There is no sacrifice in avoiding oblivion

Ok, no denying it. This one is a rant.

I am fed up with people talking about sacrifices when it comes to climate change. We have to sacrifice petrol, convenient living, economic growth ect.

When you talk about sacrifice it's giving up something... But there is no future in climate change where we can continue to have petrol, convenient living and economic growth. If we don't 'give it up' willingly then we will be forced out of it by climate change. There will be no petrol cars in a world riddled with conflict and famin. There will be no convineant living in a world with mass floods, devastating storms, months of drought and infertile spoils. There is no path for economic growth as people homes and livelihoods collapse around them.

However if we change in good time. Find a more sustainable way of living we might just, stressing and might and the just here, find a way to have a decent standard of living.

Rant over

Speech for Guilford council meeting

Good evening, I am here today to support the motion to declare a climate emergency.

This is my daughter Rachael, she is 8 months old, I love her to pieces and would do anything for her... including talking at council meetings!

What we do today is pivotal for Rachael's future. The IPCC report provides stark warnings for us should we fail to act now.

By the time Rachael is just 11 years old her fate will be sealed. If we have not acted by then we will be unable to prevent climate breakdown.

By the time she is 20 scientists predict that the northern permafrost will have thawed, releasing methane into our atmosphere, and triggering irreversible global warming and acidification of our oceans.

By the time she is 30 all corral reefs globally will be destroyed, reeking havok on fish stocks and our oceans ecosystems

By the time she is 60 there will be no more fertile soils due to the loss of pollinators, mass starvation and global collapse are likely.

By the time she is 80 the globe could be 4 degrees warmer, she will have seen the extinction of most species on earth and large parts of the world will be uninhabitable. Global conflict will be inevitable.

This is not a future any parent would want for their child. This is not a future that I believe this council wants to see for its residents. The challenge we face is daunting. Inaction is not a viable option.

The problem is huge and it will take commitment at both a government and local level to tackle. I am delighted that the motion that has been brought forward today includes a 2030 target which is better aligned with the IPCC recommendations. I am heartened to see that the motion commits to meaningful action being taken in the next year. I would like the council to support this motion, and challenge each and everyone of you to consider if more can be done. Every day that passes without action is a day we steal from our children.

Can we hand on heart look Rachael in the eye in 11 years time and say we did everything possible. I hope that this council will be able to.

Life but not as we know it

I haven’t posted for a while but there is a good reason for that.

Recently we were supprised with a beautiful baby girl and I have spent the last few months trying to get my head around the whole thing. Babies change everything. I am now under a 6pm curfew and now spend my days fighting pensioners for the best spots in cafes. I spend my life juggling between the competing demands of baby and everything else, regularly dropping all the balls in the process. I crave adult conversation to find that ironically when I do find and adult the only thing I talk about it the bloody baby!

But despite the chronic sleep deprivation, isolation, and complete overhaul to my previously carefree existance I am utterly smitten with the tiny dictator that is currently snuggled to my chest. And in the twighlight hours where she contently suckles, little hands innocently clutch to my pjs, I sighlently vow to do everything in my power to protect her. As I watch her fall asleep I like to think about my hopes and dreams for her.

I hope she has a strong personality and is bright and whitty. I hope she grows up to have a career in something she is proud of, I hope she excels at university, I hope she finds a stable relationship and has a family of her own. I hope she can live a comfortable life in a nice house and afford holidays abroad without having to worry too much about finances. I hope she enjoys the outdoors, sports and loves animals. Basically I hope she has everything that I have got and more. I hope she is truly happy.

I like to think of these hopes as aspirational but achievable, but in reality these are day-dreams. I have not considered the world in which my daughter has arrived.

The Met office recently published a report that forcastes a rise in global temperatures above 1.5C and this could occure within the next 5 years. This is a critical threashold for climate change and the concequence of breaching this threashold are catastrophice. When the gloabal temperature goes above 1.5C my poor baby girl will be in a world of turmoil. Crops grown in currenly furtil lands with stable climate, for example cacao beans (chocolate) will be destroyed as nutriantes are washed away from the soil in turblant wheather conditions. The artic which currently cools us by reflecting solar radiation will melt, causing widespread flooding and accelerating global warming. The Pacific islands are likely to disappear, displacing millions of people and killing entire eco-systems. The world will see severe floods and draughts leading to world food shortages and conflict. We are already seeing large scale migration due to climate change.

