Tag: Mental Health

Dancing With Lithium

Prague 2002 – years before Lithium entered the chat

I remember the first time I became aware of Lithium. Not the battery kind. Lithium carbonate, the gold standard treatment for bipolar disorder. Especially bipolar 1 disorder. It was before I had a definitive diagnosis. In the murky months after I was introduced to mental illness by postnatal psychosis. 

My psychiatrist had said from the beginning that I could have an underlying bipolar disorder, had mentioned Lithium. I rejected this potential differential diagnosis.  

We never got as far as Lithium that first time. I was sucked into a rebound depression that spread from dullness to catatonic in days. It was the necrotising fasciitis of psychiatry. It needed more than pills to stop it. A course of 12 electroconvulsive therapy treatments recovered me to the point of being able to go home with my then four-month-old baby.

I fully recovered.

18 months later I gradually came off all my medications and was fine. I risked smugness. So much for an underlying bipolar disorder. My psychiatrist reminded me patiently that I would have to be symptom free for 3-5 years to rule out bipolar disorder more definitively.

I didn’t make it to 5 years. I got sick again with my second (and last) baby 2 years later, and went on to have classic bipolar 1 episodes every 2-3 years.

By the time my psychiatrist suggested Lithium again, I was in the throes of psychosis, delusional and still in the stage of lacking insight common to early episodes of severe mental illness.

I laughed.

‘I’m not sick enough to need Lithium.’

I was convinced I was being offered it as a test, and that to pass the test, I needed to refuse to take it.

Eventually the trust in my psychiatrist penetrated the delusions, and I was persuaded.

It came with warnings. Stay hydrated. It can give you a metallic taste in the mouth. We need to monitor your kidneys, and thyroid, and most importantly blood Lithium levels. Too high and you risk Lithium toxicity, which can be fatal.

The list of potential side effects is long…like for paracetamol. I weighed them against the potential benefits, which included reducing the severity and frequency of my symptoms. Each bipolar episode had left me sifting the ashes of myself through once capable fingers. I was tired of working hard to re-establish my life only to be levelled again and again.

It’s been fifteen years since I tentatively welcomed my first dose of Lithium into my body. It’s not a cure. It is not solely responsible for reducing symptoms. It is a main character in my cast of management tools. I still get sick enough for hospital every couple of years, but not as severely and not for as long.

Lithium steadies me. It leads when I am the autumn leaf, caught in the whirlwind of my special brain chemistry, crunchy and fragile under life’s boot. It steps back when I settle, just a steady presence, swallowed twice daily. Solid ground in the house of my life. I don’t think about where I’d be without it.

It hasn’t asked for too much in return…so far…

Fine, intermittent hand tremors wobble my liquid eye liner. I could no longer perform surgery… if I still worked as a vet.

My thyroid function is compromised. Thyroxine is an easy fix… Even my endocrinologist agrees it is easier to supplement the thyroid than to attempt my life without Lithium.

Individual responses to Lithium like so many psychiatric medications are variable and fickle. I know someone who almost died of Lithium toxicity, many with impaired thyroid function, others whose kidney function meant they weren’t compatible with lithium, or it just didn’t work for them. It’s not for everyone.

My Lithium levels have always been where they should be. I don’t take that for granted.

But then came Thursday last week, and the unwelcome news of elevated Lithium levels. Not rush me off to hospital high, but high enough to have my psychiatrist and I contemplate the house of cards that is my medication regime.

Neither of us like this. We know from experience that even a gentle tug of one card can send my next several months toppling around my ears. So, we agreed to an almost microscopic reduction in my Lithium dose, hoping to bring the levels down without angering my brain into symptom mode. We’ll recheck levels in a month.

My dance with Lithium has been one of many things that have gifted me a beautiful quality of life. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Lithium

World Bipolar Day (WBD) 2025

CW: minor mention of severe bipolar 1 disorder symptoms – no detail

It is World Bipolar Day again. Some years I’ve celebrated and advocated. Others I’ve greeted the day with anger. Others again it has barely registered.

I first became aware of WBD around 2018, the beginning of Thought Food and my training as a peer ambassador with SANE. The beginning of my mental health advocacy era. Over years I have poured thousands of words borne of my lived experience and opinions about this illness into Thought Food. Some perhaps a little naive, but they felt right at the time.

For the last year or so I have had nothing new to say about this slippery illness whose symptoms and response to treatments vary from patient to patient.

But my algorithm made it impossible to forget that WBD is today, and I didn’t feel averse to a spot of writing. So here we are.

My bipolar disorder keeps me humble.

It reminds me I can’t shove myself through brick walls driven by ego and will, the way I did before it joined me.

How do I feel about living with it?

