Update…

So, I finished my two essays on Monday, and it was tough and pretty horrible, but they’re in now..!

That evening, I may have had a little drink, to celebrate. Now, I’m clumsy and poorly co-ordinated at the best of times - I have dyspraxia, which is immaturity of motor neurone connections in the brain, and means that things like playing tennis, where you have to try and judge distance using something extended from your body at a moving object, is kind of really not possible for me. I have a total phobia of team sports because I know my body will let me, and the whole team, down. It’s like, even if my brain is telling my body what to do, the calculations always seem out.

Anyway, as I was walking out of the lounge to go upstairs to bed on Monday night, my calculations messed up bigstyle, and my right foot slammed into the door jamb. All my toes are fine, except the fourth one, which was throbbing with pain that night, and has since gone green, blue, greeny blue, bluey black, black and now is greyish. It has also gone from the size of a chipolata, back to almost normal, since Monday. Still, as I’ve either broken it (little toes notoriously break easily and are hardly ever even x-rayed by hospitals) or just really badly bruised it, jogging has been out.

Which has really sucked. My best friend, Anthea, has signed up to do the run now, and we’re going to do it, possibly with my Dad (both are fitter than me!), which means I really need to start training. Only if I run on my toe before it’s better, it’s just going to prolong the whole healing process. Sigh. At the moment, I can walk on it almost normally, with a slight limp. But such are things, yunno. A combination of a bit of celebration booze and a few crappy neurones have conspired to dock me a week, but it’s not the end of the world. I’m going to keep telling myself that, anyway…

In the meantime, mentally this week has been really hard, and I wish I could have done some running. I recently saw a report which said that exercise actually cuts your chances of feeling blue or depressed by a third. ONE THIRD. That’s amazing… I’ll keep you guys posted, anyway, and once the swelling’s gone down and the bruise is pretty much gone, I’ll strap the trainers back on again. Hope you’re all doing ok, and *hugs* to anyone who’s not.

 

Safety First! Pt 1

Women: Change your names, stay indoors, and for God’s sake always carry a torch!

 

As you can probably tell from my previous entries, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the welfare office at my uni. But I’m sick of talking about that for the moment, so I’ve decided to talk about this leaflet I found on the wall in the Student Union. It basically sums up everything about how annoyed I am that women are made to feel guilty for being attacked if they’re not doing enough to keep themselves ‘safe’. It’s called ‘Women Aware: Useful  tips to keep safe’ (published by Avon and Somerset Police Community Trust). It’s basically a big long list, divided into several sections. Now, I’m not one just to be angry for the sake of it, so the tips that I actually agree with are in bold.

 

ON PUBLIC TRANSPORT:

 

-         Avoid isolated bus stops

 

Right. So it’s late at night, you need to get home, yet if the bus stop happens to be empty or in a secluded area, then you should try and drag someone else along with you? Slightly impractical. I thank God every day that there are well-lit and properly posted bus stops in most areas in the city I live in, but if there isn’t one available, I’m certainly not going to fork out for a taxi because some dodgy guy may approach me…

 

-         Sit near the driver or another woman/If pestered by someone, complain to the driver, conductor or guard.

 

I agree with female solidarity on the streets at night. I always try to walk along with other women if I have to walk home at night. (Unfortunately, with my height, posture and big stomping boots, most women think I’m a potential attacker walking up behind them… Hmm).  But if you’ve ever tried to use a First bus driver as personal protection, I think you’ll know what I mean when I say it’s a waste of time. They’re not employed as bodyguards, most of them just want to get their shift over and done with, and they’re certainly not looking for trouble from some creepy guy even if he is harrassing their female customers. There isn’t proper security on the busses where I live, even late at night. I really don’t see how sitting near the driver will make a difference.

 

-         Avoid empty compartments or compartments containing only one male person

 

Because he’s a male on his own, he’s more likely to attack you? I don’t get this. I definitely feel safer sitting with one male passenger than a whole gang of them… Besides, if it’s the last bus of the night, what are you meant to do? Drag strangers off the street onto the bus with you to be ‘safer’?

