AFTERMATH & MENTAL HEALTH

"The world breaks everyone and afterward, many are strong at the broken places."

Ernest Hemingway

With Christmas becoming extra special this year for lots of people seeing it as a huge cheer-up through the lockdown and coronavirus pandemic, it’s sort of been inevitable that more people will experience a ‘Christmas Come-down!’ Realising this, I thought I would blog some tips for making it through that time, and then my thinking sort of snowballed into me thinking about aftermaths in general. And aftermaths can be so connected to a person’s mental health that it feels worth talking about the entirety of them…

aftermath

[ˈɑːftəmaθˈɑːftəmɑːθ]

NOUN

The consequences or after-effects of a significant unpleasant event.

 

SELF-HARM

If I’ve labelled the aftermath of self-harm difficult or bad in any way, I’ve sometimes found people surprised by this because they’ve assumed that if I’m self-harming it’s to help myself in some way and so surely, I should consider the aftermath of it to actually be pleasant. And that if I didn’t think of it as enjoyable, why would I continue to self-harm? My response to this is an attempt to get across the desperation that a person usually feels when they self-harm. Especially where it isn’t the first time…

You can become so desperate to escape the motivations to hurt yourself that you don’t stop for even a moment to consider how awful any previous aftermaths have been. And it isn’t really about denial and blocking out those memories, it’s just that… Well, personally, I have the mindset that no matter what the aftermath, it’ll be worth that very short, momentary feeling of relief that I experience immediately after self-harming. So, it’s not as though all those memories about unhelpful responses in the aftermath of self-harm aren’t in my head; just that in the grand scheme of things, they mean nothing. Honestly, in the past, there’ve been times when a professional’s response to my self-harm has left me saying ‘I’m never going back to that A&E!’ or ‘I’ll never speak to the Crisis Team again!’ Yet, those instances don’t change my decision to self-harm.

PAIN & MENTAL HEALTH

 

Even though I’m the one in pain right now, this is yet another blog post inspired by one of my best-friends Marty from www.gumonmyshoe.com!

I think that it’s more than obvious to say most people will immediately think of physical pain when they hear the word ‘pain.’ I mean, honestly? I do too! If I’m talking to someone and they say they’re in pain, then I wouldn’t even think to ask them whether it’s physical or emotional. And I think that’s just one of the many things I’ve realised more recently with me now having four completely different types of physical pain…

The first to come along was my thumb. On Boxing Day last year (2019) I was opening a bottle of prosecco and using my thumbs to attempt to wiggle the cork loose when the thumb on my right hand just drooped down and I was unable to lift it. I was so confident that I’d either broken it or dislocated it that I went to A&E but upon x-raying it, the Minor Injuries Nurse concluded that it was just a muscle spasm and needed warm water to encourage it to start moving again. Two days later, it was literally impossible to do a ‘thumbs up’ position and I was so overwhelmed with the conviction that something was definitely wrong. So I took myself to a different A&E and was immediately seen by a Plastic Surgeon who told me that the EPL tendon had ruptured and I needed surgery so that I didn’t lose function of the entire thumb!