glitter of a far off sea. The four wheels grind slowly up a hill. We reach the summit. ‘Where are we?’, ask our parents. We clamber to stand on the handbrake; a familiar town spreads out in front of us. A grenade of excitement explodes in my stomach; I know who lives in this place – Granma and Grandad!! I am so happy, I can hardly breathe as we travel the final mile to their welcoming home, tea and treacle tart.

I am tired and stressed and my body is on fire with pain. I am setting off on a journey. A warm hand squeezes mine, a voice tells me that I will be missed. The voice says that I am beautiful, and his eyes tell me that he is not lying. He smiles, and I smile too.

It is three in the morning, and I carefully settle into my bed cradling my three hour old daughter in my arms. Her perfect, unbearably minuscule, pink fingers stretch and close, her enquiring eyes follow the shadows on the ceiling, and my love for her newborn dainty spirit completely takes my breath away. We are joined by her teeny-tiny toddler sister; sleepy eyes glowing like a pair of harvest moons, giggling, softly kissing her baby sister’s forehead and gently touching her fingers. As I watch them I am overdosing on joyful love; I think that my heart will burst with the tide that surges through my body, but it doesn’t – my heart expands to wrap the greatest gift that I will ever be blessed to receive.

I am lying on the lawn, the Spring sun is warm on my face and silky strands of cirrus embroider the sky. A butterfly, a glorious Peacock, flutters over my head and I barely feel it land on my resting finger. I remain statue still, with noiseless, shallow breathing, lest it should be disturbed. My delicate companion elegantly extends it’s exquisite fans, and stays with me awhile.

I am asleep. I open my drowsy eyes, their gaze resting on a steaming cup of tea that been loving placed beside me.

The letterbox quietly clatters, and I pick up a postcard from my now adult first born child. There are no words, save for the address, but drawings instead. I smile. I love her quirky individuality.

It is Christmas Day, my birthday. I am watching ‘ The Princess Bride’ for about the gazillionth time. I let slip this fact on social media. My brothers and sister and I, scattered as we are through the southern counties, proceed to quote lines from the film to such an extent that there are seventy six replies to my original post, and I giggle about it for at least a week.

I’m still giggling now.

My journey over the last few years has been strewn with emotional potholes and direction altering rocks, during which (thankfully) I have learnt to seek joy; it happened by chance, and it wasn’t easy, but it saved me from becoming someone that I liked even less than the small and obscure person that I was.

On NYE 2013 I decided to complete the #100happydays challenge, in memory of someone that I loved very much who died of depression. Every day I took a picture of something that made me smile, then posted it on Facebook. It started very superficially with books and cups of tea and biscuits (all absolutely essential self sustenance) , but morphed diversely as I progressed through the days. Much has been written on the very buzzy concepts of happiness and joy, in more informative ways than I am capable of expressing, and so I am not going to attempt it here. I read some fabulous books, listened, talked, learnt. I asked lots of questions, to which I may never get an answer:

What, for the love of ginger nuts, actually is ‘happiness’ and ‘joy’? Are they different?

What is ‘positive psychology’? How can I best live my life? 

My 100th challenge post was an out of focus picture of a local landscape focal point – I had this big, grand plan to finish with something pretty but the camera refused to focus, preferring to sharpen on an thorny, arching bramble in the foreground. In my failing (expletive littered) frustration, I took my eye away from the camera, and noticed six glittering goldfinches just a few feet away from me. They may have been there for a while, but they scattered with the breeze the moment that I spotted them. I stood in the field, with my feet dampened by the dew-laden grass and the radiation mist lifting as the sun warmed it, and had a little Epiphany: its all very well having a big dream or ideal to aim for, but while I was are striving towards it, was I taking any notice of the life-enhancing moments that I was passing by? I’m not sure that I was.

I was asked to carry on with my #100happydays posts, and I did so as much for myself as for others. They carried me through an incredibly challenging time in my life, which I have described in previous blog posts.

So now I endeavour to be fully engaged in those small, simple moments that add enhancing, happy jewels to the woven fabric of my life. I will get to the end of my track soon enough, so I must take time to enjoy all of my journey. I tuck those treasured, joyful notes carefully into my memory scrapbook where I can remember them and share at will. I have shared some with you.

