Tag: Holidays

Reset

The virtual shouting stops on the boat. My compulsion to check the noise evaporates with the loss of signal, the lack of Wi-Fi.  Once the grey green water of the harbour becomes ocean, the colour of a newborn’s eyes. A colour that holds the answers to everything.

When we arrive two hours later the blue changes again. Transparent and vibrant like blue heaven jelly. A giant bowl of it. Viewed from above the sharks and turtles and rays could be gummi lollies, if they weren’t moving. If they hadn’t been moving through these waters for thousands of years. Long before we came with all the awkward gear that allows us to breathe under water.

One of the first days. On the five-minute boat trip to the outer reef. We squint. It looks like a flipper, just piercing the glassy water in the distance. A dolphin? We draw closer. Engine cut. And there – barely below the surface, four metres of magnificence, mouth parts welcoming plankton. Silver, grey, black, and white – a giant silk handkerchief shimmering in the sun, billowing on the tide. A manta ray, gracing us with a moment of awe.

On another day it is dolphins, close enough to see their skin shining in the sunlight with each arc above the water.

Snorkelling off the beach. Impossibly sleek reef sharks glide close. Black and white tipped. Small eyed. Large nosed. Clown fish dart in and out of their protective anemones. Symbiosis. Ears submerged I hear parrot fish crunching coral. Their jewel tones on steroids and perfect fin flaps almost make even me believe in a god.

I hover clumsily next to unperturbed turtles. They breakfast while my breath moves noisily through my snorkel.  Blank black eyes focussed on each mouthful of sea grass or coral. The patterns on their heads and shells are intricate as fingerprints. Neck skin concertinaed in wrinkles. And when one glides off unhurried, I flap along beside her, eager to witness her surface for breath.

Each evening the birds return to the island. Hundreds and hundreds fly in on the sunset as it paints a golden red carpet on the water. I could walk into forever on it. In thirty seconds, a minute at most, as a reminder that the earth still turns, the last of the sun slips into the sea like a burning coin.

In between snorkels I read. Paper and ink books. Several.

For a week, whenever I close my eyes, fish, coral, sea stars, sea cucumbers, velvety clam lips, swirling fish, play on the inside of my eyelids. I didn’t take a camera into the water with me this time. Too distracting. I take my eyelid footage with me instead.

The release from screen suction untethers me from the endless frenetic opinions and largely meaningless activity social media hurls into my brain. This passively acquired ‘content’ vacuums up my time and energy and adds nothing to my life.

I arrive home. Feelings mixed. I could have stayed and stayed. I am also relieved. The tension of possibly forgetting either or both of the two separately packed sets of medication I travel with releases. The fear of my Bipolar disorder wrecking our holiday evaporates. Because it didn’t happen. This time. It doesn’t have a good track record for respecting holidays.

I love being removed from the rest of the world. But there is a flip side. Travelling somewhere remote with no access to doctors, pharmacists and no means of contacting them, means I travel with an undercurrent of fear. The potential of having especially a psychotic episode when cut off from all of the support I need to treat it, fills me with horror.

My re-entry into signal, Wi-Fi, and responsibilities is an opportunity for a reset. Pruning and muting the unnecessary followings. Being a bit more mindful about the world my phone dumps into my head when I pick it up. Reading paper and ink books at bedtime…

And when things get hectic again – because they will – I will dip into one of my favourite pieces of footage from the time away:

On the last day. In the water. Just off the edge of the reef. Magic appears with the majestic passage of three mantas below us. Close enough for sunlight to make them shine and glisten with each leisurely flap of their wings. Impossible for anything else to exist in this bubble of time. They gradually dissolve into the deep and leave behind joy, a lifelong memory, and an elated expression on my daughter’s face.

Deciding To Hope

To hope or not to hope?

In one week my immediate family and I are leaving for a holiday on Heron Island. That was a difficult sentence to commit to. Not the sentence, just one word.

‘Are’

The certainty inherent in those three letters. Articulating it feels like I am going to jinx it, like I will alter the course of history, even though I know that’s impossible.