I won’t sugar coat it. My last hospital admission was 6 months ago. Except for a brief period off medication between having my two children, I have been medicated – some would say heavily, but it’s all relative – for 18 years. My thyroid gland has malfunctioned on some of the bipolar medication. Brain trumps thyroid. So, I take thyroid medication to negate the effects of that bipolar medication. I have regular blood tests to monitor other organ systems for compromise from the bipolar medications. If my kidneys take a hit, I will have some big decisions to make. My lifespan is likely to be 10-15 years shorter than the general population courtesy of bipolar 1 disorder, a little less if I manage to dodge suicide.

If this sounds bleak – read on. It’s not all bad.

When I am not symptomatic, which is most of the time, my quality of life sits between good and excellent. I am psychologically healthier than most people I know who don’t live with mental illness. I have worked to get my relationships into good shape. I don’t tolerate toxicity or a lack of self-awareness in those relationships.

I know how much energy I have and where I want to put it, always. Exercise is non negotiable for my health, so I do it and reap the endorphins. For me the idea that bipolar medications stifle creativity is a myth. I fully enjoy my creativity when my brain has been unscrambled by my medication. I am not particularly worried about possibly living for less time because I have the tools to make whatever time I do have great.

In the beginning bipolar 1 disorder threw everything it had at me. Horrifying psychotic episodes, unstoppable mania, catatonic depressive episodes that only responded to electroconvulsive therapy, and suicidal ideations.

I can’t predict what it will challenge me with next, but I have learnt that developing insight into my specific symptom patterns and responding quickly to recognising those patterns when they occur, rather than denying they are happening – as I did in the early years – is key to avoiding the worst ends of the bipolar spectrum.

Early intervention for each episode is crucial. For me that usually means hospital admission to monitor symptoms and adjust medication as needed. My early hospital admissions were often months long. My most recent admission was two weeks.

Now for a bit of advocacy.

If you know someone newly or not so newly diagnosed with bipolar disorder, give them patience. It takes appropriate treatment and support from loved ones to gain initial stability.  

In the long term, it also takes hard work and time for the person living with this illness to secure two of the most important contributors to well managed bipolar disorder:   

The insight and acceptance to allow them to live with respect for this illness and the space it will occupy in them for the rest of their lives.

Stone Cold Sane

CW: Sanism, recent news cycle, mention of violence

It’s been nearly a week and I have intentionally held my horses and my tongue.

The news cycle has generated a flurry of hot takes on the horrific events at a Sydney shopping centre last weekend. It stumbled many times in its race for the truth and now appears to have moved on to fresher fodder. 

This week included a first for me. I have wished for a bipolar disorder flare up severe enough to render me unaware of the above-mentioned news cycle.  I have craved the security of being in hospital. Usually when I long for the hospital, I am too unwell to be at home.

Right now? I am stone cold sane.

I imagine anyone with a pulse, access to the news, and a shred of empathy has been devastated by the deaths, injuries and trauma that stained last Saturday afternoon. Me too.

I’ve also wished I could find comfort in plunging my head into the sand. However, for now, I am well enough to find that prospect more unbearable than having word projectiles launched at me.

It is easy for me to sink into the comfortable feather bed of my friends, family, and acquaintances who are supportive, who don’t other me, who see all of me. It is easy to feel complacent, to believe that yes things are getting better out there, that we are reducing stigma surrounding mental illness. But things are not getting better when psychosis is in the picture.

The minute the media spewed out the words ‘mental health issues’ and ‘schizophrenia’ in relation to the knife attacks, I braced myself for what was to come. And it came alright. Those words lit a match to the petrol-soaked kindling held by people paddling around in all of the news outlet and social media comments sections.

If you haven’t lived with what I have, you might think – ‘Don’t read the comments. They are rubbish.’

Yes. But they are also a barometer and thermometer. And if you are someone who walks through the world with a severe mental illness, knowing the temperature and pressure of your surroundings matters.

We all come at the comments sections from the launch pads of our life experience.

As someone who has lived experience of postnatal psychosis and lives with well managed bipolar disorder, here is a snapshot of where I come from:

My experiences of psychosis have been the most terrifying of my life. I have dry retched and screamed with fear in the middle of them. And I have been safe and receiving the best care when they have happened.

I can’t imagine how I would have survived, let alone felt, if I had been experiencing this awful symptom, without care and treatment, while homeless, in the throes of addiction, or without the privilege I live with. If I were still alive, I don’t know what path I’d be on.

Over the last 17 years I have written and talked about not only my experiences but the failures of the public mental health system that are at least partially responsible for thousands of people having a poor quality of life when they don’t need to. I have pointed out many times that these failures almost always contribute when tragedy is the last stop on the derailed train of a poorly managed or unmanaged severe mental illness.

I have gone on ad nauseum about stigma surrounding severe mental illness, and the barrier it forms between people who need good care and their ability to access it.

And I am far from the only one writing and talking about it. Yet here we are.

Here I am feeling punched in the gut by two words that popped up frequently in the comments sections this week. One of my most hated pejoratives used to be ‘psycho bitch’. This week ‘psycho bitch’ was toppled by ‘these people’.

