Articles about the road to wellbeing, and living with a mental health condition. Recounting my diagnosis with bipolar affective disorder in 2006, and my efforts to improve my physical and mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic years.
In February 2021 I began what I referred to on social media platforms as my “Wellness Journey”, a series of positive life choices that I adopted in order to improve the way I lived my life and help me move on from a period of chronic stagnation. I had spent 15 years on medication for a mental health condition that I might not even have (I’m still awaiting re-assessment for the potential diagnosis of a neurological disorder), and was not living my life the way that I wanted to, or able to fully feel like I was myself.
During the course of a 15-year struggle with my mental health, I had allowed other people to dominate and dictate the way that my life ran, had been unable to fully access my genuine emotions and feelings, had gained 5 1/2 stone in weight, and had generally lost my way in terms of personal development and creating the kind of life that I wanted for myself.
Before and After…
The “Before and After” picture above is a blunt visualisation of just how much I had stagnated, and a visual representation of how dead I felt inside. In the image from 2021 I am 37 years of age and 15 1/2 stone with 29% body fat and apparently a metabolic age of 41 years. In the image from 2023 I am 40 years of age, and 11 stone, 5lbs with 17.7% body fat and a metabolic age of 35.
For those who enjoy shocking statistics, in between these two images I’ve lost almost 10 inches off my waist, and gone down 5 waist sizes in trousers. In the week that the 2021 photo was taken, I popped the button on a pair of 34″ waist jeans because I could no longer fit into them (I wasn’t so much ‘muffin-topping’ as ‘tin-loafing’ over the waistband). In June 2023 I bought my first-ever pair of 26″ waist chinos because my trusted 28″ waist trousers looked too much like baggy clown pants to wear to a conference.
The changes of the last 2 years permeate far deeper than those that can be seen on the surface. I have been completely free of psychiatric medication for almost 18 months now, having taken only painkillers for an ongoing Covid-19 vaccine injury which I picked up in 2021. I have worked my way through 4 months of privately-accessed talk therapy, 6 weeks of talk therapy and 6 weeks of systemic psychotherapy which I accessed with the help of the Film and TV Charity, 2 x 6-week courses of guided counselling which I was able to access through Mind, the mental health charity, and I am currently coming to the end of my 1st month of face-to-face counselling sessions with Mind Cardiff.
The work that I have done on myself during this period, coupled with the help I have received from multiple mental health professionals, has enabled me to reverse the mental degradation resulting from those 15-years of medication and also overcome the results of long-term toxicity and abuse in both my personal and professional lives. It hasn’t been an easy process by any means, and I have learned as much as I have lost in the two years since I chose to begin my Wellness Journey.
This has involved the gradual restoration of a personality and associated thought patterns that I had been unable to fully access since I was 21. For almost half of my life I have been living as a shadow of myself, the firebrand of my teenage years having been doused by successive combinations of medication and life experiences that had compromised me and kept me in a virtual cage that allowed others to control and contain me.
For 15 years I coasted through life, not fully in control, and certainly not making myself accountable, letting external factors steer the course of my career without fully taking the helm myself. I was results-focused, suffering from chronic stress, and felt stranded in a situation that didn’t feel healthy or positive for me, but I was nevertheless afraid to find my way out of. A negative experience in my career shook me so much at the end of 2020 that I decided to finally put into action my plan to move to Cardiff – something that had been slowly gestating for close on 4 years – and begin my Wellness Journey.
Over the coming weeks I will go into further detail to explain the changes that I made, and the obstacles that I encountered along the way. From dealing with the pain of my vaccine injury, to publishing my first novel, from replacing medication with meditation, and the discoveries that led to my new potential medical diagnosis. I will reserve a number of the details – names, dates, places – to preserve the anonymity of others.
Having come to the end of my Wellness Journey and the realisation that it was less of a “journey” with a destination, and more of a new way of living, I am finally able to contextualise and make sense of what I have been through. If, in the reading of it, my experiences somehow help others who are going through a similar process, then the forthcoming blog posts will serve a purpose greater than recounting how I pieced my life back together.
During my wellness journey of the last eighteen months, I’ve discovered and developed a number of thought processes that have helped me with my emotional wellbeing. Last year my yoga teacher spoke of a ‘box of tools’ that I could use for focusing, centring, and dealing with obstacles, stressors and anxieties without turning to external coping mechanisms such as comfort eating and drinking.
The following is a list of my top five items in that tool-kit: processes and thought patterns that you can use to help yourself through tough times. I first compiled this list for a friend who was struggling with a tough issue, and reading over it, I realised just how beneficial these practices have been for me.
This one is the most important: without this, it’s hard to make the others work. This is also the hardest to adopt and implement. In Western society we are taught from an early age that looking after our self-interest is “selfish” and “wrong”. We are told that people who do this are “self-centred” and that this is a bad thing. On the other hand, a lot of Eastern concepts of wellness and well-being talking of “centring” and “the self”. Focusing on yourself is the first step to healing yourself. It’s not “selfish” and it’s not “wrong”.
For myself, I had to ‘un-learn’ the concept of selflessness in order to become mu better, fuller self that I am today. You have to come first in your own life. This can be difficult to accept, especially if you are a parent or have any kind of dependents. Think of the safety briefings on a plane: parents are advised to put on their own oxygen mask in an emergency before they put one on their child. You have to help yourself before you can help others. You have to be your own hero before you can be someone else’s.
If you don’t feed yourself first, you won’t have the energy to feed others. You have to take care of your own interests, first and foremost, to be able to equip yourself to help those around you. Until you accept and understand this, the other tools in the toolkit won’t work for you as well as they should.
When I began practicing yoga last year one of the first things I learned was the importance of looking after, focusing on, and adapting my breathing. No-one ever teaches us how to breathe – it is something that happens more or less instinctively when we are born. We don’t think about breathing, we just depend on it to happen as an automated process, one that is essential to saying alive.
I learned about the practice of pranayama: the practice of focused breath work. From the Sanskrit words “prana” (vital life force) and “yama” (to gain control), pranayama teaches you to concentrate on your breathing, to focus on it so that it changes from an automated process to one that you consciously take charge of yourself. There are many different techniques that can be used to cope with different situations that you encounter, but the most useful for myself is breath counting.
Try this: breathe in for the count of four, hold for one, then breathe out for the count of eight, and hold for one again. Repeat this ten times. If you can’t manage a four:eight split, then choose a count that works for you with the aim of controlling your breathing to the pint where you can reach that four:eight split. Often, when I begin pranayama, I find that I can only breathe out for the count of five or six, signalling that I need to focus more to regulate and slow my breathing.
Adopting this breath pattern delivers a faster hit of oxygen to your body, coupled with a slower, measured release of carbon dioxide that encourages you to fully empty your lungs. Over time you will develop a greater lung capacity that allows for more efficient breathing. More focus on your breathing also means that by default, you will focus less on external pressures and problems, thus reinforcing that first tool in the kit.
This one took a long time for me to master, and is in some ways still a work in progress. Staying focused in the present moment, and not dwelling on the past or anticipating the future, doesn’t come easily to me. As someone who had grown up as a ‘planner’ and ‘preparer’, I’d historically always worked towards a better tomorrow, rather than focusing on enjoying a better today.
When I added HIIT runs to my exercise routine, I found that my mind would often wander away from the exercise to other things that I had to do that day, which sometimes resulted in me quitting the workout. I learned to focus on that present moment during the exercise, not by blocking everything out or suppressing other thoughts, but by focusing on what I was doing at the time.
The best way that I discovered to do this was by engaging each of the senses. At any time that I want to feel more ‘present’ – more aware of the moment that I am in – I count off the following in my mind:
5 things that I can see
4 things that I can hear
3 things that I can feel/touch
2 things that I can smell
1 thing that I can taste
This helps me tune back in to whatever I am, and whatever I’m doing, helps me focus on the task in hand, and develops a greater awareness of the moment I’m living in. You’ll notice that by starting with what I can see, and finishing with what I can taste, my physical awareness is also shifting from an external observation of the world outside, to an internal observation of what’s going on inside my body.