I have my life.

I have love.

I have my home on the hill.

I promise to savour each moment, laugh with my belly and love wholeheartedly.

These are my words.

This is my view.

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

Dear Reader,

It has been three long weeks since my first confessional bare-it-to-the-world blog post. Here comes the second.

I am going to share a story with you, one which I have shared with few. Years ago, when I was a wee bairn of a radiographer, my Mam’s friend developed a chesty cough and was referred to chest clinic at my hospital. She sat in the packed x-ray waiting area, alone in a sea of other patients, not wanting to take the next revealing step of her care; the cold fingers of terror plucked at her voice and took the strength from her legs. She wasn’t the only terrified patient there; she saw one patient refuse to go into the x-ray room, and watched as the radiographer sat on the floor in front of him and quietly spoke to him through the cacophony that surrounded them. She saw his expression change, saw his shoulders relax; he turned to his wife and nodded. The radiographer took his hand, helped him to stand, talking quietly to him as she lead him into the x-ray room. He left the room a few minutes later with a small chuckle and a wave to the radiographer inside, and my Mam’s friend prayed that the kind radiographer would be the person to x-ray her.

That young radiographer was the person to x-ray her. It turned out to be me.

I share this with you not out of self-indulgence, and without any hint of get-me-I’m-great smugness smeared all over my now collagen-deficient face. My Mam told me her friend’s words because she was proud of her daughter; I remember them because it was a lesson in how far the ripples from my behaviour can travel, that it is not just confined to those that I directly interact with, that the impact has an undefined border.

‘Kind’ is as under-rated and under-valued as ‘nice’ when it comes to describing a human, it being so much more de rigeur to use words such as ‘sexy’, ‘savage’, ‘shit-hot’, and ‘savvy’.

Kind + Nice = Boring + Sensible.

‘Savage’? Really? How is that good? What Society have we become?

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

I was diagnosed with Chronic/Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder two years ago, as I stumbled away from the ruins of my marriage, and I don’t mind confessing that PTSD is a monumental pain in the sodding derriere. It manifests as a malevolent, malignant monster silently stowed away in my psyche, before abruptly roaring through every screaming fibre of my being at any given point during the day or the night. My sleep is interrupted by the worst nightmares my imagination can create; predominantly my daughters are dying or dead, and I am helpless to save them. I jolt into the dark, real world bathed in sweat, sobbing, screaming, sickened, terror-stricken, and helpless with grief. It is safer sometimes, for my sanity, to simply stay awake.

Daytime is a different beast; I look normal, I am normal, I behave normally. Most of the time. Certain stimuli (the list is seemingly endless, but it’s quite often related to other’s behaviour) trigger flashbacks; a smell, a word, a tone, and a look can all immediately transport me to a memory that I would rather forget forever. I have absolutely no control. None. In company, I can mostly maintain a calm demeanour on the surface but be imploding inside. Sometimes I don’t have the strength, and can visibly disintegrate; it can (understandably) seem irrational, volatile behaviour to the vast majority.

I don’t like sitting with my back to a room of people, or standing with my back to a door, and I find choosing from a menu a minefield. My constant hyper-vigilance is exhausting, but I can gauge the topography of a situation in a heartbeat. I keep myself busy; I am Donkey in ‘Shrek’, jumping up and down asking to be picked to do something. I control my eating, lapse, control it again. I have collapsed many times over many years, and twice been hospitalised, the most recent event resulting in five months off work with intense, incapacitating ME/Fibromyalgia type symptoms, the physical manifestations of PTSD.

Like Domestic Abuse, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a taboo subject that few openly discuss. It cloaks individuals in shame and burdens them with guilt. I read an article highlighting a recent surge in sufferer numbers, inflated by individuals who claim their PTSD is a result of, for example, an argument with their boss, not as a consequence of combat trauma or abuse. They are labelled ‘snowflakes’. I am no soldier, but I am no snowflake either. My PTSD has been acquired chronically, and is as real as Ronaldo’s manicured eyebrows. I have been through my own battle, and at some point (my consultant informs me) I have been in fear for my life. Last year, whilst working through a night in ED, one of my patients told me that he had PTSD as a result of combat trauma. I told him that I understood, that I truly understood. He looked me directly in the eye, and said ‘I know’. At that moment, at two o’clock in the morning, with a mad, mental ED swirling outside the x-ray room door, the world contained just the two of us; he held my hand and we cried for each other’s isolating pain. Kindness.

