Oh, what a week! I’ve been up and
down like a manic barometer over the last week or so. There have been some really good things
happening that have elevated my mood for a while but then the feeling wears off
and I’m down on the floor again.
I’ve been doing quite a lot of work with Anglia Ruskin University for
the past couple of years through a mental health service user involvement
project and currently with the Social Work Faculty. I’m currently helping to write part of a
module that is being taught to BA and MA students and I’ve found working with
the lecturer really motivating and helpful for my ability to cope with my
depression. My self-esteem is quite high
as a result of the feedback I’m getting on the stuff I’ve written and I only
wish I could do this type of stuff all the time because I really enjoy doing
it. The only worrying thing is that I
will be delivering the material I’ve come up with to a lecture room filled with
students on 3 October (or next Thursday for those of you who take notice of
those things). It’s not like I haven’t
done it before but this isn’t just telling a bunch of students my story about
living with depression and taking some questions, it’s writing and delivering
more academic type stuff and it’s scaring the Hell out of me. The lecturer is really supportive though so
that’s a great help and I’m not the only service user writing and delivering
material. My good friend Mark is going
to be there too.
Actually, Mark is responsible for keeping my mood elevated when it seems
to be dropping like a stone with the long but extremely funny ‘phone
calls. I probably don’t tell him as
often as I should just how much I appreciate those calls and the laughs we
have. It’s nice that, out of all the
shit that the involvement project turned into in the last few months of its
life, I’ve been able to get at least one good thing out of the wreckage and
that’s my friendship with Mark.
It’s actually a big thing for me to call anyone I’ve met in the real
world a friend as I have had a lot of bad experiences with so-called ‘friends’
but with Mark, friend is the right term to use.
He has a lot of similarities with my own personality but also
significant differences. We like the
same kind of stuff and have the same kind of ideals but we also have areas of
disagreement. He encourages me to get
involved in events and meetings I wouldn’t really have bothered with and he
always gives constructive feedback on any stuff I do with him. I hope he can say the same for me but I doubt
it because he’s a better man than I am.
This week I even reached out to someone who uses the same mood tracking
app as I do and who seemed to be in a desperate state of affairs. I hope I helped her; she did seem to be at
the end of her tether.
I’ve had the chance to catch up on my DVD watching and listening to my
audio drama CDs so I’m coping as well as can be expected. If things keep going like this I might
actually get around to writing some reviews for my other blog that has remained
untouched for so long.
I hope that I’ll be able to replace my broken laptop with a brand
spanking new one so that I can really get into writing my blogs and other stuff
again because I really miss it. Losing
my laptop is probably why my mood is so low most of the time now although,
saying that, my mood has never been that high anyway.
Oh well, back to the old grindstone.
All this social work course preparation won’t do itself!
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