1. “Now we just have to survive
this blizzard” – Frozen
Sadness
and suicidal thoughts are cold. They make you cold towards others because your
insides are so overwhelmingly freezing that you can’t help but let them spill
over when you’re interacting with other people. It doesn’t matter who those
people are. When your insides are so cold that you’re in an internal, permanent
blizzard; you don’t care – no! It’s not that you don’t care… there’s no choice
about whether to care or not. It’s not like you’ve decided not to! It’s more
about it not being there at all. That warmth is gone and some days all you can
do is breathe. Survive.
2. “Oh no! These facts and
opinions look so similar” – Inside Out
Using
mental health services leaves you inevitably vulnerable to reports, notes,
files, plans and discharge summaries. You can’t work with services without having
to read one of them. And you can’t read one of them without being faced with a hard-hitting
fact that you’ve consistently denied, or an opinion that goes against everything
you believe. My recent experience of this was when I received a risk evaluation
and read that my ‘risk of death by suicide’ was ‘imminent.’ Was this a fact or
opinion? My worry that it was a fact made me feel hopeless; what chance did I
have? What was the point in even trying if ultimately, I wasn’t going to win?!
Or, was it an opinion? Was it just the thoughts of the professionals? That a
Nurse has just sat with a pen ticking the boxes purely concentrating on
completing the task than considering my own thoughts and feelings on the subject?
3. “I know what I have to do.
But going back means I’ll have to face my past. I’ve been running from it for
so long” – Lion King
When
I was admitted to Cygnet Hospital Bierley, and told I’d be there for psychology;
I was so afraid that revisiting my trauma in therapy would be like opening up a
can of worms. Up until that point, I’d spent five years trying my hardest to
forget and block out what had happened to me. I tried to pretend it hadn’t
happened at all. I tried to block it out. I tried accepting it and then using
all these unhealthy coping strategies to deal with it. I was terrified that finally
talking about it all – talking about it in depth – would knock me for six! I
worried it’d bring to the surface so many overwhelming thoughts and feelings that
would be unsafe for me to experience.
4. “Sometimes who we wish we
were, what we wish we could do, is just not meant to be” – Moana
Sometimes,
our biggest bully – our biggest and worst criticizer is ourselves. We tell ourselves
we deserve these bad things. That we’re bad people who deserve it. Then we
become convinced that we deserve to die and everything snowballs into overdoses
and self-harm and scars… A cornerstone in recovery is wanting to be alive,
developing a hope for a future. Developing an aim; something you want to be.
The person you want to be. And the things you want to do as that person. It’s
about not letting that aim become a pressure and letting it have a negative
impact in the moments you feel like you aren’t getting anywhere near that aim
and instead, using it as a as a goal; something to strive towards.
5. “I’m afraid I’ve been
thinking” – Beauty and the Beast
On
bad days I think that allowing myself the space and time to think by myself can
be really debilitating and dangerous. Like I’d use unhealthy and unsafe coping
strategies to deal with the thoughts I believed I’d inevitably have during this
time.