 

IN YOUR CAR:

 

-         Where possible always travel on main or well used roads.

 

Yeah, this is a good one. I don’t drive, but when I’m walking at night I always stick to the main roads.

 

-         If you feel unsafe always lock your car doors before driving off/Always lock your car when you leave it, for however short a time.

 

Don’t these two just seem like common sense…? Or are us women too hysterical and stupid to realise these things?

 

-         Check the interior of your car before entering, especially the back seat – at night carry and use a torch.

 

… and don’t forget your hard hat, grapping irons and rope… Come on, who’s honestly going to remember to bring a torch with them when they go out at night? And why do you need one in your car? Checking the interior sounds like common sense… if you happen to be in a horror movie. How likely is it someone is going to be hiding inside your car?

 

-         Park in well-lit areas

 

Yep.

 

-         If followed home don’t get out of the car, make sure the doors are locked, sound the horn or flash your lights to attract attention.

 

Attention from who? Where are you? Is this in the middle of the day or at night? Bit confusing. Personally, I’d call someone on my mobile for help.

 

-         If you have car trouble, stay in your car and wait for help.

 

Right, except sometimes you’ll be advised to get out of the car for your own safety by the mechanics, especially if you break down on the motorway.

 

-         Don’t stop to help others – drive on and report it by phone/Never pick up hitch-hikers

 

After watching that episode of Six Feet Under, I have to fervently agree with these two… Except they’re not really specific to women.

 

WHEN IN ALONE:

 

-         Secure all windows and doors

 

Yep.

 

-         Fit and use a door chain and viewer

 

Door chains are a godsend. In the few extra minutes it takes for someone to kick your door in, you can be on the phone to the police.

 

-         Women who live alone should use only their initials and surnames in name plates and telephone directories.

 

What?! Does this sound insane to anyone else? Do you know anyone who actually does this?? Have we suddenly returned to Victorian times? Why don’t we just issue a man free with the house for all those weird women who actually enjoy living alone? Rhetorical questions aside, I’m pretty amazed at this one. How dare anyone make a woman feel like she’s not doing the maximum to keep herself safe in her own home if she has the audacity not to hide her gender.

 

-         Don’t let strangers into your home

 

Duh.

 

-         When answering the phone don’t let strangers know you are alone

 

I’m a bit confused as to what strangers would be ringing up for a chat… Sometimes when the phone rings, you pick it up and no-one’s there, you can be fairly sure someone’s just ringing to check someone (anyone) is in so they know not to burgle you. But how are you supposed to show someone you’re not alone? Pretend to be talking to someone else? Have a party CD on in the background?

 

-         Ensure you report all suspicious incidents to the police immediately

 

Ah. Well. The big one. The fact is this is great advice. In theory. But from the amount of stories I’ve heard from male and female friends about times when someone has either attempted to break in or made threatening phonecalls, the police just aren’t there to help. They either assume it’ll blow over or just plain tell you they’re not bothering to come round. In the case of some friends, someone was on their roof one night trying to break into an upstairs window. They rang the police and were told, ‘What do you expect, you live in ***** (dodgy area of town)’. It’s pretty unbelievable, but it’s true. Nine times out of ten, if you ring the police with a ‘suspicious incident’ they aren’t likely to take any notice.

 

Anti depressants

In Marytraceys9’s post Anti depressants from hell she wrote about her reactions to and feelings abut prozac, because this is a group blog we as well as our readers are going to have different opinions on things so I wanted to lay out my feelings on anti depressants.

I have real issues with the psycho pharmacology industry not least because it is all about capitalism in that one of its aims is to make money and another of its aims is to shut people up and keep them docile. I don’t think it has the best interest of those with mental health issues at heart. This article about how a drug company knew their product made children suicidal but withheld the information is an example of this.

I do think psychiatric drugs are given out too often when often other support is needed, I hate that psychiatric illnesses are assumed to be genetic and that medication is seen as a cure for bad genes. I find it bizarre that the same medication is expected to work for completely different people.