I have delivered my daughter, who I have vowed to protect into a world I cannot save her from. She will suffer hardship from climate change. There won’t be chocolate polar bears at Christmas or holidays to the Percific. its unlikely that there will be holidays at all. Instead there is likely to be starvation, conflict and desperate struggle for survival. If she does have children will they even have the chance to grow up.

All this could be avoided if we act now, but this would require a global commitment and co-operation to dramatically cut carbon emmissions. This means a substantial change from every single one of us. I mass act of ulterisim – except it isn’t ulterisim, it is saving ourselves from oblivion. However humans suffer from such a strong collective state of denile I cannot see us taking action until it is too late.

Even I a write this I can’t fathom the furtre we have created. The horror of the predictions from the scientific community overwhelm me when I think about it in the wee hours. I can not comprehend it. And so when I wake in the morning and remove these nightmares from my thoughts. I forget about it whilst I drive us in our petrol car to the café so I can enjoy a decafe caramel latte and chocolate cake with NCT friends. I use the facilities to change my baby before I head to our comfortable home, disgarding the soiled nappy into the bin not thinking about how the nappy will still be in existance long after I am gone, and my baby is gone and the world has entered oblivion.

The hardest goodbye

On the 19th of November I hugged Mr T for the last time. His health has been failing and he was beginning to struggle. I had him pts on the 20th.

I don't really want to write about it here, I like this blog to be generally upbeat and I have yet to find the funny side. But it felt weird not to mark his loss.

So there it is RIP Mr T.

For painfully embarrisingly sincere account please see haflingers tail Blog.

wedding

Now for something completely different - a little synopsis of my wedding:

 

The morning started at an unearthly 6.45am start! I’m not used to wearing dresses or make up and had no idea it took this long to get ready! Still, the hair and makeup team worked their magic and I was transformed from tomboy to bride. There was a bit of mild drama when I received a call from the groom to say the road in front of the registry office was closed and there was no-way to drive to the wedding. After 30 mins of frantic activity we managed to call all the guests, hurriedly get ready (I ended up going down the aisle with only half the buttons on my dress done up) and rally drive down the back streets of Guildford to make it to the church (OK registry office) on time.

The actual wedding service was short and sweet. I nearly cried when my friend Tessa read our reading ‘Scientific Romance Redux’. I hadn’t expected a poem about giant spider priests and sandwiches to be so moving, but Tessa did wonders with the material we gave her. Fortunately the makeup artist appeared to have used something akin to road paint on my face so my tears did not ruin the work of art.

 

 

The traditional pictures were then taken and importantly bubbles consumed before heading to the surprise (for our guests) wedding service part two: on a horse drawn canal boat dressed as pirates, naturally! The second service was a Pastafarian blessing, which was cheerfully conducted by two of our friends and then we got down to the serious business of cream teas and rum.

 

 

After an enjoyable hour or two our trusty steed Buddy took us safely back to the boat house. From here we disembarked to the hotel to drop off bags. The hotel we were staying at was hosting another wedding that day. We tried not to upstage them, but failed miserably as we made our entrance by crashing the bus into the hotel and then spent 20 mins trying to make a U-turn. It is really hard to be inconspicuous in a big sparkly white dress next to a loud beeping buss with disco lights flashing.

Once we had sheepishly extracted ourselves from the hotel we then made our way to the reception. Here we were greeted by a crowed of our dearest friends who gave us their blessing via the traditional method of violently throwing confetti at us. Confetti gauntlet successfully run, we then squeezed ourselves into the overcrowded Mead Hall and enjoyed yet more bubbles and a hog roast. Several speeches were made – including my father telling everyone about the time I lost the engagement ring, which I had until this point managed to keep a secret from Nick.

 

Awkward first dance was danced awkwardly and the cake was cut. More bubbles were consumed courteously of the ‘Wogan’ bar. Nick and I serenaded our guests and we nearly set fire to the venue with sparklers. We finally staggered back to the hotel around 2am, with big smiles and sore feet.

