A Happy S.A.D. Non Christmas

I haven’t liked Christmas since I was a kid. When you grow up and realise that your life doesn’t get better from any gift no matter how amazing or expensive, as it doesn’t change anything else and how others treat you the other 364 days of the year, or how you feel inside.

Then you have kids and sort of get sucked into it- the 'you have to trick kids into believing a mysterious man gives them presents by their bed and the fact you ‘have’ to celebrate Christmas or it won’t be fun for them otherwise'- and the implication of how can you ruin that for them by not doing the same? Comments everywhere, from family to every commercial on the planet…

Yet it’s me that buys all the presents every year, (even those supposedly for me!) , works out the best we can afford with finances we have (I have never understood the paying back the credit card all year theory of Christmas) so that everyone gets something ‘they deserve’. 

Trying to work out what to buy to spend the same amount of money on each child, buying the presents for the family who don’t need them (well not now anyway- I can think of times of the year I could buy a gift and it be much more wanted, needed and appreciated), orders and buys the food, the wrapping paper, the tape, the cards. Puts up the tree, the decorations, the lights (and packs them all carefully away each January)…basically exhausts herself for one supposedly ‘special’ day. For a religion I don’t even belong to or believe in.

And I won’t mention the expectations on this day having to be ‘perfect’. The perfect family day that you can’t ruin (with your stroppy redhead temper!) Every year I don’t know if it’s the darkness, the coldness, or Xmas which makes me feel S.A.D (Seasonal affective disorder)?? …so bollox to all of it. I don’t have the perfect family and I certainly don’t have the perfect attitude.

And then I had a brain tumour…

Last year (7 months after it was removed) I didn’t do much- apart from bought a few gifts online and then sat in my newly gifted onesie all day, thinking:

‘Fuck it, I’m alive- what else matters?’ 

We didn’t have a tree or lights as I couldn’t get them down from the loft even if I wanted to… and I didn’t. Dave cooked as he chose to. I sat on the sofa bed in the lounge for much of the day reading a book while others watched TV. (yes we were so lazy we put the sofa bed down!) Just sitting in peace, the more ‘normal’ the day was the better.

But I still felt I was lying to myself, saying this crappy saying. I don’t wish someone a ‘Happy Christmas’ – I want them to be happy inside always, all year, be true to themselves, authentic, loving, understanding… not just a fake ‘aren’t we all happy’ bolloxy day.

So this year this is it. I am not doing any Christmas. I do feel a little guilty that ‘should be doing something for Roan our 11 year old, but I have decided the gift of him seeing my authentic self will be better than any present I can buy him. I am not buying cards, or presents, or putting up any decorations. I have said that I don’t want gifts for Xmas.

If anyone feels the need they can buy me something any other time of year. Give me a gift when I need it, means something or not when you are ‘supposed to’!

If my family want to do anything, I am not stopping them, just I don’t want to.

I feel like I might somehow celebrate the winter solstice on the 21st December. I have internally celebrated it for years- that shortest day which means light can only get brighter again. The darkness is at its worst and is going again from the increasing of healing sunlight. This slightly took on a different meaning last year when I lit a whole tray of candles to celebrate the darkness of a brain tumour fading from my life, as I sat and cried in a candle lit room.

This year I will give Roan a present that day, to stop my guilt that I cannot just do nothing for him. I might decorate a few candle holders. I might not. I’d consider putting lights up, but I can’t be bothered to get them, and know they would be then up until new year… So my salt lamps and candles will do.

And it’s the 1st December tomorrow- and I’m not dreading it! I’m just partly hibernating, slowing down, wanting to keep warm and rest and counting down the days until it starts getting brighter again.

I CAN change

It’s lyrics again. I love the lyrics in songs probably more than I love the music. Well maybe except for when you can feel the passion of someone playing amazingly and the instrument is speaking without words instead.

Yet again it was ‘Free bird’ that got me, but this time it wasn’t the instrumental part, it was the words “I can’t change” and “…this bird you cannot change”… and at the same instant it made sense as to why this is often played as a funeral song.