This felt like such a strange one to adapt because it seemed like such an abstract concept, but there are measurable health benefits to the practice of gratitude, including these, noted by UC Davis Health:
23% reduction in the level of the stress hormone cortisol in your body
7% reduction in the biomarkers of inflammation
25% reduction in dietary fat intake
10% improvement in sleep quality for those living with chronic pain
The daily practice of gratitude has also been proven to reduce depression, improve optimism, reduce suicidal thoughts, and decelerate the effects of age-related neurodegeneration. I also found it interesting that those who practice gratitude have been found to have lower levels of Haemoglobin A1c: a marker of glucose control that plays a significant role in diabetes diagnosis.
As a practical measure, when I practice gratitude, I list five things that I feel grateful to have in my life right now. They can be people, places, memories, favourite things – whatever I currently feel grateful for. As I list each one, I acknowledge it, saying to myself “I am grateful that I have ___ “. Then I go a step further and say “I am grateful that I have ___ , because ___ ” and then I attach a reason for that gratitude: it makes me feel happy, it keeps me sane, it reminds me of a happier time or whatever the reason may be.
Try practicing gratitude for a few minutes each day, then ask yourself each time you finish, how it changed the way that you feel. And if it’s a positive change, that’s something else to feel grateful for!
Dopamine is a hormonal neurotransmitter that plays an important role in feeling pleasure. It affects motivation, moods, pain management, and sleep among other things. As a mental health patient, the regulation of dopamine has been of important to me. In the past, the quickest way I’ve found to release dopamine was to eat chocolate. During my teens, I used to eat a lot of chocolate to deal with stress, which led to an unhealthy relationship with food, a reliance on comfort-eating, a 34 inch waist, and the resultant low feelings of self-worth. I gave up chocolate for the best part of 17 years, and went down to a 28 inch waist at my lowest.
Last winter I returned to using chocolate as a coping mechanism, and it took me a full four months to reverse the effects that it had on me both physically and mentally. Although I haven’t completely cut it out of my diet again, I’ve managed to conquer my reliance on chocolate through nutrition, and developing my awareness of what else engages dopamine relays.
One thing that I really enjoy doing is writing. Creative writing, long-form, with a pen and paper as opposed to typing, is something that I really take pleasure in doing. I am now writing each and every day – even if it is just a half-page or page of A4 – just to engage my dopamine relay, and feel pleasure. The effects on my well-being have been quite surprising: the pleasure that I feel is better, and lasts longer, than the pleasure of eating a bar of chocolate.
Find something that you enjoy doing – that gives you lasting pleasure long after you do it, and do that every day for seven days. After a week, see how much better you feel on the whole. I hope that you are able to implement some of these measures on your own journey towards wellness, and that you are able to feel the benefits of these practices. Feel free to sound of with your own tips for wellness in the comments below.
Also, if you’ve enjoyed reading this, or if my words have inspired or motivated you in any way, why not supporting my writing by clicking the image below to buy me a coffee? I’ve recently discovered pistachio blended frappés, which have quickly become my drink of the summer to reward myself for my efforts, and motivate me to do more writing 🙂
Here’s a follow-up post about the dream that I rediscovered for myself last year: a dream so deeply suppressed that I wouldn’t allow myself to think about it, let alone speak of it for twenty-three years. For almost a quarter of a century I buried it, told myself that it wasn’t for me, and then during the first months of my wellness journey last year it began to re-awaken.
When I was ten I saw the film Free Willy in the cinema with my grandparents – a film, and a day, that I remember vividly. Coming out of the then-UCI Cinema in Swansea, here in South Wales, we bumped into a woman that my grandparents knew. She asked which film we’d seen, and when I told her, I remember her laughing and saying that it wasn’t the sort of film she thought my grandfather would want to watch. I’ll never forget his reply.
My grandfather told her that I chosen the film because I was an animal-lover (I was the Nature Kid in school…) and a vegetarian, and that was something that he ‘just didn’t understand’. I was ten years old, and by my birthday that year I had completed an almost three-year conversion to a vegetarian diet that I have kept all my life since. My grandfather was a retired pastoral farmer (cows, pigs, goats) who ate a lot of meat — it was the job that he had, and what made the family its money for a time. I recall multiple occasions during my childhood when Big Ron told people outside of the family about the vegetarian grandson that he just didn’t understand.
As a ‘back-up’ option to the writing career that I’d wanted from an early age (the well-meaning adults surrounding a young creative will often suggest a ‘back-up plan’, thus setting them up for potential ‘failure’ — more on that in another post), after seeing Free Willy I decided that I would become a marine biologist and study the wild orca population out in British Columbia on the West Coast of Canada. I was part of that generation that experienced the zeitgeist from the Free Willy franchise that saw $20 million donated to the Save The Whales Foundation and resulted in the eventual emancipation of Keiko the orca.
Aged fourteen, I remember being ushered into the ‘Careers Library’ at school, told to find a job title that I liked the sound of, find the corresponding file for that job, and note down the qualifications I would need, and the universities that I would have to apply to in order to study for those all-important letters after my name. After graduating, I would then be able to apply for marine biologist jobs. Apparently life is simply that formulaic for some people. Not so for me.
My grandfather’s slow disappearance into the mists of psychiatric illness, and his eventual death at the local psychiatric hospital when I was fifteen, caused the complete implosion of the family structure on the paternal side. It was a turbulent, harrowing time that resulted in me literally closing the door on that entire bloodline on my sixteenth birthday. In the months preceding my birthday I had made the decision to shelve my teenage dream of working with the orcas on Vancouver Island. I told myself that Canada was never going to happen for me. I would never, ever see Vancouver.
Life moved on. I buried that dream without a headstone. No marker to show where it was located, so that I may one day find it again. Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m not a marine biologist. Until last year, very few people knew of that former dream. Fewer still knew that I had ever been interested in visiting Canada, let alone living or working there. I am the Writer, the Producer, a co-founder of the indie production company Seraphim Pictures, whose social media profiles have often stated that I’ve been “scratching the Hollywood itch” for years. Beneath that itch, buried far below the surface was a wound that had become painful, gnawing away at me for decades — a pain that last year came to the surface, raw and exposed.
My first sight of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in October 2021. Image Courtesy of Ben Parker.
Last year I moved to Cardiff, the Welsh capital, something that I’d been planning since my return from Los Angeles in 2006. It took me long enough to get that far with people saying that I’d never do it, that I was ‘all talk’. With that achievement finally unlocked I began to unlock other things, and started to achieve other items on my bucket list. I had moved to Cardiff Bay with my friend Ben, who I’ve known almost fifteen years now. Ben has family out in Canada, specifically on Vancouver Island, which I’d known about throughout our acquaintance, but I never once put two and two together. Not once, in all my years of knowing Ben and his family, did I think that my friendship with him would reignite my dreams of a life in Canada. Not once did I think that through Ben and his family I would end up traveling to Vancouver Island. Little did I know…
Living with someone new always brings with it a period of getting to know the other person — even if you’ve known them a while. Through many conversations on our balcony last year I discovered that Ben had once played the trumpet in childhood, as I did. We also talked about his family holidays on Vancouver Island, and his hopes of living there one day, that had echoes in those I had once had myself. During one of those conversations, Ben told me about the photo that he had of himself and the orca Tilikum, taken at Sealand of the Pacific in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. For those unfamiliar with the name, Tilikum was the orca whose enforced captivity drove him to kill three people — as documented in CNN Films’ Blackfish in 2013. In the Chinook Jargon of the Pacific Northwest, Tilikum apparently means “friends, family or tribe”.
It was the conversation about Tilikum that started it. Listening to Ben talk passionately about the orcas off Vancouver Island (and then the both of us raging as we watched Blackfish later that evening) reawakened my own passion for them. When we worked backwards through the years, Ben and I discovered that had we both followed our teenage plans to live and work in Canada, we would have most likely left for British Columbia in the same year. We didn’t know each other back then, but we could easily have been two boys from South Wales on the same flight to Vancouver all those years ago. How different life might have been.
