THE SELF

We have three selves; the one others see, the one we see, and the one we really are. I believe our sense of identity from a child, structures our whole lives. I was always mindful, when my three sons were young, that the man in each of them was formed by the age of seven years. I had read this somewhere on child psychology. I have always had a deep love for my children, which has never left me even throughout great traumas in my life. My three sons are my ‘truth’ and I believe I am very privileged to have had the opportunity to give birth to them and to know them. Due to my long term ill-health, I have been unable to provide for them as I would have wished, and to support them in their life choices. I believe my children are special and gifted in numerous talents. They are all healthy and hardworking and have moved out of the poverty trap they grew up in. I am very proud of them.

In distant time there was another child, a friend, when I was only a child myself. The fact I felt I should have saved him from death in a buicycle accident, only revisited me during the onset of a recent major breakdown for which I was hospitalised. “Still waters run deep”. This I had kept buried for forty-six years. Even as a young child I had no-one to share my feelings with over this death I believed I could have prevented. It was many years later when I was forty-nine, that I accidentally discovered from his mother that the bike had no brakes. As a young child myself I had not known this. I have always struggled with low self-worth and an underlying belief that I am a bad person. The many traumas in my life I have been unable to share with anyone. There simply has never been anyone prepared to listen and trust. Even when surrounded by people I have felt isolated and somehow strange.

The deep seated conflict of good versus evil also manifested itself during a recent mental breakdown for which I was detained under the Mental Health Act for four months. It took me on a journey from one episode to another, to depths inside of me I did not know existed. I became different people in strange places. Recently I have been experiencing flash-backs to the time I was detained. However, there is no order to the events in my mind. For many months, I believed I had been in two hospitals for a year in two countries and in numerous rooms. Even before and after my sudden discharge, I awoke each day with the thought that I had no future. I still felt physically weak and cried a lot. I felt depressed and that I did not belong anywhere or to anybody. I still have grave doubts that my husband is not my friend and that my father is not my real father. My husband has mental and physical problems that affect me very badly, and I find my existence with him intolerable. It has been a very bad and damaging twenty one year marriage, during which time I have suffered four breakdowns, the most recent being my worst.

I believe I am damned. When I was in hospital I believed I heard God’s voice asking me if I wanted to be saved and I said no in my half awake state. I regretted it instantly. I know why I said it though. I had all my life tried to help others in my belief as a Christian Socialist, often to my own detriment and even through my own buried pain caused by unexpressed grief. There is only so much a person can give. After a life of giving I discovered a void open up like a giant chasm, ready and waiting patiently to swallow me up and suck me under. This is the power of mental breakdown and ensuing mental illness. It was a whole new experience and nothing like the other breakdowns. This is the big stuff people don’t recover from. For months there was no sleep in me, no release. The nausea never left me for months. This was a journey my isolated self walked alone, penetrating into buried worlds of untold grief and terror. My self-harm had a part to play in all things and was an important part of my silent suffering. There is little comfort that if my God had abandoned me; I do not believe I would be as well as I am on my road to recovery with medical help. At the onset of the breakdown I was destined to stand on the Briton Ferry railway line waiting for the Swansea to Paddington express. This was will, no tears or fears, just my destiny. The pain in my home with a man who does not want to be near me, is a cruel blow that has taken many months to accept. I have no future here but have nowhere to go. It is over for me and him, we have never had a married life and now it is too late. My soul is as empty as my smile.

Kay Reed
27.11.05

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MENTAL HEALTH/MENTAL ILLNESS

There is a school of thought that believes all knowledge is universal and all creativity has already been done by others. There is also a school of thought that states there are creative strata all around us which we can tap into on different levels, from which we produce our creative work. I believe this is spurred on by spirituality and creativity combined. Hence individuals are each so different from one another and individualism is partly again a combination of spirituality and all creative thought. This then creates strength of character and personality in individuals. We are all unique and all of us experience different levels of thought and creativity. I fiercely fight for the right to be an individual; each of us is our own person with our own rights and beliefs engaging our own worlds that surround us. Should we fail to relate to our own worlds then we suffer physically and mentally. Tackling suicide should be top of the agenda for Government policy. I believe those suicides could be avoided by, intrinsically, the necessity for those individually to express themselves in any creative form and, extrinsically, for the system to acknowledge their very existence and suffering which is to be fully blamed on the feet of government whatever the politics of that time. We need to interact mentally, emotionally and physically for a healthy existence where love is shared at all levels of relationships with family, friends and acquaintances.

Admiration, love and support should be the basis of all communities so that individuals may travel along their own pathway to self fulfilment, creativity and self worth. We need hope in our lives to see a future full of good, not evil which may prevent us from alienation and ultimately suicide. All mental ill health can be dealt with by expressing creativity, when we explore our minds and souls searching for our lost identities. This is set apart from negative childhood relationships that may have placed us in shoes not of our making. Hopefully we discover this before it is too late, and we realise we have been walking in the wrong shoes all our lives. There is no time to spare or waste. We must fulfil our own quests, and political activity can help in a small way.

Each of us through our own creativity within separate individual worlds may lead full lives and find out who we really are before it is too late. ‘There but for the grace of God go I ’.

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HELLO!!

The system within which we try and live, or survive, might try to break us because we do not have the freedoms that we may have been brought up to believe we have. We may have difficulty conforming to the rigid system we are born into; we rebel and we break. Let us believe without a shadow of a doubt that our minds may break but nothing can destroy our spirits, they belong rightly to us with the help of our God and Maker. At such times of seemingly insurmountable loss we may feel isolated and painfully alone with our fragmented minds for company, and nothing comes between us and our God. We only have to reach out from the prisons we create for false safety, and seek His gracious help and outpouring of blessing to fill our wretched souls, so that something, somewhere inside of us stirs, rises and soars like a mighty eagle in the endless free sky, also of God’s Creation. We realise we do not know who we are, and indeed never did. God opens up inside of us a wonder of Creation that pours out in creative abilities if we search inside of us for outlets of ideas and talents as a means of expression. This is self-empowerment, which embodies and aids recovery. Very gradually we introduce ourselves to the person inside that we have never met before………..HELLO YOU!!

Kay Reed
31.1.07

Thoughts

‘Thoughts are things’, she said,
As old as the hills and pretty with it.
Village gossips’ tongues wagged,
Until one night many moons ago,
She felt a thing choke her,
Tightening around her neck,
While her husband lay cold aside her.
Terrified, she fought the demon away.
‘Thoughts are things’, she said.

Thoughts are things that surround us, influencing our joy and sadness in each day we live. Our thoughts can prop us up like a buoy in the sea, positive and optimistic. But there are those thoughts that seek to punish us; disabling in some ways and even to the point from where some of us will never return. Secret thoughts can bring punishing memories so it seems, dwelling on past failures. They set us back. Please, not today, we heed the call; too vulnerable some days and long nights with no sleep in us. Repetitive thoughts haunt that vulnerability, shuffling our stirred emotions, wearing us down like an old carpet beneath our pacing feet.

Oppression can become a habit, isolating us surrounded by four walls, where we seek solitude and risk isolation for comfort and safety. Please, blank out those thoughts and them; the things that can destroy. Help us to face our own demons; yesterdays dreams make tomorrow nightmares. Ungrateful days bring lies, false hopes and hapless times. We try to seek freedom from these ‘thoughts and things’. Blame is a big word that maims our memories. And it can destroy. It is unjustified. I’ve been there remember!