The person cannot change- so they die. End of. They couldn’t change… their habits for a healthier lifestyle. They couldn’t change their hate and anger. They couldn’t change their job, their debt, their priorities, their addictions, their risk taking, their fear, their belief system, the belief of others, belief of what’s ‘normal’ … change themselves.

Of course this won’t apply to everyone, there will be some who changed nothing had treatment and are ok, and there will be people who have accepted their death. Learned their life lessons and feel death is just a part of the bigger picture, but from the people I know who have died this seems a minority.

But there are so many stories of people with a ‘death sentence’ of all types of cancer, Parkinson’s, leukaemia, MS etc who have healed, have changed. They changed themselves. Some will have done so alongside the conventional treatments (if this feels right and healing for ‘them’, then it’s right- I had surgery after all!) But many will have, supposedly, ‘spontaneous remissions’ without any chemotherapy, drugs, surgery or radiation. Yet they fully changed their lifestyle, their diet, their toxic emotions or whatever was needed for them.

If what you are doing now has given you an illness then expecting to just take a pill, continue as before and expecting to heal is madness!

You need to change something be it your toxins you absorb or eat, your lifestyle or attitude. To expect to stay the same and heal is just insanity. As the quote says: 

“Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.”

I know I did change after I found out I had a brain tumour. I addressed and lost many of the unconscious beliefs I had about myself and others. I cried for weeks releasing trapped emotions I had (as well as doing energy release techniques), I addressed every single reason possible as to why and how I manifested this tumour into my life. Even those emotions that hurt- a lot. I don’t believe I was a victim, I never felt something outside of me was to blame. 

I’ve had this experience for a reason, for lessons (and written them in my book). 

I changed my (already ‘good’) diet, I meditate, I get healings, I use the outside gym near me daily (I’d never been there before), I addressed my fears… I’m still working on them, on ‘me’. This will be a lifetime of change. Listening to my body.

Maybe more people will also realise they can change? And hopefully before they get ill in the first place.

Art, Procrastination and a Brain Tumour

I have an ‘art shed’ at the end of our garden. It was bought with the money I was going to use on continuing the second year of a part time art diploma. But instead we decided to make a permanent place to use for art instead.

It then got cold and damp and needed insulating and I did so, but struggled to spend the money on ‘me’ to fix it. It was all a ‘waste of time’. Plus I find one small problem with art- you want to stay there all day, which doesn’t work well with home educated kids and a family. Not to mention fatigue, where if I did too much I couldn’t handle the household chores on top very well, and so I procrastinated. 

Then in 2015, I started struggling to focus on the more detailed work. The last thing I painted , when I needed to outline it, I really struggled. My eyes felt they were wrong and blurry, so I changed it a little and made it more abstract, but silently gave up.

Then I got ill, then I found out I had a brain tumour, in my cerebellum- the very part that controls fine motor skills and coordination (amongst other things)… I couldn’t even see, or walk, straight.

The night I had brain surgery still attached to drips, I was holding my fingers together as you would hold a pen, trying to see if I could move my hand to write my name. Silently writing invisible signatures under the bed sheet. Crying. Wondering what I would do if I could never paint again. The thing that I love, yet the only thing I have always held back on. Scared of failing.

A few weeks later and while I could hold a pen ok, I would still write the wrong words, letters were in the wrong order or not legible. I couldn’t spell as I forgot how to spell words I knew easily. I had to sound them out in my head each time. Even forming letter shapes was sometimes hard, the fluidity wasn’t there, it was somehow broken in my brain. Yet I wrote. I scrawled notes that only I could have ever deciphered, and then typed. I hit the backspace far more than any other letter on the keyboard, often two or three times a word, as I kept typing the words wrongly, and spell check was ever so needed, but I kept going.