PTSD is utterly, utterly crap, but it’s not cancer, MS, or any of the other terrible diseases that I see every single day that I work. It is not depression and it is not work-related stress. PTSD will not kill me, although I know that it has claimed the lives of so many. I do not live in the past, do not dwell on it, but I understand the damage will take time to heal. I struggle with that. I have help with that struggle. Again, kindness.

So, Society, you can keep your ‘savage’ and ‘sexy’ adjectives.

Give me ‘kind’ every day of the week.

It’s the foundation stone of Humanity, and a highly prized human characteristic.

And that is all I have to say about that.

“It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward

It’s not every day that your daughters sit you down in a local coffee shop and tell you to leave their father. I remember some detail, but not all; it was a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon in November 2014, and I was drinking a large cappuccino without cake because I had been avoiding ingesting unnecessary calories for at least the previous six months. I remember their candid words and the hot, salty tears. The dawning realisation of how much damage had been done. That the cat, Truth, was out of the bag. I knew it, they knew it, and I knew they knew it. I don’t own a Tardis and Superman doesn’t love me like he does Lois, so I had no means of going back in time (dammit). I had to stop hiding, stop making excuses, stop making the best of a bad situation, stop lying to myself, stop lying to others, stop being small. I had to take stock, speak up, put my head above the parapet, blow my whole life as I knew it apart, be big and brave and honest. I had no other option, and I felt sick to my core. I couldn’t do it. But I had to.

I had known their father since we were eleven years old, joining our secondary school at the same time and tumbling through puberty together. Our young adulthood was spent illicitly taping each others albums, trying to keep an entire nights clubbing to under a tenner, cramming like sardines into cars racing to beaches, and playing ‘Appetite for Destruction’ relentlessly turned right up to eleven. We were the best of friends. We hung out with our mates, we laughed, we argued. I had other boyfriends, but it was him that I fell in love with. When we were 19 we kissed at a friend’s party, surprising everyone we knew, and there was no going back. A year later we got engaged because he wanted everyone to know how serious we were, and because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

We had a party to celebrate our engagement, a family-and-friends do at my parents home. Home-prepared grub, mix-tapes of music, yummy fruitcake to cut. One of our male friends stripped to ‘Sweet Transvestite’ under the glare of a pendant light, watched by his astonished parents. We mopped up the debris as the stragglers made their way home, and I dropped cream on the skirt of my dress. I wasn’t bothered about cleaning it, but he was. We argued. He said dreadful things. It was the first time that he physically hit me. I cried, and he said that he was sorry and cleaned my skirt. And we carried on as before.

That was really the start. We married without living together first, bought a house, had two babies, renovated the house, sold it, bought another house, knocked it down, built another house, built a social circle, built up debt, and worked hard. His sisters gave birth to my nephews and nieces who I fully committed myself to, and whom I still love with my whole heart. I had a couple of operations, an aneurysm and a tumour. I gained weight, and lost it all and more on a cyclical rotation. Normal married life, to all intents and purposes, to the outside world. Normal to me too, actually, given that I had no idea what it would be like to be married to someone else.

I tried to leave him a few times, but I just couldn’t go. I loved him. I loved my family unit, my home, my wider family. He used the most hurtful, soul-destroying, hateful words, accusing me of things that I had never done, of being something that I was not, cornering me with numbing, freezing, violent, screaming aggression, and then on the turn of a tuppence he changed tack and in the next breath would ask if I fancied a cup of tea. I was told that it was my fault, that I didn’t understand his pressure of work,  that I was toxic, that he behaved that way because I pushed him to it, that I confused him with my words and he was just so emotional that he couldn’t help but behave in that way. I pleaded with him to stop, to change. I wrote him letters trying to explain how his behaviour impacted upon all of us. I arranged lunchtime appointments with his GP to help with the enormous stress that he said he suffered. There was no longterm change. He humiliated me at the checkout, in cafes, in the bank and occasionally in front of friends. I thought it was my fault. I was small and insignificant. I took my wedding ring off, and didn’t wear it for the final 12 years of our marriage. Very few people asked why.