This is our third attempt at this holiday. The first was over Easter 2021. I almost needn’t follow that up with any explanation. To use a recently much reworked cliché -everyone was in the same boat…or in our case not in the boat bound for our holiday destination.

It was a time of global holiday cancellations. We were all still invigorated by the adrenaline of the early days of a pandemic many believed could be conquered and left behind.

We rebooked our holiday for Easter this year. But in a twist of acutely painful timing our city was locked down. Ironically only for 3 days. But they were the exact 3 days we were meant to travel to Heron Island.

By the time that little lockdown ended, everyone else was off to enjoy their Easter camping trips. We were left feeling slapped, as though we had been singled out by the universe to miss out on our holiday.

But we rebooked again. For next week. Knowing it might not eventuate this time either.

And about three weeks ago doom crept into the family. We began to censor ourselves and each other. Snapping ‘If it happens!’ if anyone dared mention anything to do with the holiday. We shot each other down with sarcasm and repressed feelings as though expressing any plans, hope or joy associated with this holiday would save us the disappointment if it had to be cancelled again.

So, just under three weeks ago our family decided – that instead of clenching everything, and white knuckling it through this will-we-wont-we time, we would allow ourselves to feel the joyful anticipation of this holiday.

We began to talk about what snacks we’d take on the car trip. What we were looking forward to most. We wondered if we would see clown fish. We started making packing lists.

Don’t misunderstand me. This is not about mindlessly Pollyanna-ing the reality we live in. All four of us are abundantly aware that things can look like they are going ahead one day only to have them snatched away in a minute.

While it is true that right now we have no control over whether our holidays or special events will be cancelled at the last minute – it is also true that we never did, we just weren’t as acutely aware of it.

But we can choose how we feel in the lead up to planned events. We can choose to anticipate disappointment or anticipate joy. Whether it ends up being disappointment or joy is almost irrelevant because it isn’t about the eventual outcome. It is about how we feel right now.

We can choose to scrunch ourselves into a ball of anxious negativity. But for what? Being able to say ‘See I told you it would be cancelled’ if it is cancelled? Like a sort of sick Schadenfreude directed at ourselves.

Or we can choose a more relaxed, positive attitude that coexists with the knowledge that it may be cancelled, but that the anticipation is pleasant. If the holiday goes ahead we will have had a much nicer lead up to it, than having to spend the first few days unclenching from the negativity.

If it doesn’t happen, we’ll be disappointed, but we won’t have wrecked the preceding few weeks with dread.

Choosing to have low expectations in an attempt to avoid disappointment is not only flawed, but in these times of immense uncertainty it doesn’t serve us well. It robs us of joy. The brave thing to do is hope in the face of uncertainty regardless of whether that hope ever grows into reality.

That said, I have two disclaimers for the hope approach.

The first is that the ability to conjure hope relies on reasonable mental health. Someone experiencing symptoms of mental illness, especially those featuring depression or anxiety will no more be able to think themselves into hope than a diabetic can think their blood glucose levels into the correct range. They will need the right treatment for them before hope can become a choice again.

The second is that if you are attempting this with children, they need to be old enough/emotionally mature enough to understand that the hope does not guarantee the holiday.

For today, everyone in my family is well enough to hope that by mid next week we will get to see those clown fish and soak in the endless blues of the sky and the ocean surrounding our tiny Island destination.

You may also like to check out:

On Uncertainty

Covid Year 2: Timing Your Perspective

Razor Blades In Mud: Laziness Or Depression?

Covid Year 2: Timing Your Perspective

Welcome to year 2.

The frantic newness of the pandemic has worn off, although the announcement of a lockdown still triggers an anxiety that (for some people) expresses itself in toilet paper hunger.

As we move into the second year of life with Covid I feel as though I am part of sick game of involuntary musical statues. During intervals of relative local stability we all dance to the music of few restrictions. But there is a sinister undertone – our movement can be stilled instantly when the Covid puppet master stops that music and we are all turned to stone for a while.