The colouring books I had bought before the operation to entertain myself I couldn’t do properly. I couldn’t see where the pen nib was properly and I couldn’t coordinate to keep the pen were I wanted- or even within the lines. It felt the most depressing thing to do, somehow torturing myself on what I now couldn’t do. Patience Jo, learn patience. I accepted that maybe I would only ever be able to paint abstracts from now on? But hey, people paint with their feet. I just need to give myself time.

A few weeks after my op, my son moved back here to live in my art shed- as somewhere cheap to live- followed by his girlfriend. Well it didn’t really matter as I couldn’t see it anyway, my world was still spinning violently, but all my artwork and materials got packed up (with me all but shoving it in boxes as I couldn’t see it correctly) and spread around the house, in the loft and under the stairs. By the time they moved out it was cold again, and I didn’t feel up to sitting in my art shed even if all the items I wanted were already there, and there was no way I could get in the loft or carry things as my body was too weak to do much. But I managed to tidy it a little and paint a couple of very abstract paintings- helping me release a little of my trauma with art therapy!

Then last March, my son and girlfriend moved back in! Once again the few of my items were tidied away into various boxes and corners of my house. I still wouldn’t know how I would be able to paint.

A couple of the times in the summer I tried using watercolours, or did a pencil sketch, but found it so hard- and even more depressing. I’d constantly go over the lines of where I wanted to go and it didn’t really help my confidence that I could do much.

So I wrote a book! I often couldn’t type or write correctly, but I kept going until I wrote seventy thousand odd words and edited and published the book myself.

From the person who often quits before she has started, I did it. I completed a whole book and got it printed 16 months after the date of my brain surgery.

Once I finished I got the desire to paint again, I ‘want’ to do work that is detailed- but who knows if I can easily or not? But mostly I just want to feel the paint on my hands as I work with the textures. Yet it’s October and my son is still living here, so I keep waiting… I’m getting good at that…

I was asked did I want my art shed after he moved out as after all I had not used it much in 2 years… and I almost broke down in tears screaming “it’s mine, don’t you dare take that away from me!” 

Although I am also a little nervous …will I be upset if I still cannot look at work in detail? Will I be able to do any work that I can sell? Or will it just be a large amount of personal art therapy?

He is moving out within a few weeks, then I need to find all the storage shelves that have been dismantled, the boxes of materials in the loft, the paints, the paper, the canvasses. So I have things where I need them when I want. I know it will make me feel grumpy as I hate doing chores I shouldn’t have had to do, that I will have to get others to help me (I still can’t climb in the loft) and it will be cold …

but I know my soul needs to paint. It told me to write quotes on canvas before I even had the tumour removed. I need to do it. To heal me. 

Negative days and dreams are OK

I’m sitting here and I don’t know what to write, but I feel sad. I feel there is nothing I can write that is positive… maybe I don’t need to be positive? 

Maybe I should just embrace the fact it’s OK to feel crap, hating the cold weather, the lack of sun, the dark evenings? Just accept the tears, that the leaves are falling off the trees, that things are falling apart?

I guess I could deal with it far easier if it was just for a few weeks, maybe even a few months, each year? But it’s 6 months. ½ a year. ½ a year of not feeling the warmth and healing from the sun when I need it.

I want to cry.

I want to move.

I want to live abroad.

It’s funny as the first time we went to Corfu (when I was 11) I just felt ‘at home’. That total peace inside – that my soul was home. I felt the similar in Majorca, swimming in the warm waters of the cove at night under the stars. Again when we went to Spain last month. That contentment inside.

How do I change it? I don’t know.

I just know I need to. Somehow.

Dedication to my Tumour

Today I had 2 notifications on Facebook that I looked at one after the other. The first said:

"I fucking hate brain tumours and everything associated with them." 

The second post was a quote from Sargent Johnny Joey Jones (http://johnnyjoeyjones.com) with a picture clearly showing him with artificial legs from above the knees, saying:

"People ask how I stay so positive after losing my legs… I simply ask how they stay so negative with theirs."

These two sayings are just it… the difference is us. How we deal with our situations we find ourselves in. I really do understand that one of the hardest things is to love ourselves- with ALL our faults and problems, but I only really understood what he meant by this quote after having my brain tumour.