I hate that we live in a society that damages us so badly that so many of us end up with mental health issues.

Most of all I hate that I take anti depressants, I hate that I have been so wounded by patriarchy that my brain broke and probably isn’t going to mend well enough that I will be able to function without them

There were recently a whole load of articles with headlines along the lines of
prozac, used by 40milion people, does not work
But that headline is misleading if you read the whole article it says

The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients,

The word depression gets blurred at the edges, comes to mean, run down, fed up, bored with life. but for me it still means, too tired to think, to walk across a room, to construct a coherent sentence, to think about food, to wash my hair, with the taste of metal in my mouth and thoughts of sharp edged instruments, where dying is a release and a reprieve. This is what my life is like without prozac.

Although I know this is not a wrong shaped brain thing, it is a wrong shaped world thing and I know my mental health issues are caused by layer upon layer upon layer of abandonment, betrayal, loss, trauma, body shock, packed down and calcified and not enough time not enough space not enough silence not enough love to say it in.. All the damage that could be dealt with has been dealt with but I’m still wounded and always will be

I have tried and tried to live without prozac and I can’t, it is essential to my survival, and I think anything that helps women survive even if it comes with patriarchal capitalist baggage is okay, is even an act of resistance.

And I think we need to be careful, there is a lot of anti psych med feeling in left wing and feminist spaces, but telling people who have been wounded by patriarchy that taking medication to survive that wounding is somehow selling out or supporting the patriarchy can be wounding them again when we should be supporting each other in dealing with our wounds in the way that is best for us,

society already stigmatises us and tells us we are weak and worthless, we don’t need to do it to each other even inadvertently.

I would love to live in a society where anti depressants didn’t exist because they didn’t need to exist, because we didn’t get so wounded and when wounding happened we were able to heal there and then and had the time and resources to support each other through severe emotional crises. But we don’t live in that society yet and to survive the one we do live in I need to take my tablets every day.

 

University Challenge: Part Five B

Suggestion To My Uni: Better organisation in the welfare building Pt 2

 

Update from last entry: I received an answer to the questions I wanted to ask Finance Guy and the answer was basically… ‘I don’t know’. Great… He gave me a bunch of other numbers to call and I was finally told by another Support Lady that I’m not entitled to any money to pay my therapy costs. I’m pretty worried about this because I know I have to keep seeing my therapist every week. My mother has suggested I bypass the welfare office and go direct to the people who assessed me for Disability Support in the first place… Watch this space…

 

I have a learning mentor who I see occasionally and because of poor planning, we rarely have a private room to meet up in. Obviously, the welfare building would be the best place to meet in but the few times she was able to book a room for us to use for an hour at a specific time, the following things happened:

 

-    We arrived to find the room already in use and no alternative available.

-         We began using a room, only to be interrupted by the university chaplain who apparently used it at that exact time each week!

-         We had to resort to using someone’s office because of a double-booking, which meant that another person was in the room working while I was talking about my problems.

 

(There’s really nothing worse than trying to talk about personal problems with someone shuffling papers in the background and whispering, ‘Don’t mind me!’ at various intervals…)

 

One morning we had a room booked for 12 o’clock, only to arrive and be told that the entire building was shut until 2 o’clock due to the Easter holidays! I admit this is a problem that at the moment may not have an answer just because Bath Spa’s campus is not very big, but there’s a definite communication problem here. I was asked recently why I haven’t complained yet but my answer was just that I don’t know who to complain to. The admin is so confusing, I have no idea who sorts anything out. Most of the staff have no idea who each other are…  

 

 

Prepping for Appointments

Shatterbox’s post about welfare services & meetings inspired me to write a bit about the numerous types of meetings I’ve had about my health in the last few years.