The girls grew up, grew independent, developed their own ethics and ethos. They defied his control, challenged his views and his behaviour, and refused his demands to be respected, as all young adults do. His behaviour at home escalated, and it was no longer confined to just me.

One morning his behaviour was so aggressive, so violent, and his words so appalling, that I felt the last of my love for him leave me. It just went. I was empty. I spent the hours that day walking, working out how to gather my girls and go, planning, preparing my words, summoning up courage. Late afternoon I returned home to a call from my sister-in-law; her daughter, my niece and god-daughter, was dead; suicide, a week before her sixteenth birthday. Life crumpled in on itself, our hearts were broken, and her death has coloured every day that has since passed. I didn’t gather my girls and go. I stayed. Whatever I was going through at home was incomparable to the grief coursing uncontrollably through those that I loved, including my girls. A few months later, I started a 100happydays blog dedicated to our beautiful angel who lost her life to depression, in an effort to focus on positivity every day, carving a small private space for my voice, my own words and feelings, and inadvertently creating a supportive community that I still lean on.

It was inevitable that one day he would lose control in front of witnesses; a big music band gig one warm July evening, thousands of people, some close friends, all of our young-adult offspring. I am not going to elaborate; it was hours of abject, awful, agonising misery, and the very last time that he hit me. I had my candid coffee with my daughters the following November, and I knew that there was no going back. It took 27 years for me to stand my ground and say ‘no more’. Better late than never, I suppose.

Honesty.

I could never have contemplated how arduous a journey the following two years would be. I eventually told the truth, painfully vomiting it out of my body like putrid pus, and let it gather the speed of a runaway train. I nearly lost myself, and was saved only by those that loyally love me completely, to whom I will forever owe a depth of gratitude that I find eludes expression. They have been rocks, saviours, pillars of strength and brutal honesty, and tender, cradling, soothing hands; I fiercely hold their hearts tightly in mine, and I pray that I will never force them to leave me. Honesty breeds honesty: courageous souls have shared their similar experiences with me in order that I don’t feel so alone, to show how much light they now have in their previously dark life, to lift me from the chasm of abject failure.

Domestic abuse is still a taboo subject; few want to understand it. Although it prevails in a quarter of relationships (a QUARTER!), it quietly sits enslaved in the shackles of shame, invisibly festering and gnawing under the cover of silence. I have been asked ‘have you found out who your true friends are?’ There were friends that just avoided me, didn’t discuss it with me, let my friendship go. There were some that listened to me, but said that they heard such a different story from him that they didn’t know who to believe. I am not invited to their homes any longer, and they too have let me go. There are some who have believed the pernicious lies that they have been told, and have walked to the other side of a road, their faces turned away, in order to completely bypass me. Others have revelled in the pappy gossipy tabloid, flicking through my pages and discussing delicate details widely with anyone, whilst simultaneously treating me like a leper; contaminated and contagious. It’s isolating, and feels like betrayal. Its been a steep learning curve, but I’m better for it; they clearly were not my true friends, and I only have room for honest love in my life now. Blood loyalties and lies banned my family from attending my lovely mother-in-laws funeral, and have distanced me from those that I have seen born, cared for and love; I miss them very much. I hope they know that they will always be welcome in my home.

The sun, however, shines on the faces of those that know that I and my brave, beautiful girls have not lied. That every frank, painful, bitter, rueful, angry, sad, screaming, sickening word has been true, and that absolute honesty can lead to freedom and learning and life and light and love.

I am not going to regurgitate or elaborate any further. In the words of Forrest Gump, ‘that’s all I have to say about that’.

So that is the point of this blog, this new chapter in my life journey. I now have the freedom to express my view, and honesty is it’s solid foundation stone.

I have my life.

I have love.

I have my home on the hill.

I promise to savour each moment, laugh with my belly and love wholeheartedly.

These are my words.

This is my view.