Last summer Ben started making plans to visit Canada. I had no intention of going with him — Canada still wasn’t for me. It was something that I was never going to do. Over the course of the summer, things began to change. Inspired by my conversations with Ben, I began to develop a documentary, A Whale of a Time, about the lasting impact of the Free Willy franchise on orca conservation, and our understanding of the species in the wild. I began pitching the film on both sides of the Atlantic — drawing interest from cast and crew associated with the franchise, and connecting with the marine biologists out in British Columbia who I had once dreamed of working with.
Ben left for Vancouver Island last October, and two weeks later I flew out to meet him. I had no expectations, no idea that the long-dormant dream would erupt, hot and burning, after I touched down in British Columbia. I can’t say that last year was especially great for my career. A lot of things went wrong for me, due in part to the ongoing pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic. I was in daily pain from my Covid vaccine for most of last year — a pain which sadly intensified on the flight to Vancouver.
The day that I left Wales for Canada, I remember sitting at the dining table considering a list of suicide notes. I was tired, in pain, overworked, stressed, and telling myself that I couldn’t do it. I shouldn’t do it. I should stay put. It would be bad for me. It would be a disaster. These intrusive thoughts were the last bastions of resistance — of the walls that I had built around my dreams of Canada — the last clods of earth that I had used to bury my dream.
I got on the plane. I’m so proud to say that I overcome my resistance, and threw caution to the wind. The moment that the plane pulled away from the terminal at Heathrow, I began to smile — my first real smile in weeks. Crossing the Atlantic that day was one of many Rubicon moments for me. Iacta alea est. Less than five minutes after getting off the train in Downtown Vancouver, walking beneath the falling leaves in the cold air of autumn, the dream came back to me, and I finally came back to life.
Selected Images of that first weekend in Vancouver. All images my own, save for the bottom middle, provided courtesy of Ben Parker.
I spent that first weekend in Vancouver itself — enjoying the city that I’d once told myself I’d live in as a “grown-up”. It was a fundamental shift — finally getting back to who I was ‘meant’ to be as a young man, all be it a few years down the line. It was as if the years of struggle, of mental illness, and medication in between now and then just evaporated. The person who I had struggled with being for years had gone, and I was able to be myself again. I have lost many friends in the months since, and pushed many more away, because they seemed incompatible with who I actually am, and some just don’t get on with me.
If that weekend in Vancouver was a fundamental shift, then the week that followed on Vancouver Island was a step-up in terms of the gear change. I got to meet Ben’s Canadian family, and I am forever grateful to the Evans clan in and around Victoria for their hospitality, for welcoming me into their homes, telling me their stories, and making me feel like I belonged. I’ll even forgive a certain sock-thieving dog for keeping a memento of my visit that all but guarantees my return.
Beware sock-thieving Canadian dogs! Photo of myself being seduced by Gus, professional sock-thief extraordinaire. Image courtesy of Ben Parker.
I have so many great memories from that trip — each one strong, definitive and inspirational. Ben and I went on a whale-watching trip with Eagle Wing Tours out of Fisherman’s Wharf in Victoria, and on that day I finally got to see my first orcas in the wild. Until then the only real-life orca I’d seen was Winnie (apparently named for the Celtic word for whale) the orca held captive at Windsor Safari Park, England in the 1980’s. To see a small pod of transient orcas in the wild was a real moment for me — a huge tick off the bucket list. I also managed to see the temporary orca exhibition at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, where I discovered the term “orca dork” as a new label for myself.
My stay in Canada was short-lived. I returned after a week or so, my arm pain from the vaccine all the more excruciating after the flight home traveled further North, and at higher altitude. Nobody could have predicted that, or foreseen the effect that it would have on me. At the end of last year, a perfect storm of jet-lag, stress, exhaustion, chronic pain, and potential altitude-induced psychosis resulted in my first-ever suicide attempt. It’s not quite as dramatic as it sounds, but it was definitely a dark moment for me. Underpinning that moment was the feeling that I had finally allowed myself a chance to live the life that I’d wanted, and it was gone again.
A good old-fashioned winter of discontent followed, with prescribed medication that only seemed to make things worse. The year has now turned, spring has come again, and in the last few weeks, I’ve been able to pick up where I left off last Autumn. This month, I had my first video conference with a prospective co-production partner in Vancouver about working together to produce A Whale of a Time in addition to a documentary series. I look forward to securing both finance and distribution for these projects in the future, and returning to British Columbia to start filming at some point later this year.
The main takeaway from all of this is not to suppress who you are. Not to give up on your dreams. Not to compromise on your goals based on the actions and attitudes of others. If someone tells you that you can’t do something, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. It just means that they can’t conceive of you doing it. They can’t imagine a world where you have realised a dream, a goal, or ambition — not because they are wrong, but because they most likely live in a world where they failed to realise their own dreams. You are not them, in the same way that I am not my nay-sayers. I am not my doubters. I find a way of realising my ambitions, no matter how long it takes. The time that it takes us to make real our dreams is less important than the fact that we have the courage to try to make them real in the first place.
If we allow them to take hold, if we listen to them, sometimes our dreams come back to us. Sometimes, we achieve the things that we want in ways we never imagined we’d be able to. If there’s something that you want to do in life (so long as you don’t intentionally hurt yourself or anyone else) if there’s a dream that you have — find a way of making it work, regardless of whether or not people understand it.
That’s freedom.
Orca Dork at the Royal BC Museum, Victoria. Image Courtesy of Ben Parker.
DISCLAIMER: This article may be triggering for some. The writing has little basis in medical science — it is merely the product of my experiences with the Covid-19 vaccination programme in Britain.
When news first broke of the development of a vaccine to tackle the Covid-19 Pandemic, I welcomed it. I have had every vaccine going throughout my life, and until 2021 had had no significant side effects. I am not, and have never been, anti-vaccination. I ended up having a bad experience with my Covid vaccine, but I kept going back, and will keep going back, as long as I feel is necessary. Read on and you’ll discover the reasons why.
First and foremost, I understand the arguments against mass vaccination, I really do. I understand the fear that the vaccines are untested, and that we don’t 100% understand the full effects of the chemicals in them. I also accept that some people believe that the mass vaccination programme is on the one hand a conspiracy to control the populace as a whole, or on the other, an attempt to divide and conquer (pick a theory — you logically can’t have both). None of this deterred me for a second in making my decision to accept the vaccine when it was offered to me.
Side note for those who claim that the vaccines are potentially dangerous until they are thoroughly tested: thoroughly tested how, exactly? Many medicines and treatments are tested on animals before moving on to human trials. At some point all medicines have to be tested on humans — often in paid medical trials. Most people are OK with that idea : small amounts of people getting paid to be tested on. They don’t agree with what they see as “mass testing” — but if the vaccinated masses were all paid for it, would they feel the same? Is the issue money or ethics? And if it’s ethics — why is animal testing acceptable?
Historical side note: if Edward Jenner hadn’t tested his hypothetical smallpox vaccine on his gardner’s son in 1796, we might not have vaccines as we do in the modern day. He had to test on someone. He went on to test on over 20 more patients, including his own son. Within a century tens of thousands of people worldwide were being vaccinated. The ripple had to start somewhere.
My feelings on getting vaccinated were as follows:
I have had vaccinations all of my life, and trust the methodology behind them.
Getting vaccinated would reduce the likelihood of me catching Covid and also the likelihood of infecting someone else.
If I caught the coronavirus and died, then I wouldn’t have to deal with it, but if I had it and passed it on to someone who then died — I would live with the responsibility for that person’s death for the rest of my days.
I had close friends who were immuno-suppressed, and I didn’t want to pose any significant health risk to them.
A sense of social responsibility — getting vaccinated for the benefit of society at large, and not just myself.