‘These people’ is less in your face than ‘psycho bitch’ – but more sinister. Where ‘psycho bitch’ is aggressive, ‘these people’ drips with contempt. ‘These people’ can be applied to any demographic the speaker or writer has a problem with. When I read ‘these people’. I picture the words tripping out of the mouths of people like Pauline Hanson, Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump,

To clarify, this week ‘these people’ in the comments sections was not a descriptor of knife wielding mass murderers. ‘These people’ referred to people – like me – who live with severe mental illness.

And the gist of the recommendations for ‘these people’ was that we should ‘be rounded up and locked away, or burn in hell’ and that we are like ‘vicious dogs who should not be let out in the community.’

While these sentiments frustrate and sicken me, I am not worried about me. I have an accurate diagnosis, access to good care, insight, and know how to look after myself.

I worry about people who are having a first or early experience with symptoms of a severe mental illness, who read this poison when they are alone, who soak it up and believe it to be the truth. This stigmatising language is enough to stop someone who is new to this, or entrenched in a stigma spiral, getting the help they need. This is particularly disheartening knowing that early interventions, especially when it comes to psychosis, give the best outcomes.

Most people who don’t get the help they need will never hurt anyone else, but they are at risk of having a poor quality of life, or not surviving their illness.

And anyone who includes stigmatising language in their vocabulary actively contributes to this cycle of suffering.

Last Saturday’s perpetrator may have been a misogynistic arsehole, capable of violence, regardless of his history of a mental illness.

Or his actions may have resulted wholly from unmanaged or poorly managed long term mental illness featuring psychosis and little help from the public mental health system.

Or it might have been a combination of both.

Most of us will never know.

So, do we need to?

I used to think so.

I used to think that the more detail in reports about a perpetrator’s mental ill health and areas where the mental health system had potentially failed them, the more the public would understand.

But I no longer believe there is any benefit in feeding a baying-for- blood public, click baity snippets or even more detailed information that they don’t appear to have the experience, compassion, or education to process rationally and fairly.

Consistent bad reporting on mental illness and its repercussions hurts vulnerable people. We may as well slide back into that dangerous fertiliser for stigma – silence.

You can report media coverage that stigmatises mental ill health at stigma watch here: https://www.sane.org/get-involved/advocacy/stigmawatch

For further reading about complex mental health conditions and stigma I strongly recommend journalist and author Elfy Scott’s book:

The one thing we’ve never spoken about: Exposing Our Untold Mental Health Crisis

You can find this book here: https://www.elfyscott.com/book

Elfy also wrote this excellent article for Crikey during the week, which I contributed a small quote to: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/04/17/bondi-junction-killer-schizophrenia-mental-health-reporting/

I have written several posts about media reporting and stigma surrounding complex mental ill health over the years. Here are some that you might like to check out:

Media-Made Monsters

Lies Of Omission: What You’re Never Told

Mind Your Language Katy Perry

Guilty Of Postnatal Psychosis

Mental Illness And Humour

Surviving On Snippets Of Hope

I know people who don’t consume the news anymore. Others avidly click, swipe, and share and demand the shares be shared and that donations be made.

A sense of needing to ‘do something’ beats like a heart behind our screens.

Some say the carnage and its causes are complex. Others claim it couldn’t be simpler. Meanwhile, powerful, malevolent toddlers masquerading as leaders extinguish lives with their belligerent tantrums. This kind of hellish tit for tat has been going on all over the planet for aeons. There’s nothing new about our news.

The atrocities we were clicking and swiping and enthusiastically sharing and donating to a year or two ago, are far from over.  This trauma has not stopped. It’s just not as fresh as what we are fed from further south right now.

While my bipolar disorder sleeps, I choose to neither soak myself in headlines nor bury my head in our (increasingly hot) sand.

I have always struggled to understand warring over a homeland, because (regardless of my genetics, birthplace, or heritage) I don’t identify as belonging to a country or a people. I was taught to be a chameleon, a grateful visitor wherever I go. It has been drilled into the DNA of my family who moved around a lot, who has flight in its history, whose ancestors have done their best not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I don’t believe humanity has quite enough humanity to ever achieve world peace. If we had the capacity to resolve conflict without collateral civilian casualties, we’d have done so a long time ago.

Our individual lack of control over global catastrophes and atrocities can feel depressing. But we can each control how we react to our feelings. Providing we are not experiencing a severe episode of clinical depression, we can feed our sense of hope by turning a microscope on our own lives and surroundings.

Good stories play out near us all the time. I witnessed one on holidays at the beach recently:

A not so gentle day. Dumping waves boiled the water. One after the other. If you got caught up in one of those you became an ingredient in a soup of flailing limbs. A bit closer to the shore we laughed and played in the sea foam bubble bath, eyes always on the incoming, legs resisting the drag out into the angry ocean.

