The Sun Will Rise and We Will Try Again

You say it to yourself sometimes, this is not my life.

You get another pin prick, you answer another question, you take another tablet, you stare out the same window from the same bed on a day that feels just the same. It has been five weeks and you are still here. Still sick. This is not my life, you say to yourself, this can not be my life.

But… it is. This is the life you wake up to, the life you fall asleep to, the life you fought so hard to keep and build and experience. And you want to keep it, to continue fighting for it, to make it better and brighter and more yours, but still… This is not my life, you say.

What you really mean is, this isn’t the life I want, it isn’t the life I thought I would have, this isn’t the life I had hoped for. And I guess that’s pretty universal, I bet we have all felt that way at some point or another; when we’ve failed someone or something or someone or something has failed us. When we have made a mistake. When we are faced with an impossible choice. When we miss an opportunity. We have all experienced that moment when we look at ourselves and realise that where we are is not where we meant to be. This is not my life, we say.

The thing is… The life I want is already mine. It’s there waiting for me in a house with two kittens and a big garden and next door neighbours that bake you date loaves just because they love you. It’s there waiting for me in a big bed with proper sheets and big arms that are always open and a big view over the wetland that catches fire every night. In my friends and my family and my way-too-many potplants and the myriad of plans and lists and dreams that are lying abandoned. That’s my life. And I want it back. More than that too… I want that life we had hoped for.

This weekend has been very hard for me. Yesterday I got to go home for the day. It was beautiful. Everything was wonderful. We were together. I was home. But it was also difficult. I spent the day tiptoeing on the edge of tears; everything I looked at, everything that I touched, everything I love, everything that is mine. The places I belong to and my family… all here but I am there. And it isn’t right. It isn’t how it should be. And I see all the ways in which my life needs me, all the things it’s missing without me there to tend to it and take care of it and I grieve.

And in my head that old song plays on repeat;
I wanna go home,
Let me go home,
Oh I feel so broked up,
I wanna go home.

I was home but I couldn’t stay. We drove back over the Kaimais through mist and rain, a thick and suffocating blanket disguising the world around us. It hasn’t stopped raining in days. The air is heavy with humidity and everything feels damp all the time.

This morning the doctors came again, as they do every day in different permutations. They came and they told me what was happening and what they had discovered. And the news wasn’t good.

It’s still too fresh and I’m still too ignorant to go into any detail. Maybe I will never understand it enough, the doctors don’t seem to either. Essentially my body is confusing things. Getting rid of what it should be holding onto and holding onto the things it should be getting rid of. And in between all of that my kidney is struggling. In the not-exactly-tactful words of my doctor; everything is getting worse (that is a direct quote). We have moved from our original intentions of fixing the issue to the lesser ambition of just trying to stop it degenerating further. We aren’t thinking about a solution so much as we are trying to figure out a management plan. And, as a collective, we aren’t entirely sure where to go from here.

My family call and I don’t know how to tell them or what to tell them. My attempts are occasionally punctuated with a slight crack in my voice and I’ll say, it’s ok. I’m ok. I’m just a bit tired. I say that all the time. The doctors ask me how I am or my mum checks in or my dad questions how I’m doing. I’m ok, I say, I’m just a bit tired.

And I am, I am tired. But what I really mean is, I am sad.

Mostly I am fine. Happy even. Mum or Tom and I play board games and go for walks and explore the before-undiscovered jewels of what is a vastly underrated city. I am trying to teach myself how to draw again to accommodate the shaking hands I have as a side-effect of one of my medications. I like to rearrange the flowers on the windowsill in my room and to write little bits and pieces of the children’s novel I am trying to bring to life. I call my family and organise our wedding. I look forward to mail deliveries and visitors and weekends.

I will be ok. As Tom says to me, I always am and we always are. No matter what happens, he tells me, as long as we have each other we will be happy. And as I have discovered on the journey, there are always so many reasons to be happy. And we aren’t giving up. Nobody is giving up. We will all keep trying. We maybe just have to figure out a different plan, work out a different dream, adjust our hopes and expectations.

This is my life. It is the only one I get. So I choose to live it in whatever way I can. I choose to live it in the best way that I can.

