Going through changes
In the past 12months, I have spent 9 months in hospital. From 9 months in hospital I have had to leave my lovely flat in a lovely area, to living in supported accommodation in a less lucrative area with no job or career. How did it come to this? From writer to therapist, a 1st class degree, a masters with distinction. Oh how the mighty have fallen. I climb up, I fall down. I climb up, I fall down… This is tiring. Do I have the strength one more time? It’s exhausting. I’m one millimeter from giving up. But somehow I do have that millimeter. And I’ve had a number of little fights too. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. Without the losses, I wouldn’t be able to contrast the successes and recognise that it is possible to get up again.
‘I’m going through changes’, by Eminem, helped me see that change is possible. My bipolar diagnosis, a mental health disorder, has been helped through people who have positively had an impact on my life along with looking to the possibilities of the future. Equally, my substance disorder has changed dramatically partly due to the change in my environment. The darkness of my previous flat could have killed me. Quite literally. That change is about life and death issues. I ended up virtually touching fatality.
That is why the title of this column centers on change. Why do I act like I’m high and mighty when inside I’m dying I’m finally realising I need help, can’t do it myself.
I’m hating my reflection I’m walking round the house trying to fight mirrors, I can’t stand what I look like.’ (Eminem). This resonates with me on a big scale. Even changes in my bodily structure cause upset.
My move to a new home recently is one of the biggest and best changes I have undergone. It hurt, badly, to give up my flat. My flat was all I knew. Little did I realise that I was dying there, little by little, day by day. The change has made an impact, on my drug use, on my mood, and more clearly now, I can hear the music again, breaking through the darkness, like the sun starting to pierce through the overcast sky.
The one thing that has stayed with me is what renowned neurologist, Oliver Sacks, calls Musicophilia. Music in his view is not a biological need yet it’s potency holds no grounds. We have a greater capacity for music than just words alone. And music has kept me going even from childhood. In my memories of the past it was always there for me. My lifelong relationship. One that accompanied me through my changes over the years.
Necessary losses, a book I read by Judith Viorst indicates the changes we make as we grow through the years, and loss is not just grief. ‘The loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All Of Us Have to Give up in Order to Grow ‘. We change through other events in our life.
Yes bereavement, but also ends of relationships, childhood, and so on.
My new environment has offered me the chance I need to change. It has offered me a fresh start. And I thank everyone in my life for helping me. But it is also frightening as change so often does. “But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here — the extraordinary rent you have to pay as long as you stay” (Annie Dillard). Now I start from a new beginning. If I had stayed I would have paid an awful price.
They say a leopard never changes it’s spots. I think that they’re wrong. What has happened to me, through the years , has facilitated change. I never thought I would recover but though I have miles to go, it’s happening, and that gives me hope. A life without hope is not a life at all.
“Things change, and that’s the way it is ” (2pac)
Kate Taylor