Then to my right a little girl, five or six, began to cry. The wash after a wave swallowed her and spat her back up like an acorn. Spluttering, she looked wildly about. I assumed the woman near her was her grandmother. She scooped up the crying girl and pointed to some other adults nearby. The girl shook her head, sobbed red faced, hair plastered to her head.  I just caught the older woman’s words above the rush of water.

‘Can you point to your mummy or daddy darling?’

The girl was crying too hard for speech, too hard to point. This was not her grandmother.

Yet she positioned the girl on one wide hip and purposefully strode away from danger. Finally, where the waves petered out onto the sand, the girl’s father appeared, and a narrative that could have played out so badly, ended well.

While the brutality of the news can suck the happiness out of our heads, good things still exist. And they don’t need to be stories. Simple snippets suffice:

Taking refuge from a storm in a second hand book shop.

 Sleeping cats.

A tidy bedroom and a good book.

The sound of cicadas.

Wildlife visitors.

Converting ingredients into a meal.

Having a kitchen to cook in.

A warm hand to hold walking in the summer breeze.

A rainbow, thunder, and lightning occupying the sky all at once.

The clink of ice cubes against a condensation beaded glass, and the first sip.

Clean pyjamas after an evening shower.

Children growing into themselves.

Free will and choice…

When I disengage from my screens for long enough to look around me, snippets appear everywhere.

I have at times been guilty of outrage in response to what my screens feed me.

But, for me, outrage on its own achieves little. It is hot air shouted into a furnace. And it is a luxury I can’t afford or sustain, because ongoing outrage can convert into powerful fuel for a bipolar episode.

On the other hand, deciding to tend the happiness in my own backyard builds the strength to do meaningful things for myself and the wider world.

PS: If you are clinically mentally unwell, then the suggestions in this post to focus on the positives around you apply only if you are well enough to do so. Symptoms of severe mental illness, especially clinical depression, can make it impossible to focus on the positives without more targeted treatments, such as psychological or medical therapies.

For me, a sign that I need more support than the power of positive thought is when I find it impossible to focus on the positive, and guilt and negative self-talk set in, because I’ve failed to appreciate the positive.

Lastly, if I were currently experiencing a bipolar episode I would not consume any news, and would focus solely on recovery.

You may also like:

Gentle Shoots Of Hope

Deciding To Hope

Unapologetically Fifty

How to mark turning fifty? For me? Two ways.

First, I sought solitude.

A weekend away with myself, books, writing implements, a beach, and the ticking of a clock in absolute silence (a sound I love in a way no one else in my family does). –

I relished the feel of sand moulding itself to the arches of my feet and the rush of eternal waves onto the almost empty beach. I ran into the bracing water, and it yanked the breath from my lungs. But once I’d dived in, I adjusted quickly to the foaming, swirling rush of it. The plunge through the waves – like moving through liquid glass. And I was alone. Gloriously so.

I could have stayed longer, happily cocooned in my own company.  But I came away with a handful of seashells and some jottings about what fifty means for me.

To date I have hungrily embraced each new decade, and I am not bothered by being midlife (if I live a long one). But I wince at some of the connotations the world cloaks this age in.

I grimace at ads for ‘Fit over fifty’ exercise classes and independent living communities for fifty plus people. I am not ready to go gently into ‘age appropriate’ exercise or towards ‘communities’ of over fifties who wander aimlessly through their last decades. And the prospect of fifty rendering me eligible to enter the geriatric wing of the hospital whenever the next bipolar episode strikes, feels horrific.

My view of fifty?

I am grateful for a body that works well most of the time and that exercise has been a part of my life for long enough for me to know what gets my endorphins going. I have no idea what I weigh, and providing my size doesn’t interfere with my ability to exercise I don’t care.

 Small age spots have bloomed on the top of my right hand, where sun hits skin when I drive. A recent selfie captured some crepey skin around my neck. And surprise jolts me when I look at it because I don’t feel old enough to have this skin. But I move on. Same with my wrinkles. I don’t necessarily love them, but I love them enough to spend money on books, chocolate, and clothes that fit well rather than on Botox.

I am not into anti-aging products and procedures. Not because I don’t care at all about my appearance.  A pretty dress and a good lipstick wrap me in joy when I choose them. But so far, I haven’t turned ‘stopping the visible signs of aging’ into a full-time job I’d be paying money to do.

For me, pregnancy and childbirth did not leave behind stretch marks, varicosities, or cellulite, and my pelvic floor is in great shape. Instead, they triggered my bipolar 1 disorder, which I’d happily trade for some stretch marks.

I don’t worship at the altar of motherhood or martyr myself for it. And I don’t believe in fetishising motherhood into it being the most important, meaningful thing a woman can do. I love my children with a heart squeezing intensity. But that love doesn’t erase the sucking-you-dry-if-you-let-it aspect of mothering.

As for wisdom?

I don’t believe people automatically acquire wisdom with age. If you don’t work for it, you just end up being an older person whose beliefs and opinions calcify into tired well-trodden paths that lack nuance and become almost impossible to break free from.