Ring out the False, Ring in the True

Every new year we get the chance to reflect on the one just passing and to look forward to the one to come. There’s a natural pause that encourages us to, and a tradition established that compounds it. It isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. New Year’s Eve is a portal, like a doorway, that psychologically acts the same way; we pass through it and it resets our minds, clearing them of our previous preoccupations and allowing us to form new ones. Sometimes we need to leave things behind and a new year is a good opportunity to do so. But, in another sense, there’s increased pressure to make plans and set goals that you don’t necessarily ascribe to.

Sometimes, in spite of myself, I get caught up in comparing my life to these arbitrary measures of success that as a society we have determined are a reflection of our functionality as a human being. Sometimes, in spite of myself, this makes me sad. Broken down into a list of achievements or externally motivated goals, my life might not seem much. I haven’t changed the world, I haven’t established a sparkling career, I haven’t got a fancy car- hell I can’t even drive. Against a yardstick of conventional success, I would fall short time and time again. But then I try to remind myself that I didn’t set those parameters and I don’t wish them to measure my life either. That at the end of the day, and certainly at the end of the year, the questions I ask myself are not about what I achieved or acquired. I didn’t choose to focus on what I am doing; instead what I am interested in are questions about being. Was that honest? Was that fair? Was that kind? Did I act generously? Do I understand? What can I do to help? And, always always always… what can I learn?

I don’t always get it right. Sometimes I still mess up or say the wrong thing or miss an opportunity to do something that could make a difference. But I try, I’m always trying. And every day I get another chance to do things differently and to do things better.

I think that’s why, when it comes to the New Year ticking over, I like to approach it with not resolutions but with intentions; to make my plans about being, not doing. And when I come to the end of the year and reflect it isn’t about measuring my “success”, it’s about the level of fulfilment I have reached and the differences I have made in my world.

Last year was a really big year for me. In expected and unexpected ways. I got a fiance and a kidney, made new friends, a few exciting decisions, several playlists and some beautiful meals, walked my neighbourhood many times over, planted trees, picked flowers, lost my little cat and too much weight, spent a lot of time in pyjamas but tried to spend less money, watched too many home shows, watched just enough sunrises, and, somewhere amongst all that, I started imagining a life outside of hospital schedules and doctor’s appointments and figuring out what I wanted it to look like.

And what I figured out is that I really love my life. I love my home, my friends, my family. I don’t need my life to be better, what I really wanted was for me to be better. Both health wise and as a person. I want to make good decisions and good choices, to be a more present listener and a more helpful friend, to use some of my new energy to contribute to something bigger than I am, to continue to value the things smaller than I am. I don’t want more stuff; I want more sleep, more vegetables, more time with the people I love, more Te Reo. I want less passivity and complacency, less screen time, less meat and less prejudice. I want my hours to be an investment and not a waste; but to appreciate that spending hours doing nothing is sometimes the absolute best way I could spend them. They aren’t empty hours if they make me feel full.

The thing is… it’s not the life you have that makes you who you are, it’s the way you live it. You can’t control everything that happens to you. I had hopes and expectations for my transplant recovery, how it would pan out and what it would feel like, and they didn’t all come true. Many of them didn’t eventuate and the reality of recovery and “real life” often felt very far away from my desires. And my desires are often far away from the ones I feel like I should have, or am meant to have. The ones other people my age, my sex, my background might have. There’s that expectation again you see. Expectations are like fine pottery; the harder you hold them, the more likely they are to crack between your fingers. And who gets hurt then? Only you. I think that’s the main thing I want to leave at the doorway of this new year; expectations that don’t even belong to me. Having or doing more doesn’t mean I am more does it? We are after all human beings. But I do want to be better and becoming better isn’t just something that happens. It’s a choice or a series of choices we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves, to stay or to go, to listen more carefully, to notice more, to love.

I don’t believe in labouring for the sake of labouring; for the purpose of reaching a certain milestone or measure of success as defined by expectations outside of your own. I don’t believe in following convention or necessarily disregarding those who do. We all have our own journey; we all matter equally; we all deserve grace and time no matter how we are different to each other.