I’ve had to have meetings with GPs, Counsellors, CBT Therapists, Occupational Health Services, Line Managers, Section Managers, and Personnel Services. The anticipation of such meetings can make you feel a bit like this:

 

 Here are some of the ways I prepare myself for these meetings:

• Take in Written Notes

This may sound like overkill, but during the worst patches of my depression I would be in tears within seconds of trying to talk about my health, and the written notes allowed me to get my points across even when I was too distressed to speak. They also mean I don’t forget any important points or issues, and can steer discussions back to the areas I want to talk about. My current therapist actually found it pretty useful as it meant she had my case history in my words to refer to.

• Take Someone With You

I found it very helpful to have my boyfriend with me when I went to see my GP about anti-depressants, as I was still coming to terms with being diagnosed with depression, and it meant my boyfriend understood the situation as well. I have found it even more important to have support in my meetings at work with managers, personnel and occupational health. At one point I was having meetings with three senior managers and a rep from personnel at the same time! Four to one in a meeting does NOT help when you’re already feeling very vulnerable. I got my trade union involved and have a union case worker who attends meetings with me, which has been tremendously useful. Just knowing someone else is there with my interests in mind makes it easier to cope. If you’re not in a union then you could ask about taking a colleague with you to meetings instead.

• Talk It Over Beforehand

I also found it good to talk over the issues that were likely to come up beforehand with someone sympathetic. One of my counsellors helped me prepare for meetings about returning to work after a three month absence by discussing what might be a sensible return to work schedule and if there were any duties that would need to be monitored etc. At other times I’ve talked to family, friends and colleagues, depending on who would know the most about the particular situation. It helps me work out what I want to say and what I might want to put in writing.

• Avoid Worst Case Scenario Thinking

This one is very hard to do, especially if you’ve already had a bad experience with the people you’re meeting, and it’s only now that I’m in CBT that I’m beginning to get the hang of it myself. I have a tendency to dwell on whether I’ll get upset, whether they’ll listen to me, whether I’m failing to meet certain standards or expectations… all classic anxious/depressive thought patterns. When I catch myself thinking like this I have to challenge those thoughts - have all my meetings gone badly? No. Have I always got upset? No. Have I usually managed to get my points across due to my preparations? Yes.

Some appointments go well and some don’t, but they’re hoops I need to jump through so I might as well prepare for them.

 

Quick NB

Hi everyone,

I know I haven’t posted in a while about the running. It’s largely down to getting badly behind on my work for uni. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to do this week (my two 5000 word essays are due in on Monday 14th, after which there will be much drinking) but if I manage to get out for a run I’ll post on here. Business as usual resumes on Tuesday 15th.

 

University Challenge: Part Five A

Suggestion To My Uni: Better organisation in the welfare building Pt 1

Oh yes. This is a two-parter

 

The welfare office at my uni is a converted building that I think was originally going to be used for halls. As a result, it is cramped, dark and the idea that anyone in a wheelchair could comfortably get around it is pretty hard to believe. I have usually been able to make appointments to talk to someone about my problems which has occasionally been helpful. However, I have also been left in the lurch by staff members who don’t seem to understand how appointment-making works…

 

Last week, I had an appointment to talk to the finance officer regarding the amount of money I am entitled to next year. I’m pretty worried about how I’m going to survive next year with rising rent costs and having to see my £37-a-session therapist every week. I had a panic attack one day, then decided to email the woman I usually talked to at the welfare office. She didn’t suggest meeting, but passed on my desperate, I-don’t-know-what-to-DO-please-help-me email to the finance officer, who apparently was out of the office for another three days. O-K… I replied to her, cc-ing the finance officer, deciding I had to make some sort of link between the woman who listens to my depressed ravings and the Very Serious Money Man or else I wouldn’t be taken seriously. Needless to say, I was feeling a little out of my depth. On the day Finance Guy returned to his office he sent me a short email telling me to phone his office to arrange an appointment. I was a bit confused… Had he even read my very long, snot-dribbling, tear-stained email? Had Welfare Woman told him I hate using the phone? I had to go to work the next day, so I used my coffee break to phone him from my mobile outside the shop. Not ideal, I hate talking to official people, I hate using the phone and I hate using the phone in public but sometimes (as the Official People annoyingly point out) needs must… I gritted my teeth.