Some of my rotten patterns have taken decades to unlearn again and again.

I was a perfectly formed perfectionist even before I entered a profession in which the stakes of mistakes are high, and perfectionism is rife and revered. I marinated (quite happily) in the culture of veterinary practice for twenty years. But it has taken a long time to view my perfectionism as deleterious to my mental health rather than as an asset to my career.

I have only recently loosened the white knuckled clench I’ve had on the course of my life and (mostly) relinquished a poisonous, deeply learnt, inbred need for control.

For me, perfectionism and control come with rigidity, and judgement. And while understanding the concept of letting these things go is easy. The work to do it is hard, boring, and ongoing. At times I still slip back into all of them like pairs of comfortable slippers.

The endless pressure to achieve has now mostly evaporated. In its place I recognise that I have more to learn than I ever have and a sense that whatever is next matters.

I have flung open the window toward fifty now and am ready to see what possibilities lie beyond this age for me.

And my birthday wish? That if I put in the work, my words will keep coming.

PS: My second way to mark fifty involves great company and cake. A lot of cake.

You may also like: Birthday Conversations

Accepting The Unacceptable

It has taken well over a decade.

In the beginning ours was an abusive relationship. Bipolar 1 Disorder entered my world by clubbing me over the head and dragging me away from myself and my life. There was no informed consent. No polite knocking at my door and asking ‘Are you ok with this invasion? Are you ok with me setting up camp in your head for the rest of your life?’

That first time, it committed horrendous crimes. It stole my most prized possession. All my control. It obliterated my reality, snatched me away from my husband and baby, sped me up and then poured concrete over me. I was convinced it would kill me…

But it didn’t.

When I finally kicked and screamed my way free, I sat panting on the other side of it, scraping all remnants of it out of my brain and off my skin, I vowed never to let anything do that to me again. This was the first and last time. I knew better now.

I knew nothing.

When my doctor told me it was unlikely that this would be my last encounter with it, I nodded but didn’t believe him.

It came, not immediately but in roughly two-year intervals again and again and again. When the early signs of those first recurrences nudged and poked and then slapped me in the face, I turned my back and raged ‘No, no , no this can’t be happening again!’

My denial fed the power it had over me to super levels.

I tried to fight it with sheer will and my bare hands grabbing at the invisibility of it. It laughed and continued to snatch my sanity, drop kicking me into hospital sometimes for months at a time.

In the face of this illness my denial was a house built of dandelion seeds.

Eventually a sliver of acceptance crept in. But only while I was sick. The moment I regained myself after each episode, I ran back into the arms of my previous life. Working and doing and being who I was before all of this. Driven by a need to prove to the world: ‘See I live with this illness and can still do it all!’

I can…but there is a cost.

In 2015 it broke me. It locked me in a torture chamber and made it clear that it was going nowhere. I sped into a brick wall, lost my reality, lost my living brain, had to have it shocked back into a feeble beginning again and again.

I limped away finally understanding that we were shackled together for the rest of my life.

I told my psychiatrist: ‘I don’t know what to do, I can’t keep doing this!’

He paused, then said:

‘Perhaps you have to learn to take this illness as seriously when you are well as when you are unwell.’

He was right.

By then I had learnt to pay lip service to my management of this illness when I was well by diligently taking my medication, living relatively healthily, taking care of sleep etc, But I had not mentally accepted that I live with Bipolar 1 Disorder every day, whether I am well or not.  I had made the easy, obvious choices, the choices that have become second nature, like exercising and taking my medications.

But it has taken much longer and been harder to make the longer-term decisions that are just as much a part of looking after myself.  Decisions like how to work and what is worth pursuing and weighing up the price I might pay for stress. Things I had the luxury of never considering before.

Fighting acceptance hasn’t served me well. Denial can damage me easily as much as the illness itself.

I have learnt acceptance is not giving up. Acceptance also doesn’t mean that the next time I get sick I will feel nothing but saintly calm. The unfairness of being yanked away from my life with no notice will still sting and ache.

I no longer leave this disorder behind in the rear vision mirror after each episode. It stays in my peripheral vision. But, the less I fight it, the milder the rope burn from being tethered to it.

It doesn’t define who I am, but I no longer expend energy proving it is not part of me. Because it always will be.

You may also like to check out the following posts:

On Uncertainty

The Well Times

Making Sense Of It

Choosing A Husband

I have been told I am lucky to have my husband.

But I did not win him in a lottery.

Michael and I met in our last year of high school. We were friends for over a year before we started going out. I remember why my feelings for him inched across the border of just friends. He was sure of himself, but not arrogant. We never ran out of conversation. He made me laugh.

I kissed him at a service station one night after driving around for hours talking. He kissed me back. I carefully considered my options for another six weeks. And then I chose him over the dying dysfunctional dalliance that had occupied me for the previous couple of years. I chose him over two other Uni boys who had nervously asked me out. I chose him over staying single because I sensed I’d regret not giving us a chance.