Being vaccinated would mean I could continue to work within the film industry (when it eventually returned to ‘business-as-usual’).
Once fully-vaccinated, I would be able to travel again when the international borders opened.
You’ll notice that the majority of my reasons for getting vaccinated focused on benefitting others rather than myself. That’s ultimately what drove my decision — thinking of the impact on other people rather than myself. Some may say that this was naïve, given what happened after receiving the jab.
On March 22nd, 2021, exactly a week before my birthday, I was given my first Astra Zeneca dose. Like many people I suffered some mild side effects: lethargy, an aching arm, and a general feeling of being under the weather. I put myself to bed early that day thinking that would be that. I woke the next day with my left arm in pain, and the pain stayed almost until the end of the year.
Historically I’ve always slept on my left-hand side, and since the night of my first jab, I haven’t been able to. This has seriously disrupted my sleeping patterns, which as a mental health patient has been something of a disaster. For almost six months I would find myself turning on to my left in my sleep, only to wake up in agony. I think at one point I was down to an hour and a half of sleep per night, which isn’t healthy by any standard.
On July 6th, 2021 I received the second Astra Zeneca dose. The GP who administered it dismissed my claims of continued arm pain as being “the most common side effect” among males in my age bracket, and assured me that it would go away eventually. On August 7th, I was admitted to hospital with severe recurring chest pains — one of three patients admitted that weekend with the same symptoms, all of whom had received the second jab roughly within a week of one another. A series of x-rays, blood tests and an ECG declared that I was ‘fine’ and yet I was doubled up in agony, tears streaming down my face, feeling a pain I had never experienced before, fearing I had come to my end. It’s no surprise I started to finally draw up my will soon after.
On October 15th, I flew from London to Vancouver, making my first Transatlantic crossing in over 6 years, and my first since getting vaccinated. What no-one would have anticipated was the effect that the high altitude would have on my arm pain. To this day, I don’t know whether it was a swelling of the vaccine injury, or the change in air pressure, but the pain increased considerably and it took me a few days to get over. On the trip back from Canada the plane took a different flight path — further North, and I think at a higher altitude — and the pain intensified considerably. By the time I landed at Heathrow, I wanted to rip my own arm off.
The nightmare continued. Once home, I was prescribed painkillers, anti-inflammatories, sleeping tablets, and returned to taking antidepressants. The combined cocktail of which (it turns out that I have a genetic sensitivity to a certain painkiller) resulted in my first ever suicide attempt in late October. I put friends, family and colleagues through hell on my road to recovery.
Part of my recovery, documented elsewhere on social media as part of my wellness journey, involved HIIT workouts with added explosive movement exercises. On November 22nd, 2021, I randomly added box jumps into my routine in the park, and I noticed an hour or so later that the arm pain that had been a constant torment for exactly eight months was GONE.
This Eureka moment started a chain of events that led to a re-evaluation of my mental health condition and treatment going forward, that I shall write about at some point in the future when it all pans out. I began researching the effects of certain exercises and workouts on the bipolar brain, then started looking into what was in the Asta Zeneca vaccine, and whether there were any known effects on mental health conditions.
At some point, I’ll write more on the above — how I learned about T-cell immunity, and the T-cells in the Astra Zeneca vaccine, and the effects that they can sometimes have on the brain. I’ve written elsewhere about titrating off my medication at the end of 2020, and how the return to antidepressants in October of last year actually had a detrimental effect on my mental health. I came off them after a few weeks, and one weekend in November went back on them — only to feel suicidal again. I questioned their efficacy going forward and also wondered whether they were even necessary any more. Had the T-cells in the Astra Zeneca jab some way ‘treated’ (I won’t go as far as to say ‘cured’) my mental health condition? That’s something I am continuing to investigate.
When I received the letter about my booster jab in December I had to think long and hard about whether I was going to accept. I went through a kind of hell last year. The effects of the original vaccine on my health and lifestyle reverberated through both my personal and professional life. I have lost both friends and colleagues as a result of the perceived ‘divide’ between the pro- and anti-vax supporters. I am of the personal opinion that the long-term effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic will be those on our mental and social health — there are a great many social ailments that will take years, perhaps decades to heal.
In the end, I chose to accept the proferred booster, and on December 18th, 2021 I had my first Moderna shot. Apparently it still has the T-cell immunity, but offers a higher level of protection when combined with the previous vaccinations. When I spoke to the nurse administering my jab about the possible T-cell effects on my brain, she told me about a patient whose Moderna jab resulted in a skin condition clearing up. Whilst many have said that we don’t know the negative side effects of these vaccinations — we also don’t know the positive side effects either. There may be chemicals in these vaccines that lead us to unintended treatments for a variety of conditions. That’s why recording side effects and reactions with the NHS yellow card team has been paramount to our understanding of the vaccines.
I chose to have that booster jab, and should I be advised to have a further shot I will do that too, because despite the pain that I lived with for eight months, and despite some of the darker moments of the last year, I made it through as a better, stronger individual. I also got to work and to travel, and I was able to socialise knowing that I would pose less of a potential risk to people that I cared about. As I said at the beginning — I understand people’s fears about the vaccination programme, I really do. I’ve seen the videos circulating on social media, I’ve listened to the theories, and I’ve understood as far as I can, but I just couldn’t give in to those fears.
What I’ve also come to realise is that many people who fear the side effects of the ‘unproven’ vaccines administered by trained medical professionals, will quite happily accept a holistic treatment or cosmetic treatment that has little or no scientific basis and isn’t administered by a medical professional. I’ve also observed the hypocrisy of those who would stand on their doorstep once a week to ‘clap for the NHS’ yet refuse a vaccination that will reduce the increased pressure on the health system in Britain. And yes, I understand that their hypocrisy is dwarfed by that of certain politicians who laid down the laws of isolation for us all, and yet considered themselves to be outside of those laws.
Those politicians aren’t doctors, nurses or scientists. They aren’t the ones holding hands of those dying in ICU, or making the phone calls to tell a relative who wasn’t allowed to visit, that a loved one has passed away. When making my decisions about the vaccine I chose to ignore the news coverage, ignore the stories on the internet and social media, and ignore the political point-scoring. What I did was speak to people working in the health service — I listened to first-hand, front-line accounts of the fight to control the coronavirus.
I then asked myself: what can I do to help? Things as simple as washing my hands, wearing a mask in public, avoiding crowded situations (which I’m fine with — I like my personal space!) and yes, putting up with the painful side effects of the vaccine. I could live with those. And so can others. And that is the operative word: I can live with those things, and if living with those things means that less people will die — even if it only saves five people — then set my arm on fire. Set my body aflame, and I will burn, if it saves but one person. If there’s one less person dying in ICU begging for the vaccine because I chose to adhere to the rules, then mine was the right choice.
My choice to get vaccinated, and continue to be vaccinated, was never about me. It was about you. Everyone else. It was never about my civil liberties, or whether or not any government or clandestine organisation was trying to control me. It was about preserving your freedom, and allowing you the choice, and hoping that you would show me the same courtesy. Hoping that you would be vaccinated to keep me safe, as I was vaccinated to keep you safe.
Doing things for other people rather than ourselves promotes social cohesion. Looking after our own self interests at the cost of others? That’s what divides us and that’s what leads to the collapse of society. Selfishness brings out the ugliness in us all. If we don’t protect our society, the civilisations that we have built (and by this I mean the people — not the trappings those civilisations have created) then our progression as a species, our evolution, has been pointless. If we give in to our fears then we become animalistic — we lose our humanity. The loss of our humanity is not worth one person’s fear for their own, singular, perception of civil liberties.
I’ll climb down off my soap box with these words about fear from a mind far greater than my own: fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering…
…when you allow yourself to dream again, you come back to life.
My sister gave me the above postcard over a decade ago, and after I moved house in 2021 it took me a good seven or eight months before I rediscovered it in a memory box. It’s an important quote for me, one that has great influence in my life, and has a particular relevance given my current situation and the changes that I made during my wellness journey over the last year or so. My journey hasn’t just been about making lifestyle changes and improving my health and wellbeing — it’s been about coming back to life, reconnecting with my self, and awakening my dreams once again.