What I do believe in is intentions and in working hard to pursue them: working for empathy and understanding of others, working for the depth and development of self, working to make each day better, each moment better, each place and person we touch better for our presence. Choose the things that matter to you, the values you believe in, and live a life trying to ascribe to those values. And then, no matter what you achieve or don’t achieve, whether you have a house, a degree, healthy children, a great job or a good car, or whether you don’t have any of those things, you will be a success .

I believe in fresh starts and new beginnings, trying again, trying harder. Welcoming a new year with open arms, an open heart and an open mind.

I believe in happy endings too. Hello 2018, best year yet.

The title of this post comes from the Alfred Tennyson quote.

When the Lights Go Out

Last Tuesday I turned thirty. It was a wonderful day celebrating with the person I entered this world with three decades ago. There was sunshine and surprises, cake with ridiculous amounts of cream, sweet and thoughtful messages and cards and calls, flowers and fresh strawberries, and every single avocado I opened was without blemish. I felt extraordinarily lucky and so very glad to have made it this far; both in years and in life. Here is my beautiful world and the beautiful people in it and the beautiful future I can create and I am so glad to be myself, to have grown into this person, to have this, to be thirty years old and living.

But to have so much, to want so much, to dream and plan and live and feel….opens you up. And when you have something, you also have something to lose.

I am back in the Renal Ward here in Waikato. I am lying still after another biopsy. Things are not going as well as we had hoped and my last few readings have been a bit worrying so here we are again. And here we go again.

I am grateful to have a team that monitors me so closely, that care for me both personally and professionally, who want this to work so badly for me. I am grateful to have a fiance who always makes things easier, who never complains about the drive over or about missing work, who stays with me even when I am not chatty or entertaining in the sterile and strange hospital environment. I am grateful. But I am still frustrated.

I started writing this post a couple of weeks ago and then I couldn’t manage to get it finished. I didn’t know quite how to say what it was I meant and I wasn’t even sure exactly what it was I meant to say. Things have been different to what I had expected. Things have been a lot more complicated and difficult and volatile than we had hoped. I knew this first year would be unsettled but I also thought it would be easier than it is.

I am better. In lots of ways. There are things I can do that I couldn’t before, I’m no longer exhausted by simple activities and if I am tired I recover a great deal faster. I am going for walks every day, I may even get up the Mount some time soon. I haven’t needed a single potassium or magnesium infusion since my surgery. I can vacuum my whole house in one go. These are all excellent, positive, encouraging results. It’s just that I, and my medical team, had hoped for better.

We have concerns. My concerns are mostly that they are concerned. That is why I am here again. That is why we have done another painful biopsy. That is why I am on tenterhooks every time I get a blood test. I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach and the back of my head, like a weight I am not used to carrying.

Is it bereavement I feel? Certainly it feels a little like grief. I’m not even sure what I am mourning though. Is it my old life? The fact I at least felt somewhat in control of it? The reality that my current and immediate future does not match the one I had imagined? There’s no use pretending that it has eventuated. I know now that I had overestimated every aspect of my ability to recover and the level of strength and wellness I would feel post-transplant. I had thought, perhaps naively, perhaps blindly optimistically, that I would have a working kidney and then I would be well, I would be normal. But, in one sharp cut, both the expectation of the new and the familiarity of the old have been banished and this is uncharted and unpredictable territory.

I grieve for my body. It feels like a foreign city to me sometimes. Gorges and earthquakes and giant splits in my skin. Bumpy new roads and strange sensations. I don’t quite speak the language of this new incarnation and the incomprehension this causes, the difficulty we face in understanding and translating each other, makes everything more difficult and more complicated. We are strangers to each other and sometimes it feels like I am the only one making an effort to reach through. The uncertainty that accompanies such a major, and traumatic, change is unsettling, disconcerting, and for a control freak like me, a source of profound anxiety.

I am doing everything I can, everything I am told to do. It is hard, this part, to know what should be happening and yet to have no ability to make it happen beyond what I am already doing (which is currently not enough).

I am mourning something I never quite had and maybe that’s what makes it more difficult.

