Yearly Archives: 2018

I’ve had the most amazing reaction to my Instagram / blog post about my recent battle with depression. People have been incredibly kind and loving. A few have mentioned how ‘brave’ it is for me to share. But I don’t see that at all.

My whole career has been built around storytelling, and telling people how important it is to tell stories. I believe in them so strongly because of their power to create change. But that change only happens when the stories ring true.

It’s not easy to be vulnerable and talk about these things when you don’t know what the impact might be, but the stories we tell when we are brave enough are the catalysts for change. Before anything can happen people have to understand why change is needed.

I’m blessed to have a loving family, a caring and considerate employer, and the support of medical professionals who have helped me through a rough time. I have everything that many people struggling with mental health issues don’t have, which makes me feel bound to tell my own story from such a safe place.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” Anon ((Often attributed to Gandhi, this quote actually has no reliable documentary evidence. Gandhi’s closest was from a 1913 publication saying, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.” Arleen Lorrance’s 1974 book The Love Project is closest to ‘authorship’ with “Be the change you want to see happen.”))

I want to see a world where people talk freely about mental health, and their struggles, without fear of what that may mean for friendships, relationships or employment. I want people not to wait until it’s too late, but to speak up early, to seek help and to recover quickly and fully.

Sharing pretty Insta-quotes and platitudes is all well and good, but how can I expect all those things to happen if I’m not willing do the same myself?

I originally shared the text below on my Instagram account, a place where for some reason I find it easier to be honest and open than other places, even if the authoring experience is a little trickier than other places. Reviewing it (and the comments) this morning, I realised I needed to share it more widely because it’s important. More on that below.

Let’s just put it out there: the first four months of 2018 have been — almost without exception — spectacularly unkind and unhelpful.

Physical illness, accidents, stress, anxiety, mental health problems and depressive diagnoses have combined for the worst run of form in all the time my wife and I have known each other. Usually we play off each other pretty well, see-sawing through life’s difficulties, helping to pull the other up when they’re down and let the other lift us when we’re struggling.

These last four months the universe seems to have knocked us down at the same time with the full force of both barrels. For me, it culminated in being off work for almost two months and being medicated for depression for the first time since my transplant.

But today is May Day. It’s the day I choose to embrace optimism again (thanks, cystic fibrosis), the day I take back the driver’s seat (thanks, mindfulness), the day I break free of the mental shackles that I’ve been in (thanks, Prozac) and see the light of life and not the dark (thanks, erm… light).

I know I can only do this with the right support, so I’m also giving cry to the international call for help: m’aidez. I need your help. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week or next month, but on this journey forward from this one single step, I will falter, I will fail and I will fall. And I may need more than one hand to lift me back up.

Today is the day I become a warrior against mental health issues. For myself, because I believed I was ‘better’ and it humbled me again. For my friends and colleagues, because stigma should never cost friendships or jobs. For others, because everyone needs to know it’s ok to not be ok.

May Day is my reset button. Let’s do this.

This post is important not just because I failed to recognise the situation I had slipped into, but because I did it while spending a lot of time preaching about how important it was to de-stigmatise and recoognise mental health issues, particularly in the workplace.

There’s more to come on this, but for now it just felt important to get this out there as a statement of intent. This is not the end of my fight, and it shouldn’t be the end of ours.

I often struggle with expectations. I want things to be different than they are.

Take this blog, for example. I want it to be read by loads of people, but it’s not (yet). There are many reasons for this, not least that I’m not making enough of an effort at the moment to get it read because I’m still trying to form the habit.

When I started it again, I wanted to be posting every day: I saw myself waking up at 6am every morning, hammering out a tight, concise, witty, powerful post and putting it out for the world to see. Since I’ve really started to focus on it and carve out the time to write posts in the early morning I’ve still not managed to put out a post every single day. But I’m still trying.

Take exercise: it’s the same every time for me. I make a resolution to get back in the gym and I dive in head-first, going all out in my first session back and being almost unable to walk or lift my arms over my head, so I give up.

Take grief: whenever you lose someone, you think you’ll get passed it, but it creeps up on you every now and again and takes you completely by surprise. Or, conversely, you can hear of the death of a friend and feel almost numbed by it, without the kind of histrionics that you expect.

Expecting things to be different will never work. There are plenty of mindfulness teachers and practitioners who will tell you to completely let go of expectations, but unless you’re ‘full zen’ that’s almost impossible to do.

More useful, I find, is to recognise when something doesn’t meet your expectations, and look calmly at your own reaction to it. When I don’t manage to hit my target of publishing a post every single day, I feel bad about it, then note the things that made me miss my slef-appointed target: last week, for example, I was quite ill on Thursday and Friday and wasn’t able to spare the brain power to do both my job and this blog, so the job came first, and when I wasn’t working I had to let my brain swich off.

Similarly when grief hits, I try to see when I’m not reacting the way I ‘expected’ to react, and understand that whatever my reaction, that’s OK. Because we all react differently to things, all the time.

So the next time you catch yourself in a situation where you expectations haven’t been met, ask yourself if those expectations really matter, and look carefully at your reaction to the situation. There is no right or wrong to any of this, but clinging to expecations after the fact will only dampen or spoil an experience.

I have trouble sleeping.

There are a variety of reasons: I used to have really severe restless leg ((Something called Rapid Limb Movement, with a score 100% higher than the classifiction of ‘severe’)) until a few months ago when I started on a treatment for it; I have mild sleep apnoea ((Quite embarrassing to admit, because it’s the kind of thing that is usually associated with older, heavier people than me.)); I sometimes over-think things and stare at the ceiling for hours while the day repeats in my head, or run through the following day instead. I sometimes have to read a book until my eyes are literally closing, even if I know it means a short night’s sleep, to ensure I’m not going to wake myself up thinking things through.

The reason doesn’t really matter, thought. What matters is the effect. A bad night’s sleep, or even just a shorter night’s sleep than is ideal, has a disproportionate impact on my productivity during the day, not to mention my mood.

I’ve become adept at functioning relatively normally – or at least appearing to – when I’m in the office, but it bothers me that the effort of doing that often means I’m not able to do it when I’m at home.

Sleep matters more than most of us think it does. Ensuring a good night’s sleep can make the world seem like a different place and provide a stability of mood that’s less and less possible when you’re not fuly rested. I struggle with that a lot, but the fight is on-going.

The irony, of course, is that the harder you try, the less likely you are to win.

I love blogs about habit, the power of habit, the reasons behind the power of habit, and of course it’s not hard to see from the minimalist design of this site, I take a lot of inspiration from Zen Habits.

What a lot of these writers appear to miss out, of course, is just how hard it can be to form a productive habit. This blog is a habit I’m trying to create: wake up, make coffee, write the blog, shower and get out to work ((Or ‘up to work’ on the days I’m working from home and commute to my eyrie at the top of the house.)). It’s a good little routine except for two small things: what happens when you wake up super-tired, and how do you make sure you’ve got something to write about?

It takes discipline to form a habit. When it’s been a tough week and I’m lagging a bit, pulling myself out from under the covers into the cold morning air can be hard enough, let alone thinking of what I’m going to write. Luckily for me, the premise of this blog is pretty elastic, mostly focused on exploring life experiences, paired with a semi-instructional approach to telling great stories simply because that’s what I’m passionate about. I have the freedom to write what I like, so I can use the difficulties to inspire me to creation. Like I just have.

But today’s lesson is not about being able to write whatever I like, it’s about recognising just how hard forming new habits can be. I’m still doing OK on this so far, but I’m starting to wonder if I’ll start to slip if I think I’ve nothing to say. The discipline of forming habits is the toughest part.