Unlocking Your Passions

Passions are so important, they are what make us the wonderful unique individuals that we are, they give us a sense of purpose, a sense of hope and reasons to stand up for ourselves and our beliefs. Sometimes the black cloud of depression can make lose track of the things we feel most passionate about and we are left feeling lost. But with a few simple steps and even when the days are at their darkest we are still able to unlock some of that inner fire burning inside us.

So what are you passionate about? 

The answer to that question is as individual as you are and as human beings we are all passionate about something, often about lots and lots of different things. But I bet if I asked a room full of depression sufferers to list 10 things they are passionate about most would struggle to come up with enough answers. 

But the truth is everyone has passions. Even you. And unlocking our inner passion is what helps us build up or create our own identities, it can make us feel like we have the power to achieve our goals and gives us the strength to go after them!

How do you know when you are passionate about something?

There is a tingly feeling you get deep down when something becomes more important than just another hobby to consider trying or passing idea. We particularly notice this feeling, which can be similar to that of anxiety, when a topic of conversation changes to something more controversial, your heart rate may rise, your speech may start to quicken and become louder, you seem to think faster and with greater clarity and are driven to make your point. 

If you feel like you are struggling to find anything that you are passionate about at all, firstly look straight to the hard core debate subjects, sure they may be considered taboo at a dinner party but when you are alone in your own mind and think about them for a while I am sure you will find there are some surprisingly passionate opinions hidden below the surface.

Some topics to consider:

1.       Religion, yes or no?

2.       Politics, who gets your vote?

3.       Is rap music a good or bad influence?

4.       Should women serve on the front line in a war?

5.       What defines equality among gender, religion and race?

Now think about your answers to these questions for a while and you will find yourself feeling quite strongly about the reasons for your opinions, no doubt they will be based on environmental upbringing, influences from the media and friendships, your own race and gender and of course personal experience.  

Now imagine that someone has come along and written a blog post and their views are the polar opposite of your own. 

Did you feel your heart rate quicken? 

Did your mind fill with 100 thoughts and questions you would like to ask or tell this person?

Congratulations, you have found your inner passion.

Argumentative or just passionate?

If we disagree on a subject I have often been known to tell my husband that I am not “yelling” at him and the truth of the matter is that I’m not actually trying to start a fight or ‘yell’, I’m just very passionate about the subject and I want him to hear everything I have to say on the matter, right now and before he can even start to offer his (assumedly incorrect) opinion!

The line between being passionate and being argumentative is a bit like the line between being assertive and aggressive. It can be quite fine. I am lucky enough to live in a country where freedom of speech is a basic human right and I have the right to passionately discuss my beliefs. But within this framework, I must also respect that other people have the same right and accept that their passionate opinions may well differ from my own.

Productive Passions

Now as much as the odd argument can be soul cleansing, passions do not have to be fuelled only by win or lose debates. Passions can actually be very productive; some people are even lucky enough to find passion within their paid work. 

Now think about what you love to do, what are you good at? Can you sing or play an instrument? Do you love to take photographs, write, scrapbook or draw? What brings you happiness and hope? Do you enjoy being of service to others?

 If that seems too hard then think about the things and the people that are important to you. Do you feel pride in your home or garden? How do you feel about the achievements of your children, personalities of your pets, family and Friends?

Your passions can be inspiring to other people, they can be personal goals to work towards, or simply doing something for yourself because you just love to do it!  

Hobbies can be an example of productive passions and are very important in maintaining your mental well-being. Personally I love to write all kinds of things, poems, song lyrics, articles for the local paper, blogs, my memoir and I’m currently working on a novel. 

As a person with bipolar disorder I find I can use writing to escape into a fantasy world away from the clutches of my depressions or use words to poetically describe my inner most thoughts and sorrows. When I am manic I am known to spend hours at the keyboard writing all sorts of short stories, songs and random lists. Needless to say, writing is one of my hobby passions; I don’t get paid for it, but it brings me great joy.

How can use our passions to help others?

We must put our own oxygen masks on before helping other people, but when we are strong enough to share our passions it’s amazing how much we can brighten up the world around us.

I have many friends and family members who suffer from bipolar or depression but use their hobby passions to enrich their own lives as well as the lives of others. 

One is a brilliant singer/songwriter and she spends time sharing her passion for music, bringing happiness to herself and others through busking and performing. 