For as long as I can remember I never wanted to get married or have children, and I told Michael this repeatedly in the early years of our relationship.

We may have started going out when we were young, but we chose not to shackle ourselves to each other just because it would have been easy. We consciously followed our own paths.

After university we lived at opposite ends of the country for a couple of years. A year of FIFO (Fly In Fly Out) during which Michael worked 28 days west of Mt Isa and flew to Adelaide (where I worked) for his 7 days off. It was hard, but not nearly as hard as the following year of him living in Brisbane and me living in Adelaide. The long distance nearly broke us.

It took those couple of years for me to unclench from my outdated determination never to marry, to recognise it would be my loss to say no to his quiet proposal on our sofa bed one aching night before he headed back to Brisbane from Adelaide.

I knew when I said yes that he was secure enough in himself for us to be co-pilots in life.

When we married eight years after we started going out, our eyes were wide open. He knew he wasn’t getting a wife who would have his pipe and slippers ready for him when he got home from work. And I was never blinded by a desperation to get married and procreate. So, I never set up the toxic precedent of taking on all the housework and mental load.

For the many years I worked in small animal veterinary practice he had dinner and a listening ear ready at the end of my long shifts. The patience, kindness, and strength he showed me in the first thirteen years of our relationship made me reconsider my stance on children. If he hadn’t, I would not have chosen to have any. We didn’t have our first child until six years into our marriage, after we’d travelled together, after we’d each established our careers.

Neither of us could have predicted that parenthood would bring so much more chaos than the usual amount a newborn brings with them into our carefully considered lives.

Some things you don’t get a choice in.

Neither of us chose the episode of Postnatal Psychosis that hit me on day seven, that landed me in the special care unit of a psychiatric hospital while he took our daughter home. And that was just the beginning. We are living the rest of our lives with my eventually diagnosed my Bipolar 1 Disorder.

When people hear about my experience of severe mental illness or even just when I don’t relate to being buried under our family’s mental load, some tell me I am lucky to have my husband, lucky he has stayed, lucky he is so supportive.

It’s patronising.

I am not Michael’s charity case, and he is not my carer. Him not leaving me doesn’t make him a saint or me lucky.

The survival of our marriage has nothing to do with luck. It has everything to do with making a good choice in each other, and doing the work when things are hard.

This ongoing informed decision making doesn’t confer immunity against a future break up on us, but it does mean we aren’t currently sleepwalking through our marriage or wallowing in decades of resentment borne of drifting along in an uncommunicative, stagnant comfort zone.

I am lucky in many aspects of my life, and I don’t take this for granted.

Among a lot of other luck – I am lucky my husband wasn’t chosen for me and that I am not in a relationship with someone who is violent or coercively controlling. I am lucky my fertility was good when I finally decided I wanted children.

 And yes, luck brought Michael and I into the same place at the same time.

But in the 32 years since then it is not luck but many conscious decisions that have led us from the right place at the right time to sharing our lives today.

Decisions

Your Mental Load = Your Responsibility

The mental load 2.0 : Airing your dirty dishes on socials

Where’s Your Comfort Zone?

Losing My Senses

I have never been so grateful to smell cat shit in my life.

But let’s add some context for that sentence.

A few weeks ago, I went out for a friend’s birthday dinner in a small, busy restaurant. Indoors, noisy. There was a lot of leaning in and speaking loudly to hear and be heard. Within a couple of hours, tongue bitten from sitting across from someone who told me they didn’t believe Covid vaccinations had been sufficiently tested for safety, I was ready for home.

Three days later tiny terrorists held me hostage in my room. I was tethered to my bed by sticky tissues and vicious spike proteins digging in to my respiratory tract. Sick, but not my usual sort of sick. I cancelled plans for the week ahead as Covid leapt through the family. And I marvelled at how easy it felt compared to cancelling things for a Bipolar hospital admission. In 2023 everyone can relate to Covid cancellations.

Prior to contracting Covid, the things I was most concerned about, should I be infected, were likely to be things of no concern to most people. I am grateful I don’t live with any type of immunocompromise or chronic respiratory condition. Neither does anyone in my family. And yet I have continued to wear a mask to the shops without caring what people think.

Because I am vulnerable to collateral Covid damage.

Anything that potentially interferes with my sleep or ability to exercise increases my risk of a Bipolar episode. Covid does both. Then there is long Covid. The stress of living with this nasty reality would skyrocket my risk of multiple Bipolar episodes. And then there is losing my senses of taste and smell. As someone who begins to feel depressed if these senses diminish with a cold, the prospect of potentially losing them long term or permanently was horrifying.

I imagine everyone values their senses differently. When it comes to reasons to breathe, I am someone for whom smelling is as important as oxygenation. I don’t mean I am someone who just appreciates nice perfume and the smell of freshly ground coffee – although I do.