Blue skies - anxiety, depression and a lot of metaphores

Having received a lot of positive feedback about my trich post, in particular several people have said it has really helped them understand the condition, I have felt inspired to blog about some more tricky mental health issues.

Today I will attempt anxiety and depression. Now I have wanted to blog about depression for a while as it is so difficult to understand. However, I like my blog to be humorous and upbeat. Depression is about as upbeat as Eeyore at a funeral.

How about we start with anxiety.

Anxiety comes in many forms; panic disorder, Generalised anxiety disorder, social anxiety, phobias, and arguably post-traumatic stress disorder. I have only had the privilege of being visited by the first two horse riders of the nervous apocalypse. Whilst I have listed several distinct disorders, there is a great deal of overlap between them so thinking of them as entirely separate conditions is a bit of a misnomer.

I like to think of anxiety as the most popular of the mental health disorders. If anxiety was at a party, it is the one that would be given a warm reception and understanding smiles by the normal folk. It does not scare people as much, as it is an extension of a normal sensation. We have all felt anxious, we can all sympathise with anxiety. It holds the least stigma in a way.

However an anxiety disorder is where this anxious sensation is disproportionate to the situation and wildly out of control. It is a bit like being in a small dingy in the middle of the sea out in a storm. The anxious waves are crashing over you all the time, anxious thoughts scream through your mind like an onslaught of wind and hail. It is incredibly difficult to navigate and see the horizon, all you can think about is surviving the storm.

This to some extent explains why I am such a terrible driver. When anxious I commonly get lost. In fact I get lost all the bloody time. I drive into things, famously I have parked my car into a giant blue skip, a ditch, and a house! How do you not notice a house?! Sometimes I lose the ability to speak normally, coming out with a babble of backwards words, which makes asking for the much needed directions even more of a challenge. And of course I regularly don’t listen/compute when people are talking to me,  meaning you can tell me something and I seem to have forgotten it only seconds later ie by the time I have reached the junction ‘bugger was that left or right they said’! Seriously permanently lost!

Yup the side affects of anxiety basically render me as capable as your 90 year old aunt Sally who lost her marbles a decade ago. I am so caught up and distracted by anxious thoughts that I cannot focus on daily tasks. It is frightening and frustrating and can result in  feeling entirely helpless.

And this is where our friend Depression commonly steps in.

Firstly, unlike anxiety, depression is not simply an extreme form of sad. Don’t get me wrong, it involves a copious amount of sad, but sad is merely a side effect in a way.

Depression is also not well liked, if it arrives at the party people will sigh in disappointment and do their level-best to not get cornered into conversation over the buffet table with it. To onlookers depression is completely frustrating, it seems self-inflicted and selfish. The net result is the people with depression are often are met with hostility.

If anxiety was riding the dingy in the storm, depression is when the boat has sunk. You are trapped at the bottom of a very dark, very heavy ocean and you can no longer see the light.

That sensation of helplessness can lead to despair. Despair is a big part of depression. You are stuck and you cannot find your way out, similar to being subject to a star wars episode 1-3 marathon, extended dvd version, in a hall of mirrors. You desperately want it to stop but there is no exit and Jar-Jar-Bloody-Binks is reflected in everything you see.

Everything seems detached and remote to you. You feel emotions intensely and not at all simultaneously. Perhaps it is the brains why of coping with such intense feelings, a bit like closing your eyes to a bright light. Unfortunately the best emotions are long out of reach, desire, happiness, anticipation. They buggered off with the life-jacket-of-hope when the boat capsized. You forget what it is like to feel these things and cannot even imagine them anymore. All that is left is the heavy stuff that sinks like anger, sadness and emptiness. Most people opt for emptiness, and perhaps dabble in a bit of sad/angry for varieties sake, before shutting their eyes back to emptiness again as sad/angry sucks. Of course a life of emptiness means you don’t really know how to engage with the world anymore. Events lose their meaning. Things that you know you once liked and should make you happy don’t. Things you should look forward to you don’t. Things that you should care about you don’t.

