I need help.

And I have no shame in voicing that. Perhaps once upon a time I did?

Last week I didn’t share a Warrior Weekly because I was unwell. Last night the flow of energy just wasn’t there. This morning, this wanted to come out instead…

TW: talks of mental ill health and suicidal tendencies. As always, take care of your energy when reading or come back to visit this piece another time.

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In the past 6+ years that I’ve been on this monumental healing journey, I’ve sold the luxury city centre apartment I was living in. It was so spacious that it was more like a house in a flat.  

Until I became ill to the point of being unable to work, I hadn’t ever spent much time in the home that I’d maxed myself out to buy. In the process of buying it, I’d caused myself so much financial pressure in respect of saving for the deposit and worrying about paying the mortgage repayments. Something that only added to the mounting stress and pressure already existing in my life.

I didn’t voice any of this to anyone back then, but I did go on to have a breakdown and nearly take my own life. It was this event in 2016 that unleashed the gift of courage to start speaking up.

Photo by Melany Rochester on Unsplash

18 months later I found myself disabled by the illness that I’d been speaking up about to doctors for 2 whole decades before diagnosis. Was it the mental strength that had me heard for the first time in my life? Or was it the courage to start speaking my truth in a new way?

Only at the point of disability by illness did I begin to spend time in a home I spent all my days working for. Ironic that I was physically no longer able to work to pay for it. And by this time that was only because I couldn’t move a lot of the time or function out of it.

Incidentally, when I look back and reflect as deeply as I have on the role counselling therapy played in my role to recovery, it has been enormous. Crucial.

I’m also now wondering as I’m typing this, the role that counselling played in me starting to tune in to a little of what I knew to be true. The suicidal thoughts for certain completely stopped. And any occasional time they came even remotely close to resurfacing, I knew that these did not need to be acted upon. Whereas before counselling therapy I didn’t know that these were a sign of mental ill health or struggle. Even though the affirmations I had on repeat were “I hate my life in Newcastle. I am struggling” for the 18 months leading up to breakdown. I had no conscious awareness of what was going on inside my head never mind my body.

Photo by Samuel Austin on Unsplash

It's only now this piece of writing has taken off in a direction all of its own that I wonder at the connection between speaking out, seeking therapy, receiving diagnosis and connecting to the insight “something big is coming” had on me advertising for a lodger so that I could save the money obtained for the “something big is coming” that I knew was going to affect my income even though I didn’t know what.

2 years into the mother of all healing journeys, I was just getting back on my feet income wise when the pandemic hit, swiping my income for the second time in 2 years. The Monday to Friday lodger I’d been grateful to have for a whopping 3+ years had to work from home (not far away from it) so needed to hand his notice in.

I was one year into the journey of deep healing treatment, bodywork, part of which reconnected me to my dreams. I’d been dreaming of moving back to Yorkshire again recently, something which had started just before my mental and physical health took a drastic downturn.  Only instead of tuning in back then, gleaning messages, insights and wisdom, I’d shut them down and, in turn, more parts of me were steadily shutting down.

Even when I dared peak into this dream and explore it, I put loads of barriers and limitations up. I couldn’t rent, that would be a backwards step. I had to buy and get a mortgage – never once thinking of the pressure nor any impact this would have on my health.

Come 2020, things were different now. Something had shifted. Something had changed. I had changed.

I was no longer having counselling therapy. Some 3.5 years in when my counsellor said “you seem relaxed today”, I realised I no longer needed it.

My health had been my priority – No. Matter. What. – for 2 years now. And this did not negate the fact that I needed to generate an income to keep a roof over my head. But having an even higher priority above it did greatly influence financial decisions I made.

Not without adding some more pressure first though.

My financial asset was a lot for me to let go of and so I didn’t want to let go. I wanted to keep it, sought ways to rent it out. Only the universe, the flow, the energy (call it what you want) was nudging me in a different direction. With a boat load more lessons to learn, more healing to happen, more growth to burst its way through the underground and integration that would last beyond the relapse of that summer. Through all this, I did come to receive the message, I adjusted my sails. It was time to move in the direction of the wind, not against it.

I put my home up for sale and sold it not to the one who’s name energetically went wild when I saw it (the first to view) but to the one that person wound up bidding against following an understandable delay in her commitment. The buyer knew she wanted the property so much she asked all the questions that told her all the information she needed to know and rang the estate agents immediately with an offer of the full asking price.

In the end, I gifted all my furniture to the first-time buyer. A solid oak wood table, a corner unit sofa, 2 wardrobes and a double bed. Another journey in letting go.

I gave up resisting the flow of life and moved in the direction the wind was blowing me. To a place I’d never heard of never mind been to visit. “Are you sure she wants to move here?” my soon to be new landlady asked a fellow social distancing walker I’d met randomly one day from yoga. “I live in the middle of nowhere surrounded by fields”. A woman who wasn’t even looking for a lodger introduced to me in this way. The day following a meditation I’d done where I’d asked for a large room for all my ‘stuff’ in the middle of nowhere surrounded by fields. I was trying to find new ways to ease pressure in my life.