 

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked as soon as I got through to him. Again, confusion. He had my email presumably sitting in his inbox right in front of him, detailing exactly what my problem was. I awkwardly explained my worries again, glaring at any passers-by who could hear. We arranged an appointment for two days time (which was then Thursday at 11am). ‘I’ll just pencil you in,’ he said. So, silly me, I assumed he wrote things like this down…

 

Thanks to the massively helpful once-an-hour-in-the-holidays uni busses, I arrived at campus 50 minutes early on the Thursday and passed the time sitting in the library, feeling horribly nervous. The last time I had spoken to this guy, I had burst into tears because I felt so uncomfortable talking about my problems. I have no idea how student finance works, really, and I thought that he, the financial officer, might be able to help a tad. That time, he hadn’t suggested much and had looked suitably ‘Oh-dear-a-crying-girl’ awkward… I looked at the clock and felt sick. Five to eleven. Then I decided I was tired of feeling sick and downtrodden by uni, and did a Wonder Woman turnaround. I decided I was going to pick up all the courage I had, get in that office and demand the help I needed. I wasn’t going to take any shrugged shoulders, any ‘I don’t know what I can do’s. He was paid to do a job, I was paying to be at uni. I had the upper hand! I could do this!

 

I marched into the welfare building and went to his office. The sign on the door said ‘Closed’. ‘He must have forgotten to change it,’ I thought, foolishly. I knocked. No answer. I tried the handle. Locked. A woman walked out of the office next door. 

 

‘Can I help you?’

 

‘I’m looking for Finance Guy,’ I mumbled, Wonder Woman disappearing.

 

She gave me a look like I’d actually said ‘Finance Guy’ and not Finance Guy’s name. ‘He’s at the Open Day all day today.’

 

There was a silence, like she expected me to slap my head and go ‘Of course. The Open Day!’ I didn’t, I just stared at her.

 

‘We had an appointment scheduled for today at 11,’ I said.

 

More silence. Then finally, as she realised I wasn’t going to turn tail and leave, she suggested I go and look for him (!!) and that ‘he might come back here for you, but I don’t know.’ I was incredulous. Do the words ‘scheduled appointment’ not mean anything at all?

 

Feeling like an idiot, I went and looked, but the building she suggested I look for him in was swarming with prospective students and parents and I didn’t feel anywhere near brave enough to set foot inside. (My friend later said I should’ve stormed right in and made a big fuss in front of everyone about how rubbish the university is and made them all go elsewhere!) Eventually, I decided to go back and wait in the welfare building in the small hope that he might come back. At 11:15, my friend walked in and I finally decided he wasn’t coming. We went off to have a Diet Coke and a rant in the canteen.

 

The next day I sent a very restrained email to him expressing confusion. His reply? ‘Sorry, we must have just missed each other’… I honestly didn’t know what to say.

 

 

 

 

4th jog

I went for the fourth jog last night and my muscles were hurting a bit, but I still did it. I felt very tired on coming home, though, and have decided to take today off, and do today’s run on the rest day, tomorrow.

Effect on my mental health:

So far, the affect has been negligible, oddly. Perhaps I haven’t done enough time-wise to get to the buzzy stage, although I have felt good after the runs and I’ve felt good about my committment to it. I’ve also enjoyed the actual running. Despite this, I’ve been feeling very low and have had some suicidal thoughts, although that’s hardly rare - I have them most days. I think while I feel liberated by the running, I feel trapped by my eating, which has always been a problem for me. Eating is just so complicated and surrounded by emotion it’s like trying to find sense in a Daily Mail article.

At the moment I’ve got the night to myself as S (my boyfriend) is going out to the pub with a friend. I’m trying desperately to work out in my head what to buy for dinner. I’ve already overeaten several times today, and feel pretty dreadful, but I know I’ll be hungry again in the evening. Part of me just wants to have something bingey that I know I will feel bad about, but it’ll mean that for at least a short time I’ll feel good. Part of me wants to eat nothing at all, as if that could ever be some kind of answer.