Which leads us onto another fun aspect of depression – guilt. No-one is as frustrated and angry with a depressed person as the person themselves. I would feel immensely guilty that I was not enjoying life. I would feel guilty that people were having to scoff their vol-au-vents in self-defence at my presence. I would feel awful that I could not feel happy about the nice things people did for me. And of course this huge guilt sits onto of your self-worth and squishes it like a fat man on a small donkey. When you feel this bad about yourself you really don’t want to go out and see people anymore. It just makes you and them feel worse.

And finally that leads to the last horrid limb of depression – delusion. Once stripped of functioning emotions, self-worth and hope our minds are effectively standing stark-but-naked in the middle of a paintball field, with absolutely not protection from the horrid paint balls of paranoia. It is hear that we are most vulnerable to delusional thought. I have convinced myself of the most unusual and strange things. I convince myself that everything is somehow my fault. I convince myself that my friends hate me because I have done wrong. I was once so convinced of this that I went out and bought a 'Mog the forgetful cat' book because I left a friends window open by mistake. In my mind she must hate me for being so careless and rude, I was the worst person, she kindly offered me a bed and I repaid her by inviting burglars to her house (she was never burgled). I was so mortified that I could not face her and instead posted the book through her letterbox. Leaving an utterly baffled friend with an open window and a child's book on her doormat. Of course she didn’t hate me, it was all in my mind.

I can feel like everyone is watching me, everyone is talking bad things about me, nobody wants me to be around. I can even think it would be better if I was dead.

…. Yes we appear to have lost upbeat and happy. Cheers Eeyore.

The good news is that anxiety and depression do not have to be a permanent state of mind. You can get better from them, often we need a bit of outside help and support but you can find your way back to happy and functioning.

Sometimes I think it is helpful to think of the mind for what it truly is. Our mind is our brain and it is fundamentally a very complicated, slightly squidgy, organ.

If you hurt a joint, you sometimes need physio to recover and make it work normally again. Muscles and tendons can be manipulated with motion to make them stronger. The brain is not a muscle. The brain is a complicated mess of synaptic connections which work on a competitive basis. The more you use a neural pathway the stronger it will become. Unused connections are re-routed. It is a system to make our brains as efficient as possible. Physiotherapy for the brain involves building stronger positive neural pathways and re-routing the negative ones. The only way to do this is by thinking (and perhaps with a bit of support from medication). To overcome and then manage anxiety and depression you need to continually do thought exercises. The trick is trying to find the right exercise, by no means an easy feat particularly when you can barely find the supermarket. You will then need the will power to continue to keep up the physio for the rest of your life even after you have recovered to prevent re-lapse.

I guess my take home message is that mental health is self-involved not selfish. However frustrating it must be for the onlooker, it is twofold for the sufferer. It takes a huge amount of energy and commitment to recover from a mental health illness, and that is when you know what you need to do to get better. Please be patient and kind to anyone who is suffering and support them to get all the help they need to get better.

Blue skys are on the horizon.

 

 

Confessions of a trichotillomaniac

I’m feeling the urge to blog again but now the surrey 100 is over I don’t have a ‘challenge’ to write about.

In the absence of a sporting challenge I feel strangely compelled to write about a daily challenge for me. I have to confess I’m a bit nervous about writing this entry as I’m afraid to say my daily battle is a mental health problem.

Yup I have just imagined at least half of you have shut down the computer and run away screaming.

Perhaps that is unfair, but when other people start talking about their mental health woes I feel like running away – and I’m certified nuts myself. But I guess it is for this reason I kinda want to write this. Mental health conditions are something that does have a huge stigma to it. It is hard to understand and it is a lot easier to think of people who suffer from it as different, weird, a bit broken and possibly best avoided. I think most people who read this know me, and hopefully like me, so coming from me it might not seem so alien. If I am open about my problems perhaps I will be doing my little bit for mental health awareness.

My particular brand of crazy (or at least the one this blog entry is about) is known as trichotillomania.

‘The specific DSM-5 criteria for trichotillomania (hair-pulling disorder) are as follows : Recurrent pulling out of one's hair, resulting in hair loss. Repeated attempts to decrease or stop the hair-pulling behavior.’