When Covid cancelled our family trip to Heron Island this time last year it was disappointing, but I countered it with perspective, a stiff upper lip. After all what was a lost holiday in the big scheme of things? So many people were worse off.

So, we rebooked the Heron Island trip for this year. We’d been due to leave on March 30. The anticipation of it had built joyously for the whole family. I was particularly looking forward to it. Our last family holiday in December was marred by the onset of a bipolar episode the day after we arrived that saw me unable to enjoy it and heralded more hospital time. 2020 Ends In Hospital

I am stable now.

Over the weekend two of us dutifully took Covid tests for minor sniffles, both of which returned negative with plenty of time to spare before our scheduled departure.

When I woke up on Monday morning, the day before we were due to leave, I actually thought we would make it. And then news of the 3 day Brisbane lockdown broke, and my joy turned to misery. Our household was plunged into mourning. There were tears, cries of shock, and lead filled stomachs as we processed this loss for a second year in a row.

Is my wording a bit dramatic?

Are you itching to respond with the catch cry of this first world country, the mantra of our year?

 ‘It’s ok because others have it worse than you.’

Does that make it ok?

Should this fact completely invalidate our experience or feelings? Does our disappointment, grief and anger have anything to do with someone else’s (potentially worse) experience?

No. It is totally unrelated.

 And often swallowing our feelings through gritted teeth can be unhealthier than just vomiting them out and moving on.

I first encountered the results of suppressing my emotions because ‘others had it worse’ the night before my daughter’s first birthday, thirteen years ago.

The condensed version of the time surrounding her birth (if you haven’t already read about it in some of my other posts) is this: A 32 hour labour on 2 hours sleep, developing postnatal psychosis 7 days later, a month later catatonic depression, months in a psychiatric hospital, electroconvulsive therapy and much medication, and finally home by the time my baby was 4 months old.

As I recovered, I practiced a lot of gratitude for my healthy baby, which in itself is not a problem, but I had not allowed myself to process my feelings about that time before I plunged into gratitude.

The night before her first birthday I was out to dinner with friends. I could not stop thinking about what had been about to happen to me the year before. On the way home I pulled into the maternity hospital car park and lost it.

I wailed, tears and snot streaming down my face. It was ugly. But I finally owned my grief, and silenced the pernicious little voice in my head that had been telling me that I had no right to my feelings because I had a healthy baby and  ‘others had it so much worse’.

It was only once I’d allowed myself to feel my feelings that I could move on baggage free and feel genuine empathy for those who, in the big scheme of things, had experienced worse.

I am not naturally inclined to drama. I am all for perspective. At times I have been quick to paper over my children’s strong emotions with perspective, not because it is helpful to them in the moment, but because it lessens my discomfort at their distress.

Perspective serves an important purpose. If it is timed right. Once the initial urgent feelings have been dealt with and released, perspective can help us move on with our compassion for others intact. But forcing it too soon can trap us in resentment and on the exhausting hamster wheel of pretending we’re ok, when we’re not.

 Perspective (however well intentioned) would have been an unwelcome guest in our house just after the news of the holiday cancellation broke. However, 2 days later it had just started to soothe me with the knowledge that it could indeed have been much worse.

Proof that this could have been much worse came just now. The Brisbane lockdown ends at noon today. Covid has pressed play again. Brisbane people get to dance into their Easter holidays.

For me? Right now? Perspective has again momentarily retreated.

Excuse me while I go away and vomit up my feelings about the military precision with which our holiday was assassinated. We were turned to stone over the exact two days when we needed to be dancing.

I will welcome perspective back once I have emptied myself of this minor resentment and am keeping everything crossed, that maybe the music won’t be stopped on our third rebooking in September.

You may also like to check out:

Making Sense Of It (introduces the concept of a ‘tantrum allowance’)

Covid Lockdown In A Psychiatric Hospital

When Covid-19 And Bipolar Recovery Collide With Unexpected Results

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