My 74 year old bipolar Aunt in the UK performs and shares her original poetry as well as volunteering her time as a phone counsellor to troubled young people.

One friend is an incredible seamstress and makes and gifts beautiful quilts to those in need.

Another finds her passion in being of service to others and she volunteers for the SES and St John Ambulance as well as raising a family and working. 

Many of my amazing internet friends share their passion for mental health and well-being by writing online articles and blogs or even tweeting to help end the stigma of mental illness, and it’s working!

Be Passionate

So there are many kinds of passions, there are the things that drive us to speak up or act, such as fighting for justice, human or animal rights, political opinions and freedoms. There are the things that we love that give us that warm glow inside such as spending time with our families, friends and pets. There are the hobbies such as cooking, crafts, tinkering with cars, playing the Xbox, writing and music. 

Write a list of your 10 most passionate passions with a little sentence describing the way each one makes you feel inside. That way on the harder days you can reflect on them and regain a sense of just how strong and uplifted they can make you.

Take notice of the things you love and believe in, hold onto those things that give you that tingly feeling inside and whatever they may be, once you find them, stand up for them and unlock that inner passion!

Bipolar and the Workplace

I often get asked the question “your kids are all at school now, why don’t you go back to work full time?” and it always leaves me floundering a bit for a socially acceptable explanation. It's hard to tell people that I struggle with a mental illness and while I haven’t had a major hospital requiring episode for nearly 2 years, the truth is I am scared to work full time, scared I will over commit and become unwell again. 

Every single time I have worked ‘full time’ hours, as in 9am-5pm  5 days per week, I have had an episode resulting in having to cut down hours. One or two full days a week seems to fit well for me, it gives me something productive to do and a social outlet but it doesn’t cause the stress build up that can trigger my illness.

“But lots of people with chronic depression work full time jobs.” 

Yes, yes they do. My hat goes off to them because I honestly don’t know how they do it. I have tried to work while depressed and had mixed results. If the depression at the time is relatively mild and not accompanied by anxiety, then I am able to plaster on a fake smile and make small talk in all the right places for 8 hours and then collapse into a heap afterwards. It exhausts me and gives me no energy reserves. My children and husband suffer because they have to deal with a wife and mother who can’t participate in family life, cries uncontrollably, yells too much and stays in bed all weekend.

When I am severely depressed most of my journey to work is spent convincing myself not to drive into oncoming traffic, work itself becomes pointless as I am unable to remember anything, concentrate or communicate effectively with colleagues, my inner dialogue chastises every thought and every thought’s, thought. I am useless, hopeless and I think about my pre constructed suicide plans at least 30 times per hour.

My anxiety spikes because I am aware of how completely awful my work performance has become and I become paranoid that I will be fired at any moment. The anxiety causes my hands and legs shake until I can no longer use a keyboard or construct a basic sentence, I am terrified somebody will realise I am not ‘ok’ and if someone actually asks how I am I am likely to burst into tears.

I literally attempted suicide in the car park outside an office building I worked in once because I couldn’t face going up there again.

“But what about hypomania, that makes you super productive, right?”

Ha! Yes, and no. Mild hypomania can be wonderful, everything seems crystal clear as though you have cleaned a dirty window or put on glasses for the first time. Your energy levels are up, you are exercising more, dressing for success, getting involved in more social events, and not needing as much sleep as usual to wake up refreshed. Work has suddenly become much easier, words and ideas flow in conversations and meetings, you enthusiastically take on more and more projects, everybody notices your excellent work ethic and bubbly attitude and are a sure thing for that next promotion.

The trouble with hypomania is it usually either fizzles out before you have finished all those new project submissions, or it increases in intensity. Intense hypomania is where everything becomes very, very fast. All those wonderful ideas are still coming only they are happening so quickly that the part of your brain that filters out the plausible from the outlandish takes a little holiday.

You are energetic and excited and EVERYONE needs to hear your AMAZING ideas so that they can be implemented as soon as possible! You are talking fast, really fast; your bosses boss whom you have approached directly to save valuable time and company resources, is having to get you to repeat yourself two or three times so she can understand your words.

To prove to your employer how your brilliant idea will best suit the company you have spent the last three nights at home awake until 5am on the computer researching patents, emailing CEOs in China and creating business plans, brochures and designing logo’s and buying websites.