For me the hair pulling is thankfully mainly focused on my eyelashes but others pull at eyebrows and head hair. Most start as children, will probably be intermittently bald throughout their life and never fully recover.

Trichotillomania is fairly rare and little research has been conducted to discover the cause or create a working cure. It is almost tempting to think of it as exotic but the reality is far from glamorous. For the most part it just means I have a stockpile of unused Christmas mascara and an inability to see in the rain. Turns out eyelashes are really useful at keeping water out your eyes! In the shower I look like a mole dancing as I blindly negotiate washing my hair. I cannot swim at all without googles, even breast-stroke as the water will instantaneously get into my eyes. So next time you are stuck in the rain waiting for a bus at least you can marvel at how good you eyelashes are at keeping your eyes dry. It is true; you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

My trichotillomania started in primary school. In fact my trichotillomania was inadvertently caused by the nutcracker. CURSE YOU NUTCRACKER. My family went to see it when I was a kid. I’m not much of a ballet fan myself so decided to pass the time playing with the little binocular things you get at the big theatres. I was blissfully unaware that these binoculars were a hive of bacteria and I was effectively having unprotected eye sex with the previous thirty thousand people who had used them since their last clean. Unaspiringly I got eye aids – otherwise known as conjunctivitis. I spent the next fortnight with disgustingly gloopy eyes. I distinctly remember having to pull the puss from my eyelashes in order to open my eyes in the morning as they had got stuck together. Inevitably some eyelashes were innocent casualties in the war on eye gloop.

I guess this must have started off the habit. At first I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I remember talking to a friend about it during art whilst we were drawing self-portraits. I told her I sometimes pulled my eyelashes out and she said she did too. Confirmed, it must be OK then. Little did I know that my friend was so insecure that she would have agreed with whatever I had said. Had I told her I kill people at the weekend I’m sure she would have said that she too was a serial killer. Never trust an 8 year old. So anyway my little habit grew stronger but no one really noticed. Kids do weird disgusting things all the time, it is impossible to notice them all.

The first memory I have of compulsive hair pulling was when I was struggling with my long division homework. Long division just doesn’t make sense. It never has and it never will. But when your 9 and you have been sat at your desk for an hour trying to make it make sense and it is getting late and if you don’t make it make sense soon you won’t have your homework done by tomorrow and your teacher will shout and you and everyone else in the class will know you haven’t done it and will think you are lazy or stupid… it gets a bit stressful. When my mum came over to check how I was doing she found that the centre of my work book was full of long black eyelashes. Balled patches had appeared on my eyes which were red and sore from pulling. I distinctly remember her shock ‘What have you done!’ and the shame that followed. I learnt then that my little habit was a bad, ugly and shameful habit.

In the weeks that followed it only got worse. The more my family tried to stop me and tell me off for hair pulling the worse I felt and the worse it got. I was painfully embarrassed by it. I remember trying to make up lies to cover what I had done – ‘I woke up and they fell out’. I never have been very good at lying. I remember it hurt, it really hurt when I pulled out an eyelash, but this just made me want to pull another one. A bit like poking your tongue into the hole when a tooth is removed or poking at a bruise after a fall. It didn’t take long before my eyes were entirely bald.

Over the next few years things went from bad to worse. I started to badly suffer from anxiety. At first this just made me a bit withdrawn but eventually I had such bad panic attacks that I became house bound. I was depressed. I would go days without eating and the thought of food made me panic. Missing some eyelashes were the least of my worries. Eventually at fourteen, I was taken to a psychiatrist that took me seriously. At the time the general consensus seemed to be that children could not suffer mental health problems so I saw at least three doctors who told my mother I was just being difficult. It was this psychiatrist who diagnosed me with trichotillomania amongst other things. The other things took precedence for treatment as they were stopping me from functioning so we never really addressed trichotillomania in the sessions. After a course of anti-depressants, therapy and a change in school and lifestyle (Mr T arrived), I learnt how to manage my anxiety and eat food again. The anti-depressants also seemed to stop my trichotillomania.