That postcard has spent a number of years inside a dusty photo frame propped up against the inside of one of many memory boxes that I have. My memory boxes are important to me — they contain everything from ticket stubs to theatre programmes, photographs to party streamers. I’ve always thought that there would be days in the future when I would no longer be able to recall my most treasured memories, and so, in the days before Facebook Memories, I decided to gather together the things that remind me of who I am and what I have enjoyed doing.
I’ve spent many years trapped in a bubble, in a life that I didn’t want — my wings clipped by a mental health condition, my personality diluted by the medication that I was prescribed, and my time spent thinking of others, and basically living for others. Previous to this period there was another life, another me that existed. I carried the dreams of that life through the years that I dozed on medication, never feeling truly alive, or truly me.
I have always considered myself a writer first and foremost — the dream of writing for a living has been lifelong, and always tantalisingly out of reach. In my early twenties, when I fell into working in the film industry by accident, that dream was overshadowed by the new dream of running a successful production company and seeing my writing come to life on screen as opposed to in the pages of a book. There have also been other dreams I’ve had along the way: dreams of travel, of becoming a parent and raising children, dreams of living overseas. Some dreams have stayed with me, others have been buried.
I’ve said elsewhere on the internet that to be a creative means to be at odds with the world in some way. It means taking a look at the world and believing that you can improve it — whether through art, education, design, technological advancement — whatever it is we create, we create it to make a better world. We dream of a better world. We challenge the status quo. A creative does not accept the adage “it is what it is” — yes, we can only control the controllables, but through our creativity we can make something better, an improved experience, for those who we choose to share our creativity with.
I was told some weeks ago, rather accusingly, that I live in a dream world. It was said within the context of a conversation about relationships, about putting people on pedestals, wanting the best and not settling for anything less. On reflection I agree with it to an extent, but it stung at the time. I wouldn’t say that I live in a dream world — I am an idealist, and I seek out my ideals. If my ideal is a life more pleasant, more dream-like than others can conceive of, then that’s a problem for those who aren’t a part of it. In the last year I have begun crafting the kind of existence that I want — I have begun creating my happy. Anything that doesn’t fit in with that falls by the wayside, sadly.
I had put certain dreams on hold for over a decade, that I knew. But there was one dream I had suppressed, and buried so deeply, that I had forgotten that it existed. It was a fundamental, deep-rooted, core dream that I had had from the age of eleven, and one that by the age of fifteen I had decided wasn’t for me. When we give up on our dreams, a part of us does indeed die, but when we suppress a dream that is still living, when we block out a possible existence that could still be achievable — that’s damaging. For me, that dream was Vancouver Island.
I’ll post a blog later in the month about my dream of Vancouver Island, how damaging it was to suppress it, and how liberating it was to rediscover it last year. I ended up traveling to Canada and staying in Victoria on Vancouver Island in October, and it was the final nail prised out of the coffin that allowed me to resurrect old dreams, and discover a self that I had all but forgotten.
Back to the postcard. I think it was given to me around the time of my first visit to Los Angeles in 2005, the year when I started working in the film industry. I’ve held on to that quote for a long time, with no idea where it came from. I’ve wanted to write this post for a good month or so, and finally took the postcard out of the frame this evening to photograph it. What I read on the reverse astounded me.
The back of the postcard is almost blank, with a printed note identifying the quote from the 1983 Paramount Pictures movie Flashdance. It’s a paraphrased version rather than a direct quote, but here’s where it gets weird: 1983 was the year I was born, Paramount Studios was where I was planning to host the UK Short Film Showcase before I was denied a US visa and had to put my dream of Los Angeles on hold, and What a Feeling, the song from Flashdance has a particular meaning in my life.
When I was 19, I ran away to Italy to complete my first novel. Fresh out of school at 18, I’d landed a job in the local council’s social services admin team, pretty much living a life that wasn’t mine, and less than I year later I decided I was going to escape to Rome. On the night of my leaving do that October, one of my colleagues requested from a DJ the Bananarama song Robert De Niro’s Waiting because of the repeated use of the song lyric “talking Italian”, as they’d given me an Italian phrasebook that day. The DJ didn’t have the song and so instead, opted to play the Irene Cara song What a Feeling from the Flashdance soundtrack.
The song begins with the lyric I’ve heard over and over since that night:
First when there’s nothing but a slow glowing dream, that your fear seems to hide deep inside your mind…
In the years since that moment, I have repeatedly buried three dreams, and let the fears from deep in my mind come to the surface and dictate the course of my life. Three dreams of three places: Vancouver Island, Rome, and Los Angeles. In 2021 as I came off the medication and came back to life, those dreams reawakened and became a priority again. A life, or lives, that I should have lived, and could still live, came hurtling back to me in quick succession. A pin-prick of light on the horizon grew in hope, and the realisation that those dreams, that life, could still be mine knocked me for six.
2021 was not the best of years for me, but it was by no means the worst. I am thankful for the lessons I learned and grateful for the memories I created. I have come back to life, I have started to dream my dreams again, and this year I will begin to make those dreams a reality. It’s already happening, plans are afoot, and I’m building on the foundations that I laid last year.
Mid-way through last year I said to my yoga teacher that 2021 was about me flexing my wings, and 2022 would see me fly. I fully intend to honour that. I know now that my fears are only in my head, and that is where they belong. They have no place in the real world, and they will not keep knocking my life into neutral as I have allowed them to do in the past.
Reading through this post before hitting publish, I can see that the signs have been there all along, like threads intertwining, ready for me to pick them up and follow them, as Theseus left the Labyrinth. I can’t ignore those signs any more, and I won’t ignore my dreams. If I live in a dream world, so be it, but it’s my dream world — one that I have crafted for myself.
If you are a creative or have a dream you’re afraid of pursuing, and you relate to any of this, then take this little nugget of wisdom to heart: you can’t dream when you’re dead, so live your dream. Today, tomorrow, and every day. Your dreams are there to be realised. And so are mine.
I’d always been intrigued by the health benefits of yoga — two family members used to go to yoga classes when I was in my teens. It had been suggested to me a few times before I finally adopted yoga as part of my wellness journey this year, but I’d always resisted the idea of taking lessons. Like many guys, I had the preconceived notion that yoga meant going to some community centre or the like, for a class that would see me making an idiot of myself in a room full of perfectly-poised women contorting themselves into various pretzel shapes. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
In April this year I began a course of virtual yoga sessions via Zoom with a newly-qualified yoga teacher in Cardiff. As part of my Wellness Journey, the road back to health after my breakdown fifteen years ago, and wanting to draw a line under my old life and start afresh, I made a number of positive lifestyle choices. Balanced diet, increased exercise, meditation, yoga — they were the tools I chose to shed the two and a half stone I had put on in lockdown, and propel me forward into a better, healthier way of life. Within ten months I’d dropped three and a half stone and exceeded my fitness goals, but the greatest changes were within.
I made the decision to adopt yoga and meditation as a way of regulating my moods and calming my mind. It sounded a bit new-agey, but after fifteen years of prescribed medication, I wanted to try a new approach and see if a more holistic treatment would be of more benefit. The hunch paid off — although it hasn’t been all plain sailing, my Wellness Journey has brought me back to life, grounded me in reality, liberated me from toxic interactions, and emancipated me from the yoke of continuous medication.
To start with, my preconceptions about yoga were all wrong. It’s not all bending and stretching in weird ways – there are different schools of yoga, and there is so much more to it than the physical movements you see people doing in online videos and celebrity DVDs.
For starters, the word “yoga” is a Sanskrit word meaning “yoke” or “unity”. In essence, the practice of yoga is meant to control and ‘yoke’ the mind to the body, and also to the soul. It’s about unifying body, mind and soul to find stillness and peace. It’s not about fitness and flexibility, or weight loss and muscle tone — those are potential side effects on the road to unity. My favourite quote about yoga from the Bhagavad-Gita defines it like so: Yoga is a journey of the self, through the self, to the self.