I am also someone who knows the smell of my husband’s sternal notch, the dip between his collar bones at the base of his throat. It is an olfactory hug, a smell I could pick out of a line-up of other sternal notches.

I know the softest fur behind my kittens’ ears smells of butter and air. The smell of garlic sizzling in olive oil or a chocolate cake just ready to be taken out of the oven are pure dopamine hits for me.

So, when Covid blindfolded my sense of smell on day five, and in doing so kidnapped one of my greatest sources of joy and information, I panicked…enough to google how long this was likely to last. It can be as little as five days…but sometimes this black out lasts for 6-12 months or is permanent.

This loss of smell was not like the kind I’ve experienced with a head cold. It wasn’t associated with nasal congestion. My nose was clear and breathing air in a world apparently devoid of all scents and odours. I realised quickly that aside from the discombobulation and depression of living with no nose, there were practical difficulties. Sniffing potentially spoilt milk – nothing. Toast burning to charcoal – nothing. A rotting potato decomposing in a black pool of noxious liquid at the back of the potato storage drawer – totally undetected.

Without smell to accompany it, my sense of taste was reduced to only being able to differentiate sweet from salty foods.

I began to bargain in my head. Which of my other senses would I give up in exchange for my sense of smell? Impossible. I don’t want to lose any of my senses.

Thankfully, for me, the blindfold loosened within ten days. I began to smell around the edges of the world again. Strong smells returned intermittently and then faded away again. The fading times lessened. I discovered the foul stench of the decomposing potato that had been reverse air freshening the kitchen for at least a week. Cat shit re-entered my nasal vocabulary. And with time so have the subtleties of air and butter on kitten fur,

As for the Bipolar risk factors that accompany my visit from Covid, I’ll have to wait and see. The last couple of months have carried other stressors with them too. From experience, my Bipolar episodes tend to sit back patiently while the risk factors peak and the stress unfolds, and then set in as a special treat once things settle down.

So I am moving carefully through the world with my fingers crossed, while I enjoy being back in the world of the smelling.

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Writing On A Tightrope

What is the thing that could unseat you from your life?

For me it is attempting to control things beyond my control. This urge originates in my DNA and is exacerbated by living with Bipolar 1 Disorder. When this illness sweeps in unannounced and for however long it pleases, it rips my sense of control apart. The rebuild is always hard work.

And while I have learnt to loosen my grip a little more each time I recover, control of the control issues is still a process in progress.  

My kryptonite is sick children.

Over the last six weeks, various illnesses, hospital admissions and a surgery between my two children have threatened to overwhelm my relatively well-honed CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) skills. Neither child was ever in acute danger, yet I battled the clench reflex of control. I loathe feeling as though I am not in the driver’s seat of my life. This time I was on a bumpy road trip I never consented to, delegated to a back seat with no seatbelts and poorly locking doors.

But something unexpected helped.

At the end of April, I started a five week online Creative Writing Course with the Australian Writers Centre. Three to four hours a week to cover course material and submit an assignment. No penalty for not submitting the assignment, other than missing out on feedback from the lecturer.

I completed two weeks without distractions before the illnesses descended.

I immediately indulged in some classic black and white thinking and catastrophising and thought I’d abandon the writing course. Thankfully CBT skills prevailed: Neither child was on life support, and doing some of the course would be better than doing nothing.

I decided to do the minimum I needed to submit an assignment each week. Surprise, surprise – the writing was a welcome relief from the stress of sick children. Spinning and shaping words into new work left me feeling more in control of my world. The gentle nudge of an assignment due, felt as though someone had handed me a balancing pole as I walked my tightrope.

We are (hopefully) through the worst (of the sicknesses) now. The course finished a couple of weeks ago. But I thought I’d share two of the creative writing assignments I submitted, for those who are interested. Both are a scene with a 200-word limit.

I hope you enjoy this foray into another branch of my writing life:

Assignment 1:

Anton pulled on his fur lined hat with the ear flaps, leather gloves, woollen scarf, and snow jacket. He collected his fishing rod and box and left for the lake just as dawn poked its pink fingers through the patchy clouds. Snow crunched like fine gravel under his boots and his breath came in clouds.

He loved the peace and solitude of ice fishing. Some winters the lake froze into a clear pane of glass, and you could see fish moving sluggishly under the ice. This winter, the ice had incorporated snow, until it was as opaque as wedding cake icing.

Anton had barely lowered his line into the ice hole and himself onto the bench when he felt it. Not the usual twitch of a fish, but a heaviness.

He reeled in his line and squinted.

Waterweeds.

His stiff fingers untangled the dark green filaments around his hook. The curtain of weeds hid something fleshy, something covered in blood vessels. It had a cord, like a length of blue wool dangling from its belly.

It had ten fingers and ten toes.

 A gasp shot from Anton’s mouth. His fingers trembled across his chest in the sign of the cross.