Despite you feeling like a million dollars, at this point your family has probably realised that something isn’t right and are hopefully enacting some sort of pre organised action plan, if you are in therapy your therapist will have advised you not to go to work and sent you to a psychiatrist for a med review.

If you ignore this advice and carry on in your quest for glory, one of two things will happen. Either the intense hypomania stops dead in its tracks leaving you fatigued and in way over your head paving the way for a depressive episode or it escalates further into full blown mania.

Full blown mania at work isn’t fun anymore, you stop looking like a brilliant all be it slightly eccentric up and comer and start to look just plain crazy. You can’t remember the last time you had more than two hours sleep or ate something that wasn’t put directly into your hand. Your hair and make-up aren’t quite right anymore, you accidently wore your sneakers with your dress because you were too busy that morning writing long lists of famous people to pitch your life changing ideas to and got distracted.

Your mind is whirling so quickly that it can’t keep up with itself, ideas don’t even make sense to you anymore because they have all moshed together, hallucinations begin. You need to tell your boss that you have to go home, he says that’s fine so you head out to the car. Why are you still sitting at your desk? Didn’t you leave? Did you imagine that? Oh you are in your car. No its your desk? You can’t even tell what is real anymore.

You half come to your senses and realise you are in the sick room, your manager and team leader are both with you discussing whether or not to call an ambulance, the room is spinning. You try to talk, to explain, but the words come out too fast and too jumbled to make any sense. Someone comes to pick you up and all your colleagues stare at you in disbelief as you are escorted out of the office.

“But now that you are on a medication regime, you should be able to work full time like everyone else, shouldn’t you?”

Unfortunately, it’s not that cut and dry. Medications certainly save many people’s lives but they can often feel like a deal with the devil, you get to keep your sanity but not without serious side effects. Insomnia, fatigue, weight gain, tremors, cognitive and memory issues just to name a few; these can be quite disabling. Many people spend years trying to find a medication where the challenges of the side effects don’t outweigh the issues caused by the bipolar in the first place. 

“So how can we support people with bipolar in the work place?”

That plaster cast on your broken leg is a visible reminder that you are unable to run at the moment. Mental illness is invisible, it is understandably hard for people to remember that someone may be struggling when they don’t have a visual representation of illness to remind them all the time.

Having bipolar disorder does not make you a bad or lazy person, it doesn’t mean people need to tiptoe around you or fuss over you constantly either. While we don’t want to be singled out from our peers and colleagues we ask that you understand that living with this illness can be extremely challenging and working full time hours is simply not a viable option for many of us. 

What we do ask for:

• Increased awareness of our challenges and some of your time to listen and learn a little bit about our condition.

• Be willing to express concern if you feel our moods are intensifying but don’t assume every scowl or sad expression means we are about to have an episode. People with bipolar have normal feelings of happiness, frustration and sadness each day just like you do.

• Flexibility, we have doctor appointments, therapy appointments, specialist appointments that we must attend and these are often only available during work hours. We can become unwell suddenly and may require time off without warning at inopportune moments. We don’t mean to be difficult, but having one or two days off now can prevent several months off and severe productivity losses later on.

• Respect our privacy, if we want to tell colleagues about our condition or give you details about our recent visit to the psych ward we will, but otherwise we would appreciate you keeping these things on the down low.

• Patience, some of us might be taking several different medications that make us unable to function very well before 10am or after 3pm. Our memories might also be affected and we may require a little more prompting than other staff do.

So please understand, while you can’t see my mental illness, it is something that affects my life every single day. I enjoy working part time and challenging myself with new projects and my decision not to work full time has not been made because I am lazy or out for a free ride in life, but because it is the best one for myself and my family.

HAPPY MAY!!

Happy first of May!! Today I finally have proper access to the internet again! 

After three long weeks of only a sporadic ability to tweet, I can once again feed my digital addiction. 

Life just keeps on giving me lemons, time to make Lemonade

My darling husband used up our data load limit in the first week of April (you tube has a lot to answer for!) and as we are rural and confined to satellite internet rules and regulations, we were unable to purchase anymore for the remainder of the month.

 

#CliveTheGuineaPig

Sadly, on our property we only get mobile phone service from half way up our driveway, so if I wanted to tweet or check emails I had to either trudge through the icy winds to the little mound where we seem to magically get 3 bars of reception or leave home entirely; and due to the school holidays, I didn’t get out much! 

Well, things have settled down here somewhat since I last posted nearly a month ago. My meds are working their magic and I have been brought down to a nice mildly hypomanic state rather than a rapidly losing control manic one.