I began my yoga tuition with some basic breathing work — pranayama — and some easy stretches. It’s strange to think, but no-one ever teaches us how to breathe. We are born, we more often than not get that initial slap on the back, and we breathe. It’s an involuntary action, and we do it all through our lives, until we stop. Until this year no-one had ever stopped to tell me that there are many ways of breathing — that the daily, automatic, conscious breathing we do is not the most efficient way, and that we can train ourselves to breathe differently.
During my first few weeks of yoga practice I learned breathing techniques to calm and centre myself, breathing techniques to manage the heart rate, and breathing techniques proven to deliver more oxygen to the brain. It’s strange to think that at thirty-eight years of age someone finally taught me how to breathe. It’s stranger still to think that most people will go through their lives without this knowledge.
Next came the work on the mat — the stretches, practicing the movement in and out of different asanas, and combining them into short flows synchronised to my breathing. At first I was doing it once a fortnight, then once a week, and then about a month into my yoga practice something really interesting happened — I started doing yoga on my own two or three times a week in addition to the virtual lessons. Then five days a week, and then it became something I automatically did on a daily basis as part of my morning routine.
It started off as a few minutes on the mat each day. That grew to fifteen, then twenty minutes daily. As the weeks went by and I committed more asanas and more flows to memory, that time increased. I started timing my sessions until I was almost hitting the hour mark with my solo practice. I then began incorporating mantras into the various vinyasa flows — something which complimented the daily meditation sessions I had adopted, and worked like affirmations to reinforce the effects of the positive life choices I made at the start of the year.
One day in early summer I noticed something that was strange and surreal to me: I was shopping in the supermarket, and somehow without even thinking of it, I had synchronised my movements to my breathing. Reach for something on the shelf? Breathe in. Put it into the trolley? Breathe out. I had even slowed the pace of my shopping trip to match my slower breathing. I wasn’t sure if it was the first time I had done this, or just the first time I had noticed doing it. My yoga teacher said she’d expected it — apparently there comes a time in every person’s yoga journey where we reduce our time on the mat, and yoga starts to infuse into our daily lives.
I delved a bit deeper when the virtual yoga lessons ran their course, and discovered that there are eight “limbs” to yoga, three of which are the meditation, breathing and postures I have adopted this year. There’s so much more to yoga than I realised — there’s a code of ethics, a way of thinking, a spiritual path. I can’t ever see me adopting the religio-spiritual side of things but I’m really intrigued to see what more there is for me within the practice of yoga. There’s more for me to learn, to read, to study, to practice.
So far the effects on me have been significant — adopting yoga has helped me lose three and a half stone, and I look, feel and walk more like me. It really has been a journey back to my self this year, and I look forward to seeing where else it takes me. I am calmer, more collected, more centred on my self, and focused. More determined to go where I want to go in life, more courageous in my decision-making process. Healthier, and happier, and so grateful for the journey so far.
To those of you who are considering taking up yoga, I’d say give it a try. Be open to the possibilities. See where it takes you. Be curious about changing your life. There’s more to it than stretching out on a mat. Even after the best part of a year I’m still pretty much a beginner. The journey continues…
Disclaimer: This post is not to be taken as medical advice, or words by which anyone should decide to begin or end a course of treatment. Any decision to start or stop treatment should be made with the full support and understanding of medical professionals. The following content may be divisive for some, and triggering for others. It is merely a written account of my own experiences with medication…
I’ve written elsewhere about the long-term effects of the breakdown I went through in 2006 at twenty-three years of age. The main change to my life was that, following a diagnosis of rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, I was prescribed medication that I would need to take for the rest of my life in order to function as a healthy, regular member of society. I was reassured that many people live relatively “normal” lives with the condition (which is true) and that medication would help achieve this (partially true). I accepted the diagnosis, the advice, and the medication with no question.
I spent the following fifteen years on a daily regime of mood stabilisers, anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and the occasional anti-sickness drug or something to counteract certain side effects. Every three or four years, the medication would change under review, sometimes more effective, sometimes less. At one point I was prescribed a particular drug that distorted my vision and laid me flat on my back, unable to stay upright because of dizziness — that resulted in a rare home visit by the doctor, yet another change a medication, and a short course of anti-sickness tablets.
For the most part it was a manageable way of life, although I was just going through the motions, spending a good 10–12 hours in bed each day. The medication often hampered my creativity, often limited my capability for work, and pretty much stalled my career. My condition as a whole affected friendships, relationships, and also affected my working life. The flip side is that it enabled my mind to heal at its own pace, even if it take 15 years to recover from the breakdown.
In November 2020 an incident occurred that cast doubt on the efficacy of the medication. I questioned whether I needed it as much any more — or even if I needed it at all. I received a letter from the local surgery saying that because I hadn’t attended my usual ECG & blood tests that year (due to Covid and lockdowns…) that they were going to stop supplying my medication with immediate effect. That in itself is horrifying — the threat of an abrupt cut off in medication after a 15-year dependency was dangerous. However, I chose to see it as an opportunity to try a life free of medication, and I rose to the challenge.
As November turned into December last year, I started titrating down the amount of medication I was taking. This meant that, even with being cut off from my regular prescription, I could continue to take the tablets for longer, just at a lesser dose. I didn’t take heed of my own advice in the disclaimer at the top of this article — I didn’t do it with medical advice, and I didn’t discuss it with my doctor. I didn’t want to hear the arguments against coming off medication — I wanted to give myself the chance. Very few people knew about my decision, and those who did know only found out weeks into my experiment.
By February 2021 I was close to coming off everything completely. I was feeling more alive, more focused, more in control of my life, and more me. I moved home during the last lockdown, shifting my business with me. I came off the meds completely, and never wanted to go back on them. I felt I had come back to life, yet sadly, the life I had come back to was not what I wanted.
I’d put on two and a half stone during lockdown. My career was in the doldrums. I had been coasting for too long. The answer, once I was fully aware of everything, was to begin a Wellness Journey that saw me adopting yoga and meditation, combined with a better diet, and more exercise, as a way of managing my condition. Adopting positive lifestyle choices, and being open to positive opportunities, allowed me to manage the mood fluctuations without the intervention of medication.
The difference in me was plain for all to see. My Wellness Journey resulted in me losing over three and a half stone, improved my moods, my self esteem, my self confidence, my feelings of self-worth. My eyes look brighter, I smile more, I don’t look down at the floor when I walk. My career has started to pick up — I have more drive now, more focus, more determination. I have come on leaps and bounds in the last ten months, and I am happier and healthier because of the journey I’ve been on.
Unfortunately I can’t say the same for many of the people around me. A lot of them had grown used to me as I was on medication. A number of them had only known me since the medication, and so they had no idea of who I was without it. Sadly, I came to realise that there were people in my social circle who were at odds with who I really am as a free-minded person unencumbered by medication. This year I have felt the need to let people go from my life, and push others away. There were people who were fine with me on medication, but when they discovered who I was naturally without it, they took issue.
There were calls for me to start taking medication again, to “get help”, and to go back into the proverbial box I had been kept in for a decade and a half. Unfortunately for those people, I had rediscovered life, rediscovered myself, and fallen in love with who I am as a person, and the idea of living the life that I want. As I reintegrated into real life post-lockdown, I had to leave behind the virtual life I’d cultivated during my years of illness, and a lot of people weren’t OK with that.
On a flight from London to Vancouver, my bad reaction to the Covid vaccine (more on that another time) flared up at high altitude. On the return flight it was even worse. Coupled with jetlag, anxiety and depression, within days of returning to the UK I felt I’d undone all of my healing over the past fifteen years. I felt I’d lost every inch of ground I’d gained. I felt my life had been taken off me again, resulting in my first ever suicide attempt (nowhere near as serious as it sounds). The long and short of it? I went back on medication.