And there are other losses. Other pains to mourn. I try to remind myself that loss came from gain; that I was lucky to have something to lose. I tell myself over and over again. As if it makes it easier. As if it will hurt less.

The thing is, the breaking of a bond you have invested in will always leave you changed; leave you as both more and less than you were before. Sometimes it is unexpected. Sometimes you believe you are prepared. Sometimes you expect it but you still aren’t prepared. Even when it’s something or someone you know you needed to give up or wanted to get rid of, it doesn’t mean the loss isn’t difficult. There will always be grief involved. There is always some mourning in change.

The old adage that time heals is true but it’s not the whole story. Certainly the day to day of things might ease but there will always be moments where it hurts all over again as much as it ever did. Healing by its definition means there must be a wound and though it may repair it will never be the same. Sometimes you might heal stronger; you hope you will heal stronger; but you will always bear the marks.

Maybe the skin feels tight when it pulls away from the scar, maybe you favour your other arm after a break, maybe you still get short of breath when you feel overwhelmed though it’s been years since your last anxiety attack, maybe you give less of your heart away, or love a little more cautiously… We wear the vestiges of our past pains forever.

As I get older though, I can recognise the power of loss too. Mostly it is loss that teaches us about the worth of things. There’s another old saying; you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Sometimes, if you’re lucky and clever and you learn, you can discover the value of what you have before it’s gone. And we can discover within ourselves the things we can gain too; resilience, empathy, gratitude.

Part of the long (often difficult and painful) journey of emotional healing I have been on since my teen years and early twenties, when I experienced at times crippling mental illness, has been accepting that sadness is a valid emotion. That feeling sad is not a failure and that in itself it is a reasonable and necessary emotion like any other (except bitterness which is the single least constructive feeling you can experience). Learning to sit with my sadness and let myself feel it was terribly hard to get my head around. Recognising that sadness is a crucial and unavoidable part of being open, of loving and receiving love, of making any kind of connection with the world around you and the people (or animals) in it. Understanding that sadness is the sister of joy and that they come as an inseparable pair. Appreciating the strength that comes from accepting both and growing from them and not letting fear of getting hurt or experiencing loss prevent you from creating bonds.

The Japanese have a beautiful process called Kintsugi, a method for repairing broken ceramics with a special lacquer mixed with gold. The break becomes a vein of precious metal through the object. The philosophy behind this is to recognise its history and to visibly incorporate the repair into the new piece instead of disguising it. It becomes, through this journey, something more beautiful than the original; having been broken it becomes greater.

I like to think that maybe I’m like that. A little bit broken in some ways, but better for it. I know that the journey I’ve had to this point, the connections I have made, the ties that bind me here in this place, to these people, are a part of the reason I can keep faith and keep trying, even when things are hard.

So This is Where the Fear is

It is a beautiful day. The sun is out, the sky is blue, it is warm. It feels just a little like spring and I am trying to remind myself to enjoy it. The last few days have been a bit manic. I have barely taken a breath. I have hardly sat down. I have had trouble sleeping. I thought I was fairly organised but there were so many things that couldn’t be done any earlier than last minute. For an obsessive, control-freak perfectionist like me, planning and packing has been a marathon effort and this final week has been a trial. But now we are here; everything that can be done has been; anything left undone will have to go to the devil.

My room has yellow check curtains in that relentlessly cheerful shade peculiar to public institutions, and an unexpectedly beautiful view to Rangitoto island. I can see boats pulling in and out, the cranes working away busily at the port. My nieces and nephews always call them giraffes. The giraffes are eating their fill today. And here we are. This time tomorrow I will be out cold on an operating table. Up until this point the whole transplant thing has been an intellectual exercise. It feels quite surreal to be in this place, waiting for the morning to come. I almost can’t believe it will happen. I have waited such a long time. But now we are here and it is happening. I’m scared.

Sometimes I feel ungrateful or unworthy when I say that. As if I only deserve this if I can be brave and stay positive, if I don’t waver from the persistent and overwhelming belief that it will all be ok. And I do believe that. I really, truly do. And yet, I am still scared. The thing is, through all of this, I’ve learnt some things. Really important things. And I thought maybe this last post before my surgery might be the place to share them.