Part of me is however waiting for the other shoe to drop, mania always eventually gives way to depression and for me, May is a month loaded with a history of depressive and suicidal episodes.    

I feel good right now and I really, really don’t want to fall back down that hole.

While I was away….

Easter came and went, my parents came up to visit and we had a huge fully cooked brunch and then did the annual “Easter Hunt Extravaganza” which is where I write a bunch of rhyming riddle clues and the kids go on a treasure hunt around the farm finding more clues until it leads them to the “Bounty” which is a giant Easter basket full of chocolate.

Mr 11, who is ever enterprising and not overly fond of chocolate, saved his stash and then slowly sold off parts of it to his siblings who had run out of their own by day two. Of course he saved approximately 50 mini eggs to take to school and sell on the playground at highly inflated prices, that kid is going places – hopefully jail isn’t one of them. 

My father in law was cutting something on the saw at work (he’s a joiner) and accidently cut the back part of his middle finger off! After waiting three days (!) for surgery, they stitched and skin grafted it and things looked great for about two weeks, unfortunately the skin graft didn’t take and things got infected, now he is playing the waiting game with daily dressing changes for another week to see if they can possibly operate again and save the top of the finger!

As if to compete with my father in law, my mother in law had a routine mammogram, they found an 'anomaly' and this led to urgent ultrasounds, core biopsies and fine needle lymph node biopsies and three excruciating days waiting to find out the test results. 

#CliveTheGuineaPig and I

I went with her to the results appointment and we were relieved to find out that what she had was actually a benign condition called a “radial scar” – they look like cancers on mammograms and apparently cancers can loiter around their edges. The lymph nodes were also given the all clear and were most likely just a little bit swollen due to a mild unrelated infection. 

There are five new fighting fish in my life, their names are Giovanni, De Vinci, Vivaldi, Monet and Picasso. These were rejects from the pet shop – ones that had come in with issues and were unsellable (clamped fins, fin rot or generally unhappy). They have been being treated according to their symptoms and are all doing really well. Except perhaps Monet, he has a habit of lying under his plastic plant playing dead, but when you poke him he quickly jumps up and acts lively for about 5 minutes before “resting” again.

"Picasso"

I survived the school holidays without becoming depressed or blowing our life savings on manic whims. Our life savings are looking fairly ordinary at the moment, so my money spending was confined to lists of ‘things to buy soon’ – of which there are many.

"DeVinci"

After that one little slip up during my “Crazy Week” I have not yet gambled again! Although I obviously am un able to take children into gaming lounges so the holidays and being relatively broke probably helped with that more than my will power actually has.

"Giovanni"

I caught up with one of my best friends from high school, she lives in New Zealand now and came home for the Easter break to visit. I love catching up with her, even though we only see each other every few years we can launch straight into deep and meaningful conversations within minutes and it's like we were never apart.

"Vivaldi"

Unfortunately, I also fell of the self-harm wagon, it had been a really long time too. This was before my meds had kicked in properly, I was very manic and Bel (the name I give the part of me that fuels my eating disorder) was in my ear frequently and loudly with regards to preserving my recent weight loss and harsh judgements from the fear of re gaining it. 

One night at about three in the morning I ended up eating a stack of left over Easter chocolate then overwhelmed by what I had done and overcome by Bel’s fury I turned to old habits. Self-harm for me tends to be punishment rather than release. I was doubly punished though because the chocolate I gorged wasn’t gluten free and so as well as fresh scars, I also ended up with a killer migraine and on the toilet for half the next day.

"Monet"

 I took Mr 14 into the city with five of his friends so they could see a movie and look around the shops. Luckily I was still pretty manic so we had the music pumping the whole way there, that was a LOUD car ride! While I was waiting for them I met up with my parents for lunch and then went for a walk around the lake near the shopping centre. The lighting was AMAZING and I took a stack of photos.

So that’s some of what has been happening at my place, I kept writing for sanity even though I couldn’t publish anything, I wrote a couple of half posts I need to tweak, a ton of poetry and some random rap lyrics – I will probably share these at some point in the near future (maybe not the rap song…) Oh and I was even witness to a *murder!

*Of Crows

I hope all you guys are all doing well, now that the kids are back at school and I am back online I will endeavour to find some time to catch up on blog posts and pod casts! 

Peace, Kate xoxo