Month: August 2012

Sports and nonsense

The London Olympics are drawing to a close so what better time to examine what sports should be in and what sports should be relegated to the scrap heap of “clearly requires physical skill and endurance but just no”. Before we get started let’s revisit an example of what was the best part of Australian Olympic coverage before Channel 9 won the rights and butchered it to pieces and threw it in the crock pot:

Here is the list as it stands:

Olympian list of olympic sports

 

Here’s what we need to consider in deciding what stays and what goes – history and stupidity.

My list of what goes:

  • Synchronised swimming (its a performance. Yes, it requires you to be fit but it is not.a.sport)
  • Badminton
  • Boxing (we’re really awarding medals to people inflicting brain injuries on others?)
  • BMX (I mean, COME ON)
  • Equestrian (no other sport involves you using an animal – if we follow this logic then sheepdog trials should be on the list)
  • Football (hello, WORLD CUP – football is so needy, it’s just me me me all the time)
  • Golf (are you for real – it’s in for Rio)
  • Handball (FFS – I mean, let’s just throw in elastics and hopscotch while we’re at it)
  • Table tennis (it’s PING PONG)
  • Tennis (again, such a needy spotlight hugging sport)
  • Volleyball (an ABSOLUTE joke)

 

Your thoughts?

 

Onward!

 

New favourite

Chef knows how to cheer me up

Day whatever

I’m almost a week out from when I went from panic attacks and wrestling the tonnage of my self-doubt to bat-shit crazy suicidal self-harming banshee.

A week.

How time flies.

My mum keeps asking me how I am, am I feeling ‘better’. This morning I just had to tell her that no I wasn’t better but I was OK and that this wasn’t a quick fix and it was going to take a while for me to be better.

Many of her generation struggle with the whole mental health topic despite hearing all the research and news stories and stories about their kids and their friends kids who actually can say, ‘hmmm, maybe it isn’t that normal to imagine topping myself as one of the solutions to getting through today” and seek help to stop or at least narrow their choice of coping options to less life-ending ones. My parents tend to get it now after seeing me hit rock bottom and claw back up again but even so, just asking me if I’m ‘better’ makes my head explode.

At the moment I am functioning. I’m putting one foot in front of the other and savouring the fact I am not edgy, that I don’t have a pit in my stomach, that I’m not crying more than 5 times a day, that I am not imagining driving our chef’s knife down through my hands and pinning them to our breadboard (hello weird Jesus complex anyone? It’s my very own foodist crucifixion) and that I’m not imagining how blissful it would feel as I fell from Narrabeen headland.

I guess if we’re looking at it on that scale then fuck feeling better, I’M CURED!

Dr M gave me a script and permission to be taking 5mg of diazepam three times a day. That plus a bipolar drug at night which is excellent at lifting mood and helping sleep. Then microscopically introducing Zoloft. I’m up to a whole half a tablet! I haven’t needed that fell-a-horse dosage of diazepam – in fact I’ve only been taking one in the morning with the zoloft and it’s pretty much been enough. Last night was bad and I realised that maybe I could take the medicine my doctor told me to.

Let’s just file this post under ‘progress’.

 

Onward.

Life trumps everything

Narrabeen Pool

Don’t go up the stairs, don’t go up the stairs, don’t go up the stairs.

What I said out loud when, yesterday morning, I couldn’t lie in bed letting the voice in my head steal more from my soul.

What I said out loud when I went walking in the dark before I had to try and get through another day.

What I said as I walked past the stairs that go up the headland at the northern end of Narrabeen.

I got past them and breathed a little easier. I was listening to Ball Park Music when this track came on:

I ripped the headphones out because I didn’t believe it.

 

I kept thinking of my friends Eden and Maggie and their lives after losing people in their lives to mental health crises.

I made myself imagine the boys’ lives if I was gone. If I had taken me from them.

Sunrise at Narrabeen

Don’t go near the water, don’t go near the water, don’t go near the water.

 

How do you explain the demon realm to the uninitiated?

 

I spent much of yesterday working. Somehow, through the blinding storm of wanting to take one of our kitchen knives and drive it over and over through my hand so hard the tip would embed into the cutting board beneath, I wrote two articles.

The power of the human brain, huh.

 

Your comments kept me going. Chef making me cups of tea and holding me kept me going. Texts from friends kept me going. A text from Maggie saying, “Do not trust your feelings” was vital.

 

It sounds so counter-intuitive doesn’t it. We’re told constantly ‘go with your gut’, ‘if you feel it it’s real’. Well let’s all just make a mental note that there are particular occasions when the complete opposite is true.

“Don’t trust your feelings” gave me the power to say “I don’t believe you” to the vitriol my brain was flinging at itself. It got me to 3:20 yesterday afternoon.

And here we are, a whole day later. There’s a bit of a drug cocktail in play and I am fluctuating between awe at the power of modern medicine and trepidation that I could possible feel this much better this quickly.

What I do know is this. I am OK. And that is a whole lifetime away from where I was yesterday.

 

Onward.

 

Update

I’m seeing my psychiatrist at 3:20.

He’s going to try and keep me out of hospital with some drug cocktail (by the sounds of it) and seeing me as often as he sees his wife (by the sounds of it).

Hospital is not off the cards.

As he said, “life trumps everthing”.

 

Onward.