Firstly; I have learnt that bravery isn’t mindless faith. This. Is. Scary. Anyone who understands the procedure understands there are very real and confronting risks, both before, during and after the surgery. Recovery will be tough. Side effects are tough. What comes after is permanent and the treatment is for the rest of my life. Only a fool wouldn’t feel fear in this moment. But feeling fear isn’t the same as letting it control you. I let myself feel it, let myself acknowledge it and express it. And then I don’t let myself become mired in it. That’s the lesson. Secondly, I’ve learnt that resilience doesn’t neccessarily mean bouncing back to where you were before. Sometimes it means surviving, or adapting to a new normal. To move forward not backwards. Resilience is a test of your ability to accept and work with change when it happens; to make a difference when you can and accept when you can’t with grace. Resilience isn’t pretending that the hard stuff isn’t hard. This is hard. Even if everything goes as perfectly as possible, it will still be hard. It’s painful and messy and difficult to control and they are all concepts I find hard. I don’t like messy. I don’t like not being in control. But, and here’s my third and most important lesson, engaging in the full range of experience – living and dying, love and loss, sickness and health – is what we get to do. Being human doesn’t happen despite suffering; it happens within it. Even as the last decade has passed without a great measure of outward growth or measurable success, my inward growth has been prodigal. All of the ways in which this illness has tested and proven me, stretched and battered me. Here I am; scared and messy, resilient and strong. Here is the fear; and I am no less worthy for feeling it. Fear is not weakness. Fear is not failure. Fear exists to remind us only that some things are worth overcoming. And here is my overcoming.

I want to say thank you. For coming with me. For facing it all beside me. When we approach suffering together, when we choose not to hide from it, our lives don’t diminish, they expand. Today my life feels wide open. The outpouring of love, support, positivity and faith from friends, family and my wider community has been overwhelming and incredibly humbling. You wonderful people. How lucky I am to have you. It is… I have no vocabulary to describe how it makes me feel. Buoyed I guess. Uplifted. Made bigger by the love given to me. Made stronger by the people holding me up.

I am grateful beyond words. I am moved beyond measure. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Tomorrow is the day my friends. But it’s also only a day. My story extends in both directions to and from this point and though it is momentous, the truth is that it’s just one dot on the map of my life. A life I hope holds many, many more. Every day from this day I hope I can make meaningful. Every day from this day I hope I can make worthy of you all, worthy of this sacrifice, this love, all this belief and faith, support and strength loaned and given to me. It’s a gift, this life; this phenomenal, beautiful life. A gift made better for giving. Mine is better for yours.

The Unquiet Mind

Today I stopped breathing. My eyes lost focus, my hands went numb, my skin felt clammy and hot. The whole world spun in dizzying, terrifying motion around me. It felt like I was drowning and suffocating and being buried alive all at the same time. It was excruciating and disturbing and utterly inexplicable. 

I was having a panic attack. I knew, at least, from past experience that that’s what was happening to me. But it had been a while and it left me shaken, sweating and with a dry, sickly taste in my mouth like I’d been chewing on sawdust.
These days I spend a lot of time and energy on developing and practising behaviours and thought processes to limit my anxiety and stress. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it’s as demanding as a full-time job and as necessary as sleep. In fact, sleep is an important part of my well-being arsenal. I’m saying this because I think it’s important to acknowledge that there’s not always a cure for things; sometimes there’s only a treatment. There might be medications or meditations or conversations that make things easier to understand and bear and we should make the effort to share our hard-won experience of what works for us in case it helps someone else. But it’s a treatment, it’s mostly not a permanent fix. For me that treatment is an every day commitment, one I practise with devotion because it protects and sustains me. I want this to be talked about. I want this to be normalised. I want this to be accepted. I want, desperately, for this to be understood. I am better, absolutely, but I am not “cured”.