Photo by Angelina on Unsplash

This is where operation declutter began. In the 2 moves prior, I’d simply bought more storage units to house the clutter of objects I never used. In my storage bed, a black sack full of shoes that I hadn’t worn a single pair of in over 5 years. For whatever reason I couldn’t bear to part with them even though I had a massive box of shoes in my wardrobe of ones that did see the light of day occasionally.

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Unfortunately, by the time I moved I hadn’t made much of a dent. I was several weeks into relapse and had been up all-night puking. Even though I’d been back to a friend to reignite her offer to help after first, initially, declining and her having not only brought herself but another friend who I had only met once or twice, I still hadn’t been able to pack the enormity of what was taking up so much space. Not to worry, the removals lads had been overexerting themselves too and were tired so between the 3 of us, me continually having to lie down between packing, what started out as a removals for a 2 bed flat at 10:30am finished at 8:30pm a 2 hour drive away in my new home.

Photo by Connor Moynihan on Unsplash

Here, I could not communicate the extent of my ill health. Nor that I was experiencing a relapse or how seriously my ability to function was impaired. Even I didn’t realise that when I got a sweat on doing a little hoovering on one floor of the house on a good day that this was a sign of my incapacity, not until long after when I started to reflect more deeply alongside my research, incorporate period journaling and saw my health take a hike in improvement.

Once I was able, the clear out continued. Stacks of stuff put into the garage and loft for storage. At the same time, we emptied a couple of skips worth of loft attire that had been collected in the 30sum years of the house being lived in.

My large bedroom full to the rafters the entire 2 years I lived there. Of what though? A lot of it is gone now in the mass exodus of bin bags here, charity bags there and the year after I moved into my static caravan a few car boot sales and a few valuable items sold on facebook marketplace (not my forte so I asked a friend for her trusty help with this, and thanks to her it all sold in a short space of time and I made a few hundred quid).

The aftermath left me with an ensuite toilet full to the brim of ‘the last of my clutter’. This was last year and as my health had improved to levels I had never experienced before (mostly only mild pain, symptoms only few), I noticed a correlation between the remnants of my physical clutter and the remnants of ill-health.

Interestingly, this did not spur me on and not only did the ensuite stay bursting full and unusable, but further piles of clutter began to build in the spare bedroom once again.

Now we reach the point I sat down to initially start writing from this morning, only it took off in a different direction (as these things so often do) and has brought up so much emotion for me to process.

It is only now, for the very first time today, that I feel like I have the space for emotion to bubble up and rise. That I have an outlet for it, have the room in my body to feel it, witness it, process it and move through it. Though I have experienced this before (largely with the processing of recent series on the struggle of slowing down) and have been using writing as a therapy since 2016, I haven’t ever felt able to regulate in this way quite so well as I am now able to.

In recent weeks I’ve realised that I was struggling (or not making the time) to create space in my week to sort through it. I live between here and my partners so there’s plenty of reason why when time here to do it is reduced.

It was only last week when the Mr suggested spending the weekend at mine to declutter and I said “yes. Yes please.” that I realised I need help. I need help with this. I need support. I am aware it is only the remnants of the clutter of the last of my life. And yet it is a big deal. I need to be held as I embark on the latter part of this journey. In the same way that I have needed to be held on all elements and aspects of this path. Only society paints a picture that this is selfish, self-indulgent, attention seeking. And that if you do need it, there is something wrong with you. And then and only then, are you allowed. And even then, you will feel shamed and stigmatised for it. And it may not be available because there’s a waiting list. And you can only have this one and not that one.

Photo by Carolina Heza on Unsplash

One question that has been on my mind recently is

Who am I when I no longer spend days of the month ill?

Who am I when I have a whole month to align with the seasons of the menstrual cycle and experience all the energy and the wellness that that brings?

I don’t know the answer to that question. For I will not be who I am now. There will be a death and a rebirth. And I’ve also been wondering recently why we only see death as final. Why we haven’t been taught that death and rebirth is a continuation in life. Every year, after a spectacular show of colours, the leaves on the trees die. The bloom of all the summers flowers come to an end. Only to return in full bloom the year after. Every year. And yet we’ve been taught to go against the grain, against the flow. Continue and fight, push on, carry forth, force, just keep going as though we are some lit up Christmas tree putting on a performance that lasts beyond the Christmas play.

For me, this weekend, it has been great to proudly proclaim that I need help. Of course I need help. I cannot do all that I need and is expected of me alone. I didn’t get this far on my own. Nor did human civilisation.  

So, yes, I need help. A great deal of help. I wouldn’t be here without it.

It is not to be shamed. Looked down upon. Used as a crux when someone is struggling. Put down to the bottom of the list.

What would happen if we used help and support when we were doing well? Flying high. Thriving (and not just surviving). As far as my own journey and story goes, only time will tell, I guess.

Photo by pure julia on Unsplash