That’s when things got worse. Yes, the antidepressants lifted me out of my funk, and stopped me from feeling suicidal. Yes, the painkillers numbed my arm pain. Yes, the sleeping tablets helped to restore my circadian rhythms. However, the combination of those medications alongside an anti-inflammatory that shouldn’t be given to bipolar patients basically ruined me for the best part of a month.
I quickly came off all but the anti-depressants, and started titrating down off them as soon as I felt able to. I realised that even at a half-dosage, the anti-depressants were pushing me too high, and dangerously close to mania. It became apparent, once I’d got my routine back, that my Wellness Journey had rendered the medication all but obsolete. Taking the same tablets that once helped me now hindered me, and got in the way of my further healing.
Once I came off the anti-depressants I felt better — more together again. I’ve begun to question whether fifteen years of medication was worth it, and whether I might have been able regulate my moods using methods other than medication. I starting keeping a mood diary again in the summer to track the mood swings. I’ve also made use of guided journaling to identify triggers and new ways of healing. I’ve had two courses of counselling that were enlightening. The more work I’ve done on myself, the less I’ve felt I needed the medication.
Fifteen years ago I could never have conceived I’d ever been in this position. Certainly not this headspace. I believed that I was “broken”, that there was something “wrong” with me. Medication and therapy gave me the space and time to deal with the repercussions of my breakdown, but I think it went on for too long. At some point I had to take the step to deal with this myself, in my own way.
It hasn’t been an easy process, but I’m glad I made the decision to come off the medication, and I’m glad I’m now medication-free. I’ve had to get used to living life as myself again — and I know there are people who have had difficulty getting used to me without the medication. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no going back now. I couldn’t have done this ten, or even five years ago. This year was the right time for me, and saying goodbye to the medication, and the person I was when I was taking it, was the right course of action for me.
To those of you reading who are taking medication — there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a reason for us being prescribed medication, and we do need to trust the professionals who prescribe it. I’d also add that we also need to trust ourselves. If you’ve been on medication for a long time, if you feel you’ve been on it too long, trust your instincts and speak to someone. See what your options are — coming off it, changing to a different medication, adding something else into the mix to compliment it. Providing a change or discontinuing treatment wouldn’t be life threatening, feel free to explore your options. Who knows who you might be on the other side?
I’ve always been a planner, especially when it comes to my working life. From an early age, I knew what I wanted to do in life. I knew I wanted to write for a living. I dreamed, and planned, and set goals to achieve in order to pursue my dream career.
At age 11, when moving up from primary school to secondary, my year group was streamed by academic ability as an “experiment” to see if it would be of benefit to our education, our exam results, and ultimately the school’s position in the league tables. At that time, the school was perceived by many as an under-performing “sink school”, and the record GCSE, A-level results and university admissions were seen as a successful outcome for the experiment.
Behind the apparent successes, however, the experiment fostered an environment of ambition and competition among my peer group, especially among those of us in the top set. At the end of each academic year the school would rank the students in our year group and we were moved up and down sets depending on our academic ability. I remember one girl bursting into tears because she was being dropped from Set One and being placed into Set Two. Our form tutor rather unsympathetically said “that’s what you get for not revising enough for your exams”, or words to that effect. She was traumatised into thinking that she wasn’t good enough, with no support from the member of staff who was supposed to look after her welfare.
The school had a long-standing rivalry with a school in a nearby town over how many students were sent to Oxford or Cambridge each year — something always trumpeted in the local press as the paragon of a successful education. When it came to the turn of our year group I remember my Head of Year telling me in no uncertain terms that I would be applying to Oxford. I didn’t — I had no intention of going to university. I was done with the pressures of the education system, and basically fulfilling the agenda set by the ambitions of the Local Education Authority. I ended up turning down the university placements I was offered — I was determined to find my own way.
Twenty years on, aged thirty-eight, I’m finally coming to terms with the psychological impact of that academic streaming experiment. As far as I remember, for the seven years I was in that school, I was second in the year group ranking. I was always pushed by the adults around me to pursue the top spot, and never managed to achieve it. What that instilled in my sensitive, creative brain, was the belief that I wasn’t good enough, and I would never achieve my goals, no matter how hard I tried. That was a goal instilled in me — be the best, or be a failure. It was never a goal that I chose for myself.
It took me moving in with a pragmatist this year to learn that there was another way of doing things that was ultimately more healthy. I have been conditioned by both my education and fifteen years of self-employment, to plan, set goals, achieve them, or feel like a failure. When you start a new business, investors and financial institutions more often than not require a full business plan and three to five years of financial forecasting. That mentality fed into my need to meticulously plan everything.
Over the past fifteen years, I have weathered the dissolution of the Welsh Development Agency and a resultant loss of business support and funding; the Recession and its resultant global economic downturn; Brexit and the UK’s exit from the European Unions; Trumpism, and now the continuing Covid-19 pandemic. As I look back on all that turbulence, one thing I have learned is that nobody could have predicted all of that, let alone planned for it. Forecasts are at best a rough guess at how a business might succeed if all goes to plan. However, there are so many external forces that act on a business that “all” never goes to plan.
We adapt in order to survive — that is the nature of evolution. Change with the times, roll with the punches. You can’t plan for tomorrow, because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. You can try to anticipate, that is all. You can plan for tomorrow, given certain conditions are met that bring about tomorrow, yet if that doesn’t happen, the plan fails. What matters is how you live, and how you conduct yourself, today. We look after tomorrow by taking care of today. I’ve always planned, I’ve always made lists, set goals and aims, and if I didn’t achieve them, that lack of achievement compounds a sense of failure and not being good enough. But “good enough” for who? For what? This is what it meant to me to be an over-achiever — constantly striving for better and never being content.
Starting a flat-share with a pragmatist this year rather than another planner like myself has been good for me. I’ve learned that there are other ways to approach life that are better for my mental health. Discovering and adapting to another way of thinking has been enlightening, and I’ve recognised that the low points of the year have occurred when I have tried to keep hold of the old ways of my old life, and force them to fit into the new. The low points of this year have been when I tried to stick to a plan, and it failed. The high points, conversely, have been when I have managed to let go of the planning and anticipation, and to live in the moment, and go wherever life takes me.
It hasn’t been easy. Rewiring your mental hard drive and changing your thinking is no mean feat. I know, after decades of planning, that complete pragmatism wouldn’t work for me. I know after this year that I can’t adopt a pragmatic way of thinking and living 100% — but what I’ve also learned is that I can combine the two, and find a third way, a blend of planning and pragmatism that works for me. Giving up on plans, not being able to plan, feeling like I can no longer plan, trying to live without plans, and then thinking that there was nothing worth planning for — all of that was damaging for me.
After numerous low points, depressive episodes, a return to medication, and subsequent return to suicidal thoughts earlier this year, I came to realise that finding the balance between planning and pragmatism was key to my successful recovery. Now I consider that the best way forward for me is to prepare (or plan…) to be pragmatic. At first it sounds like going around in circles, or just chewing my own words, but I look at it like this: if I accept that life is ever-changing, that the best laid plans go to waste, that there are so many elements in my life that I have zero control over, then I can stop worrying about them. Controlling the controllables means accepting that there are certain things I can get a handle on, and do as I want, but the vast majority of things are out of my hands.
I’ve accepted the notion that I can’t plan everything out. I have to leave the majority of it up to Chance. I do, however, know that I can plan certain things, but also be open to the idea of those plans changing. At its very basic: I can plan to get out of bed in the morning at a certain time, but if I get up five minutes earlier, or ten minutes later, it isn’t the end of the world. I still write lists, and I still don’t tick everything off, but that’s good. I realise now that if I ticked everything off a list, there would be nothing else to do that day. In the past, I would start on the list for the next day, week, month — whatever the time period. If I tick each and every thing off, at some point there would be nothing left to do, nothing left to achieve, and then what?