I’m also saying it because I am, despite having had years to get used to it, only just realising that my kidney transplant is the same. I have spent so much time planning excitedly for the future, and everybody we tell is excited and expectant for me too. But I seem to have skipped over the comprehension that this surgery is also not a cure. Even if (when…) my surgery is successful, the rest of my life will involve a battery of medications as critical and necessary as my daily devotions to preserving and maintaining my mental health. The internet is a dark and twisty hole of stories about the impact and side effects of these miracle drugs. And that’s not sarcasm; they really are miracle drugs. But even miracles (maybe especially miracles) come with sacrifices. I will have some significant adjustments to make. There will undoubtedbly be sacrifices I need to make.

I don’t want this to come across as negative, pessimistic or ungrateful.
I am fortunate beyond anything for so many different reasons. I am so lucky. I am so blessed. I am deeply, unquestionably, excited, happy and hopeful.

Ah, but I’m scared you know. I am, quite honestly, bloody petrified. And I guess I want to say that out loud and to acknowledge that that’s ok too.

The title for this post comes the Napoleon Bonaparte quotation: “The best cure for the body is a quiet mind”. A little harder in practise than in theory mate.

The Miracle of Existence

There’s pathos in the everyday, the familiarity of our routines, in the way the toaster clicks as it cooks, the whistling of the steam in the kettle, the sounds of the morning in the low level hum of the day beginning. It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present falling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When I am no longer twenty-nine and longing and insubstantial and beautiful, or ever quite as young as this moment right now, I won’t remember the way I stir the porridge and the sound the spoon makes on the thick bottomed pot, the feel of my boyfriend’s wool socks slipping down my bare legs, the gentle warmth of the winter sun melting the frosted grass, the steady heartbeat of the city in the distance, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already. The moment has passed and I am older now, then. We let so much of our time disappear disregarded; as if the momentous is all that counts. Only these in-betweens are what make a life, and what define a person. The million small ways in which we feel gratitude or display compassion or show integrity. There is a sense today that the ordinary is unremarkable. Brené Brown wrote, “in this world, an ordinary life has become synonymous with a meaningless life,” as if these moments of ritual and routine can not add up to something beautiful. As if we must be extraordinary to matter. But it all matters. We all matter. I try to be aware of the sensations I experience, the world I inhabit, the sweetness of my ordinary life, the satisfaction of being. Any moment, any action, has meaning if we give it such. I have wished whole years away in hoping for more. I swore I wouldn’t ever again.

When people ask me how old I am, sometimes I want to tell them a decade younger. Because that’s when I stopped. That’s when my life was put on pause and my upward growth halted. My twenties were a ghost decade. I mean, I lived them. Things happened. Good things. Bad things. Things that were neither or both. Years passed. I undeniably grew older; I can see the evidence of time scraping its nails into the soft skin around my eyes, in the white hairs appearing on my partner’s scalp. A recent scan of my bones, my hip, my spine, show them to have aged beyond even my actual age. They are hollowing out like bird bones for the moment I launch into flight. I forget more. I worry that fact around like a ferreting terrier. Do I forget because I am tired? Because I’m in pain? Because there’s too much going on in my head? Or because I’m getting older and my brain is getting weaker? I used to be quite dualistic: my mind and my body were two quite separate things, the broken flesh just a vessel for a superior brain. It didn’t matter so much if it failed me in form or function; after a twisted and obsessive pursuit of physical improvement that haunted my teens, I thought I had reached a much healthier perspective. I divorced all connection between the body I walked around in and the thoughts that drove it. Like a vehicle, I did my best to fuel and maintain it. I respected its abilities and trashed its shortcomings without any real sense of belonging to it. But I was mistaken. Just as my mind sabotaged my body, the illness I have battled so long infected my mind. There is a profound and complex interrelationship between them, and the years that I’ve spent living in one at the expense of the other have proven to be more than problematic. The brain and peripheral nervous system, the endocrine and immune systems, and indeed, all the organs of our body and all the emotional responses we have, share a common chemical language and are constantly communicating with one another. My frustration and unhappiness with my faulty physicality made me feel like a soul trapped in a skull and rib cage. But I have realised that my thoughts, my will, my feelings, have a measurable effect on my health and body; and in reverse, my health has a meaningful impact on my happiness and resilience levels. As I look forward to the future post-transplant, I’m more aware than ever that I am a whole and that the whole of me is more than the sum of the parts. Even an organ short. I am only myself; but I am trying to be always and more completely myself.