Assignment 2:

It’s 2022. I should be used to wearing a mask by now. And yet, I suddenly notice the itchy edges on my cheeks. My breath moves hot and thick and sour inside it. Outside the mask (for a sip of water) the dry air is laundered with disinfectant, hand sanitiser and soap.

The bedside chair is designed to exacerbate my sore back. All the other parents’ anxieties hum around us. My own worries are a fistful of wriggling worms trapped in my stomach.

Th attempts to jolly up this space with zoo animals on the curtains dividing each bay, and jungle scenes on random walls, have failed miserably. The fluorescent lights erase all beauty. Behind my son’s bed a multicoloured cluster of tubes and canisters, buttons and power points sit patiently waiting for the terrible moments when they are called to action.

My boy’s soft hand is invaded by a plastic tube, covered in gauze, and clutches ‘Scrat’ his tiny plush toy wombat. The nails-down-a-blackboard screech of a toddler in the next bay jerks me upright. My back spasms.

In this place time obeys different rules, and my heart in its chest full of quicksand keeps beating, somehow.

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The Four Minute Teacher’s Gift

A giant digital clock rules the room. It ticks down the allotted six minutes in seconds, and an unignorable alarm leaves no one in any doubt of when their time is up. The space has a frenetic speed dating vibe.

But this is not speed dating. These are parent teacher interviews. And many of the parents are there to squeeze the most out of the teachers and every second they have with them.

I admire the teachers for being able to give the right information about the right kid to the right parents, respectfully and diplomatically. And I feel compassion for them because they are the shock absorber for a new parent’s emotions every six minutes. I’ve heard (from teacher friends) those emotions can be intense and not always politely expressed.

Teachers are overworked, underpaid, and too often disrespected by parents who should know better than to take out their frustrations on those who dedicate their career to educating our children. Parents should have the insight to recognise that their child’s learning outcomes are the result of many factors. What the teacher is doing is only one variable.

A child’s ability to function happily at school is affected by many things that their teacher has no control over.

Teachers (generally) have no control over whether a child has had a decent breakfast, no breakfast, or a slurpie for breakfast before they arrive at school. They don’t control whether that child is given the space to express their emotions safely at home, and whether they are given unconditional love and support in challenging times. Teachers often have no control over whether they have an adequate number of teacher aides and other support staff for the class they are allocated. Teachers don’t control whether a child has an undiagnosed and/or unmanaged medical condition that affects the child’s behaviour.

I appreciate that for many parents giving their child food, a safe home, and appropriate medical care, is something they are unable to provide. If a child lives with a medical condition or disability that is poorly understood or inadequately supported by the school, or if a parent suspects their child is being abused by a teacher, of course they must advocate for their child. But these instances are not what this post is about.

This post is about the parents who live with none of the above circumstances, stopping to appreciate what a fantastic job most teachers do with our children. This post is about stopping before you abuse or accuse a teacher of being responsible for aspects of your child’s development that they are just not responsible for.

I approach parent teacher interviews with empathy for my children’s teachers, even the teachers who other parents whisper sharply about. Over the ten years that I have had a child or children at school I have learnt that some years my children have brilliant teachers whom they love and work well with.

Some years their teachers do a good, solid job. And some years they have teachers who they don’t click with, who may not handle difficult situations in the classroom as well as one of the brilliant teachers might have. These last teachers may not be my children’s favourites, but they haven’t broken my children either. Because (unless a teacher is abusive) the ‘not breaking the children’ responsibility is largely mine and my husband’s.

I generally keep my parent teacher interviews to four questions:

How is my child’s behaviour?

Are they making an effort?

Are there any areas where they are falling behind enough to warrant additional support?

Does the teacher have any concerns about my child?

The answers tell me more than a six-minute gallop through their work books would.

I’ve found high school involves fewer parent teacher interviews. So, when the notification option to book in for parent teacher interviews was emailed out recently, I asked each child if they wanted me to book any interviews. The year 7 child nominated a teacher he wanted me to catch up with. I asked if there was anything in particular he wanted me to mention, and he said:

‘No. I just really want you to meet my favourite teacher.’

The interview was last night. Just after the screech of the alarm ending the previous parent’s time, I sat down opposite my child’s favourite teacher. We introduced ourselves. She sipped hot tea from a big, green mug. Her voice was a little hoarse. A Covid leftover. She asked me what I’d like to cover. I told her:

‘He just wanted me to meet his favourite teacher.’

The teacher’s whole face smiled: ‘That has made my day.’

We briefly touched on my usual questions and as I stood up, I said: ‘Thank you for everything you do.’

The whole interaction took exactly four minutes.

The teacher stood with me and smiled again: ‘I’ve got two minutes left to get a fresh cup of tea before the next one.’

You may also like to check out these other posts:

Rewards For Reports: Entitled or Deserved?

Mental Health Parenting Truths 101

The Parenting Trap – Is Information The Enemy?