It’s an interesting thought — if I achieve absolutely everything I plan to do, then what? Sit back and do nothing? Keel over and die? Life would be boring without anything to do. So I always leave something on the list. I never seek to complete a list. Only to keep going. The resultant change is that I’m now becoming more of a process-focused individual, and less of a results-focused individual. Yes, I could push myself and force myself to achieve everything I want, but if I break myself doing so, what was the point? If I don’t enjoy the process of getting what I want from life, then is it worth wanting in the first place?
Since adopting this process-focused way of living, I’ve started to enjoy my life more. “Live in the Moment” and “Go With the Flow” are words bandied about on too many fridge magnets and t-shirts for them to have as much impact as they deserve. What I’ve discovered, is that if I just go where life takes me, and enjoy the journey, then the results, the achievements, become of secondary important. A lesson is not as important as the learning of it. A destination is not as important as the journey to it. At the end of my life, I want to look back and say that I’ve lived, rather than look back and say that I was alive.
We’re all alive, but it takes so much more to actually live. Sometimes it takes planning and preparation, sometimes it takes pragmatism. At the end of the day, the river follows the path of least resistance. Resisting that flow is damaging. Planning, and then feeling like a failure for not completing a plan, is merely resisting the lessons and the journey that you experienced along the way. The real failure is not enjoying the process of getting to the destination, of recognising that if your goals are not achieved, then maybe they were the right goals. Nothing should be set in stone, because even stone erodes under the power of elements.
Going forward, I’m combining both planning and pragmatism, but leaning more towards being pragmatic. I’m also focusing on process and not results, on the journey rather than the destination. It hasn’t been an easy change to make — but I’ve made it all the same, and I’m happier and healthier because of it. It’s working for me in my day to day personal life, and I look forward to see how it works for me in my work life long term. Try it in your own way — see if it works for you too ☺.
Yesterday was World Mental Health Day, which is something that has passed me by in previous years despite mental health being an issue that is very close to me. Twelve years ago this month I had a breakdown that lead to a diagnosis of rapid cycling bipolar affective disorder. I don’t know whether World Mental Health Day was a thing back then, but if it was, I was in no state to take notice of it.
Mental health and well-being are important buzzwords at the moment. Whilst increased awareness of mental health issues can only be a good thing, sometimes it can feel as if people are jumping on an overwhelming bandwagon. The trouble with mental illness is that it is pretty subjective, and it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees sometimes. It can be difficult to make sense of it all on occasion.
I’m kind of unsure what I want to say here. I spent part of World Mental Health Day under a blanket. I didn’t want to: I started the day off positively, even squeezed in some cardio at the gym, but the black dog crept up on me in the afternoon and I couldn’t shake it for a few hours. No reason, no big trauma, it just happened.
I spent too much time on social media (it’s a habit I’m having difficulty shaking) and whilst the mental health hashtags, the survival stories and the inspirational quotes were shared in solidarity, they just left me feeling sort of numb. To me it felt like a bit of overkill. There’s such thing as too much of a good thing: too much interest, too much support even. Too many hugs create a pressure that squeezes and suffocates, no matter how positive their intention.
The day after yesterday was much better by far. The twenty-four hour news cycle slowly erased much of the mental health hashtags and the awareness posts. Yes, it’s still okay to not be okay, it’s okay to be unwell, and to cry, and to be depressed on occasion — all of those things are fine. Yes, we need more education on the matter, and certainly more understanding. I don’t completely understand it all myself, but the main thing is that day after day things get better. It’s key to remember that this, too, will pass, no matter how bad it is.
So long as the next day comes around, the day after yesterday will always be worthwhile…
Photo by u042eu0440u0438u0439 u041bu0430u0439u043cu0438u043d on Pexels.com
I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder following a breakdown when I was twenty-three. Despite having been previously treated for anxiety and depression and other diagnoses including cyclothymia, it came as something of a shock. I had always been “healthy” as far as I was concerned — going to the gym regularly, eating “properly” — but there was a whole other aspect of my health that I had neglected throughout my life. My mental health. When my doctor sat me down and explained what bipolar disorder was, I seemed like a classic case.
Looking back, it comes an as little surprise that something would go wrong. Such is the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight. Ten months before my breakdown I had started my own business in the most volatile and untrustworthy of industries: film. A combination of the loss of a vital production contract and a sudden disappearance of government support left me like a fish gasping for air, but rather than calling it quits I decided to power on through the stress.
The dream had begun in Hollywood, with a research trip I undertook with my business partner one Christmas — the exchange rate was good, the lifestyle was better, the people both curious and welcoming. We were bright young things with a promising future ahead of us, and a three-part docu-series and a short drama behind us. The seemingly endless possibilities dried up soon after we returned to the UK, to be replaced by much knocking on closed doors and banging heads against walls.
There was a brief respite from the encroaching despair with a trip to the Cannes Film Festival to debut my first short film at the Short Film Corner of the Marche du Film. I felt on top of the world again, but would soon return to another slump in the UK. My life seemed destined to follow a roller-coaster of highs and lows, a cruel mimicry of the mood swings that I would end up enduring.
The film was something I had fallen into by accident. From an early age I had wanted to be a writer, and in retrospect, the obsession with writing, the late-night drives to complete work, were probably early symptoms of my condition. I completed my first novella aged sixteen, my first full novel at twenty-one, and have been unable to secure publishing interest in either, had simply decided to move on. I had moved into filming events — a lesser passion, but one that seemed to have better prospects. That led to arts coverage and writing documentary voiceovers, and the alluring dream of owning my own production company.
Grandiose plans are themselves another symptom of the disorder, not that I recognized that at the time. I was just burning with creative fire, a desire to write my stories, and see them played out on film. Sometimes that fire burned quickly to embers, other times it was an all-consuming blaze. There were times when I thought that having bipolar disorder made me a more creative person and other times when I thought that being creative made the symptoms more acute. It was as if, without the proper treatment, my chosen career was slowly killing me.
I am by no means the first person of a creative nature to have been both blessed and cursed in this way. From Vincent Van Gogh to Ernest Hemingway, the arts contains a whos-who of bipolar and cyclothymic patients. Hollywood is no exception: famous faces diagnosed with the disorder include Carrie Fisher and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Whether I label myself as a writer or filmmaker, I appear to have plenty of company where my mental illness is concerned. It seems that people with the disorder gravitate to the arts sector and its related professions.
I’m conscious of the fact that three out of the four people I named in the last paragraph died in circumstances related to their mental health. “Outlook not so good” to quote the magic 8 balls. Although I choose to live with, as opposed to suffering from, my illness, suffering is part of the deal. Some days are worse than others. It is natural for writers to struggle to write on occasion, but those times are compounded by depression and not being able to get out of bed of a morning. Over the years I’ve noticed that the dreaded writer’s block often correlates with a visit from the dreaded black dog. Such is life.
The flip side is that bouts of mania can manifest themselves in long periods of creative writing (the beginnings of this article are one result). These bursts of creativity produce a glut of short film scripts or the first drafts of short stories, only to dry up when I burn out and the mania subsides. Whilst it feels great at the time, the disappointment and self-doubt that arises from an incomplete project can be crippling, and so the pendulum swings the other way and depression sets in. My work, the career path that I have chosen for my life, seems to directly affect my mental health and not just vice versa.
I must be a glutton for punishment. I do know that I am addicted to stress and perform well under pressure provided that said pressure is self-inflicted. My life would probably be easier, and healthier if I chose to do something else with it. There are a myriad more sensible options out there, but the film industry itself is addictive, and there is nothing else like it. I’ve come to realize that I am something of a risk junkie, betting it all each time I choose to back a new project with time and creative effort, always with mixed results.
The fire warms and burns me and yet I continue to fuel it, to watch it grow, and to get closer to it the brighter it burns. One day it will likely consume me altogether and the illness will have its way with me. Until then I will continue to struggle with it, making the best of it, working with it to create something out of nothing. People who play with fire get burned, but they are also warmed and illuminated. I’d rather feel the benefits of the flames and risk everything, than not feel them, and risk nothing at all.
Something On My Mind: A Blog By Daniel Lyddon 