And the funny thing is that I have spent a decade waiting. Thinking. Observing. Researching. Analysing. Dreaming. The cerebral side of life taking precedence, a response to the physical limitations imposed by my weakness but worsened by my need for understanding, for control. Now my plans are full of doing, making, being. I will be well and the things I long most for are the things that move my bones and stretch my muscles; the snip snap of tendons and joints creaking into place. There are mountains to climb, cities to wander, babies to bear, people to hold. The physicality of life and living, love and loving. The ways of expressing my inner world in action that I have been denied so long. 

This is a strange period of time. This almost time. All this imminent change is coming but I’m not close enough to anything definite to prepare for it. I feel like I’m in an adolescent waiting zone. Where there’s a sense of the future I’ll have, yet so much is still in flux that it’s angsty and confusing. Sometimes I feel like I am an almost person waiting to be an actual one. But I am here. I am already living. I am young and I am old and I am body and I am mind. In the poetry of my tea leaves brewing in the pot and the breeze spinning the sheets on the line in swift dizzying motion, in the speaking magnitude of insignificant, everyday things, in the cells that die and the hopes that grow, I live.

Improbable, Beautiful and Afraid of Nothing

There have been so many days of rain this summer. Day after day after day of it. Rain so heavy it made our chimney leak. Rain so constant we have grown colonies of mushrooms on the lawn (which always makes me think of that Sylvia Plath poem and shudder). I have never seen the countryside so green at this edge of the year and I can not remember one as wet. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep for the unending chatter of the drops falling on the roof, or can’t leave the house because of the sheeting precipitation, it feels like it won’t ever stop. And yet, it always does. The skies open up, the edges of the horizon turn blue, the sun filters down in hazy rays through the clouds; it is bright again and I forget how it felt to be so damp it chilled my bones despite the sticky and suffocating humidity. In the midst of those grey and relentless days I’ve been living much inside my head. Sunshine makes it easy to avoid thinking beyond the next swim, the closest ice cream store, the joy of lying under the sprinkler in my bathing suit. In the rain I am forced to consider myself; to consider the question of my future and how exactly I shall answer it. It has been a strange month or so of growing and stretching in some unpractised and uncomfortable ways, and my skin feels tight and unhappy. Inflated with all this longing and yearning, I am getting too big for my current life. 

There is one remaining test to be done before we are given a date for surgery. Just the one. In a month’s time everything will be ticked off; we will have jumped through all the hoops, and we will be, at long last, ready to move onto transplant. I’m not going to lie, sometimes it has felt like forever waiting for things to happen. Months pass with no forward motion, no new information, no results, no referrals, no plans. It can take up to twelve weeks between each part of the process before we move on to the next. It can be hard not to get angry sometimes; it feels ridiculous that something so important, so absolutely critical to me, can be delayed so often and so much. I try to breathe, try to remember that I am only one person, try to tiptoe that line between hope and despair. It has taken almost two years to get to this point, and, now that my transplant is so close to happening, I’m not actually sure that I’ve had enough time to figure it all out.

In this incarnation of my life I have always been careful not to plan too far ahead; not to think too much of the future; not to commit to too much and to always set up an out just in case. My yes is always accompanied by a caveat; health permitting. It changes so fast and I can’t control it. Even within the space of hours things can progress from (my) normal to critical. Because of this the future has always been an amorphous, tentative thing for me, and any plans beyond the small and domestic almost non-existent. In some ways this is self-protection; not just for my health but for my heart. Many things I can’t do. Many things I shouldn’t do. And even when I might be able to do them, there are far too many times I end up too sick to carry them out. Sometimes it’s easier to not to hope or plan for things than to deal with the disappointment when they can not come to fruition.

But my life is changing; now I have to consider the future, a different future, a future I have the control of. And I need to start preparing for it even if I can’t yet comprehend how it will be. My current life has a routine. It has well established boundaries and very clear limitations. And stepping outside of those boundaries when those limitations are removed is downright terrifying for me. I’m an imaginative girl but I am so far removed from the context it’s almost impossible for me to conceive of what a normal life will be like.