I always wondered about the different ways people deal with addiction. Cigarettes, alcohol, drugs - to give them up you have to give them up forever. But food? You have to reconnect with your actual hunger and somehow live by it. It’s a nightmarish task. Imagine asking an alcoholic to make sure they drank just three small glasses a day. Or a junkie to have 3 small hits, and 2 spliffs, but nothing else. I know Susie Orbach’s methods are the right way to eat, but I feel like I’m just too messed up to manage them - my eating habits are so f***ed that I would have to give up my job, my life, and concentrate on nothing but resolving my eating for months and months and maybe even years before I could eat properly again. It doesn’t seem a fair choice.

Anyway, sorry for being all depressive today! New Battlestar Galactica is out tonight, so I am looking forward to that. I’ve also recently done a poll with some friends about body size and the psychology around that, so I’ll be sharing that in another article soon. Hope you all have great weekends

 

3rd jog

Just got back from my third jog, and it all went well. I think at the moment a combination of my enthusiasm starting a new thing combined with it being a fairly short distance has meant that I’m confident and committed. Watch all that change on Sunday for the 25 minuter!

I remembered a fact earlier, by the way, that I thought I’d share with you all. Do you ever get fed up of hearing about men being ‘better’ at sport - faster, stronger, etc.? It annoys me, anyway. One debate has been raging, however, which women may well win:

Are women better than men at long distance running?

Now this hasn’t been proved completely, yet, but more and more evidence is coming forward to show that women’s endurance is higher than that of their male competitors. Women have also had a very late start - we were only allowed to compete in marathons in the 1980s, due to the belief that women didn’t have the endurance capability. By the 90s, people were already raising eyebrows at just how good women were. So we’ve gone from ‘not having the capability’ to ‘possibly having a better capability’ in less than twenty years? I’m intrigued.

For anyone who’s interested in this, here are a few articles on the topic.

Are Women Catching Up With Men?

Ask the running doc: Will women someday beat men in the marathon?

 

2nd jog

I went on the second jog earlier. It went fine. My motivation is obviously still fairly high as I’m quite enjoying the exercise. And because I have to write about it. I couldn’t face going into the office today, though. My anxieties get really bad at work - when I get home in the afternoon and shut the front door I feel a real sense of relief. The stress surrounding the job really gets to me, and the people are quite inpenetrable.

On my first day I was in two of my male colleagues discussed getting a stripper to come into the office as it was another male colleague’s birthday. I felt very uncomfortable with this, and, after twenty minutes of trying to work out what I should do in an office where I had no authority, I emailed a fairly friendly seeming female colleague, and told her I would leave the building when the stripper arrived, and asked if she wouldn’t mind texting or calling me on my mobile phone once she had left. She wrote back saying that it was unlikely they’d get anything organised, and in the end they didn’t, and just went to the pub.

I felt totally helpless to voice the problems I had with their behaviour, however, and spent most of my time in the first weeks of my job trying to work out just what sort of an organisation I was working for. Part of their remit is working with women’s rights groups in Africa. Yet they thought it was acceptable to bring a British stripper into the workplace, a woman who was statistically likely to have suffered sexual abuse in childhood, not to mention the concept of professionalism. Even now, several months into the job, sexist comments are regularly made in the office, and no women sit on the senior board, despite the fact that almost all administrators and lower level positions are held by women. I find the office an incredibly uncomfortable place to be in due to this, and due to the fact that despite my having asked on numerous occasions, they still haven’t got a contract for me to sign, to say I legally work there. This makes me even more reluctant to say anything, as if I am sacked I will not be able to prove I even worked there. It won’t be forever, though, only till the end of August, when my course at uni finishes and my partner and I will move back to London.

It’s opened my eyes a lot to the endemic sexism experienced by so many people in so many organisations. I hope you lot have better luck with work!