Saying you hate brain tumours and everything associated with them, especially when you either still have one, or have had one surgically removed seems to me so very wrong. You are hating a part of you - what you are now, and with that you will always have pain. It feels the hate will always keep you having and focusing on symptoms from your "fucking brain tumour."

I learnt so many positive lessons from my brain tumour. It caused me to digest and really absorb all the self-love books I had previously read, understood, but not properly digested and were not part of me. The guidance in them just suddenly was in me, part of me. I got it.

You need to love you, to be able to totally unashamedly look into the mirror and be happy and grateful with all you have.

I am so thankful every day that I can do what I can do and although, yes I do get a little annoyed or frustrated at times with what I have lost. (and occasionally angry when trying do to something in a rush!) Most of the time I try to accept or improve things I need to do from a state of loving myself rather than hating myself for what I cannot now do.

As Anita Moorjani says very clearly in her books:

"You need to do all from a place of love- and that way miracles and healing can occur."

My brain tumour taught me:

That people I know care so much more than I realised.

As do people I didn't even know… Dr's and nurses who literally are there to help heal you.

Strangers who pray for you and send healing.

That our bodies are amazing- they can heal from so much. I mean - shit - I had my skull opened up, my brain fiddled with, but my body has healed itself. Yes the surgeons stapled me up, but my body healed and removed the swelling etc innately.

That we have an inbuilt strength, love and healing power.

That being 'you' and loving you, is the best you can do for yourself and your family

Happiness is a state not a place and you certainly can't buy it!

To listen to myself. (and action it)

Or as I put in my book dedication to my tumour:

"You almost killed me, but you saved me too." 

💗

 

                                   

Weekend of Synchronicity

Just woken after a very busy weekend of synchronicity …

On Saturday Dave asked me to put something back in the car that was parked outside the pub he was playing at ...and walking past my car with her son was Elaine - who had the exact same brain tumour removed also at St Georges with same surgeon!

I met her on line on a brain tumour support group - baring in mind I have only seen 3 other people online who have ever had the same tumour as there are only approximately 40 a year of them in UK!! 

Knowing she was OK after surgery was a life saver to me before I had my op…

But to literally walk into your 'tumour sister' you had never met was amazing!💖

Then yesterday Dave and I went to Kent to see his old boss (also a Dave) who had just got married and was having a mini music festival in his pub garden! Dave got the job with him back in 1995  (when he was unemployed after Adam was born) as his boss wanted to learn guitar and so Dave taught him to play…

And yesterday his old boss sung many songs he had written during the bad times in his life (when we lost contact with him for the last 15 or so years after his first marriage broke down) ... To me it seemed like the music saved him - he could express his pain through writing music. 

So Dave being employed by him and teaching him guitar might just have saved his life too! 

Here for a Reason

I am digging in the garden, slowly moving the soil with a trowel from the once sloped bank into a leveled flowerbed, and while I am digging I keep seeing a robin who seems to be waiting for me to throw him some worms. But this robin doesn't look like a normal robin, he has barely any redness on his chest and his head just looks like he is missing feathers or is covered in scabs or white patches… he either has some disease or had a very close encounter with a cat? 

In fact if he didn't act like a robin I wouldn't really be sure he was one. However, whatever the reason is for his scars 'scabby robin' is just continuing to do what he has to - which I assume is feed babies - and he is in my garden for days, waiting for me to feed him the worms and grubs that I dig out.

I take a picture of him and see if anyone on my Facebook wall has any ideas on why he looks so bad… they don't, but also assume he must still have a nest as he is constantly eating!

"He is eating the worms I have been digging...lots of them! and sitting about 1 metre away (but not when I have a camera)"

As I am watching him again I suddenly feel this, like he was sent here for a reason:

"I'm sure his head and neck has scabs on it so maybe he is 'my' robin. A slightly beaten up around the head with a few scars and war wounds, but alive, robin - just to make me smile 😊"

… the day after this realisation, scabby robin disappears…