I think I stopped pulling entirely from the age of 16 until 20 but close friends tell me otherwise. Apparently I pulled my eyelashes out over my A Levels, and during a break up at university, but these must have been small blips as I don’t remember getting balled from them. I wish, I really wish, I knew why I didn’t pull during this time. I don’t think I was any happier than I am now. In fact I think I am happier now then I was then. I wasn’t taking any medication; I stopped the anti-depressants when I was 16. I was a lot drunker, in fact I’m fairly confident that from 18 to 20 I was almost permanently drunk. Perhaps copious amounts of vodka cure trichotillomania? I should publish my findings, it would be the first known cue! Alas copious amounts of vodka do not get you a degree so in my final year I decided to sober up… for at least half of my waking hours and get my head down so I passed the degree. And I guess it was here, once more at my desk desperately trying to understand a problem in front of me – except this time long division is replaced by some unfathomable cognitive neuroscience paper with a hangover to boot - that the compulsive hair pulling started again.

My eyelashes have been weakened from years of pulling. It used to be quite hard to pull out the beautiful long black eyelashes I had as a child. But as an adult I now have weak brittle thin eyelashes that fall out as soon as you look at them. In an hour I can pull out a section as wide as my finger. Plucking them mercilessly one by one until there is nothing left. It doesn’t really hurt anymore. Just a pleasant tug and tingle as the hair pops out. When I get compulsive it is a real need. I feel agitated, my hands almost itch for wanting to pick. My throat feels tight, constricted by my want to pick. I find it almost impossible to stop my hands from touching my face. I run my thumb across my eyelid to find a stump. Once I find one I cannot stop thinking about it. It almost becomes like a splinter in my eye, I just need to get it out. On bad days my first waking thought it pulling out my eyelashes and it is constant through the whole day until I go to sleep. Unless I see Mr T that is. Any time with Mr T is downtime and I have no desire to pull when I am around him. which is both lovely and strange. When I’m pulling I go into a trance like state. It is not really relaxing as such, but I feel a calm detachment from the world. With the stress of my final year it took no time at all for me to go balled.

And then I had the dilemma about what to tell my friends. At school I had ridiculously low self-esteem so talking about my eyelashes was just too painful to imagine. I also almost never went to school or talked to people so it was surprisingly easy to avoid the subject. My best friend clearly had trichotillomania as well, evidence by the balled patch on her head but we never once spoke about it. We just couldn’t, it was too shameful. In fact we still have never talked about it! Seems like a bit of an opportunity wasted now because it would have probably been helpful to share our experiences but hindsight gets you know where.

All that vodka had made me very talkative at university. I was blessed with many friends and even more acquaintances (that unfortunately I can never remember due to vodka but I chat to them anyway because it is too embarrassing to admit I literally cannot remember anything about them). The eyelash thing is bound to come up.

… but it didn’t. Hurray for being fair and too lazy to wear makeup on a daily basis. People didn’t notice, or at least if they did they never said anything. To me, every time I look at a mirror I see it. Every photo of me I see it. But I guess I’m very aware of the picking and all of its negative connotations. To an onlooker I probably just look a bit washed out. Funny thing was I was almost disappointed no one brought it up. I think I was ready to talk about it now, and almost wanted people to ask. Eventually I just started telling my friends about it. They were all slightly bemused but very good about it. The huge burden of shame I used to carry around as a child had dwindled to mild embarrassment. It is not something I’m ever going to feel proud about, but I can now tell strangers about it. A wise, and fairly troubled, person once sung ‘ridicule is nothing to be scared of’. It is amazing how much courage that brings me on a daily basis.

And so there you have it. Confessions of a trichotillomaniac. I still pull. I don’t know how to stop. I’ve had a crack at many interventions: gloves, sellotape on hands, thinking putty, glasses, goggles, a picking diary, a picking log, cutting my nails painfully short, growing my nails impractically long, asking colleagues and friends to shame me, wearing fake eyelashes. Bizarrely when I put the eyelashes on I don’t feel the need to touch my eyes, but instead I find myself picking the skin off my arms so I don’t think I’m really making progress. Nothing seems to stop me. I would love to stop but I’ve almost made peace with myself over it. Who needs to see in the rain anyway?

For another perspective on trichotillomania check out Becky’s blog (which may have inspired this blog post) on U Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU61riJ9dHUNKhedeejZfXAg

x