I jump from one potential future to another, one scheme to the next. I discuss these ideas with my friends or family, I do research, I write hundreds of lists. I have created enough fictional futures for a dozen lifetimes and I still haven’t decided what it is I want. If there were more parameters it might be easier to figure it out; but, within reason, there’s nothing to stop me from pursuing any of the plans I have dreamed up. I could do almost anything really, and yet the reality is, I can not do everything. And I am scared to the  point of immobility. Because what if I choose wrong? I don’t want to choose wrong. I have already lost so much of my life, I couldn’t bear to waste any more of it by picking the wrong future. And it’s hard because I don’t know who I am when I am well. I don’t know what I will enjoy or how it will feel.

I Google “life after kidney transplant” but all it tells me are the medical implications, the physical changes, the critical commitment to medications, healthy lifestyle and diet, the regular doctors visits and blood tests, the potential for imminent failure but also the expected potential for a much more normal life. And that’s useful, it’s important information, I am grateful to read it; but though I search and search and search, nobody can tell me how it feels, how I might feel when I am through. Not physically, emotionally. Everything I can find is from hospital literature; what you can expect, how long you can expect it to last, what will be required from you. But there’s nobody telling me how it is to live it. How does anybody live it?

I feel twelve and choosing my new school far from home; I feel eighteen and choosing to travel overseas rather than go straight to university; I feel twenty-two and choosing to leave my hometown and make a new one. I feel all new and uncertain and scared and underprepared and almost, almost, almost free but not quite there. I’m not quite free and I’m not quite sure of anything.

I could study again, something new. Maybe do teaching or train to be a librarian. I could go back to painting or something else creative. Do I want to work for someone else or for myself? Do I want an easy job or one that challenges me? Do I want a job that makes money or one that makes a difference? Will I need a job with little stress to help protect my health? What is it I want to do?

If I am honest here, trying to figure out what I want to do is overwhelming. In the small hours of the morning, when I am still too often awake, I feel the weight of these decisions pressing in on me. And the truth is, I can’t actually make these decisions yet. We don’t know if the kidney will take, if the surgery will be successful, if I will improve drastically or if I will always be in some ways handicapped. We don’t know if this is the solution. We don’t know if there is more than one problem to be solved. Too much remains to be defined and that makes my planning problematic. My boundaries haven’t been prescribed and figuring out what I want to do is still an exercise in futility.

Besides, if the last seven years have taught me anything, I am asking the wrong question of myself. I think we’re all asking the wrong questions and, if the media, political climate, social malaise, rates of depression, anxiety, dissatisfaction and suicide are any evidence, we’re also coming up with the wrong answers. When I am lying sleepless in my bed, suffocating under these lives I haven’t lived yet, I force myself to breathe deeply and remind myself that what I want to do isn’t the important thing; the important thing is what I want to be.

There is a significant and incredibly meaningful difference between doing what you want and being who you want and sometimes you sacrifice the first for the second. It’s worth it, to give doing something up in order to become a better person. Or, in my case, to be given something and to become better, just better fullstop.

It is an incredible gift that I am getting. And I’m aware that calling it a gift might sound a little twee, sentimental or clichéd.  But it is. I am getting a chance, I am getting the choice, I am getting an opportunity to do more, but, critically, I am also getting the opportunity to be more. And when I think about my intangible and still undecided future I want the decisions I make to be about the kind of person I want to be; not how to make a living but how to live.

Mary Oliver said it best, I think, in her poem The Summer Day:

“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? / Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

And that’s what I am in the process of figuring out; what I plan to do with my own oh so precious life.

The title of this post is from another beautiful Mary Oliver poem, Starlings in Winter. 

Written on your Heart

​Everybody has a place they go to when they close their eyes. A place that has meaning, that reasonates when the real world becomes too much. Where is it you go when you take a breath? When you take a moment? When you are so overwhelmed the only thing you can do is shutter yourself by shutting your eyes? We all have somewhere we escape to in the darkness that closing them brings, and with it peace or happiness or respite from the things that worry or haunt you. Maybe it’s somewhere you’ve been, maybe it’s somewhere you’ve made up, maybe it’s somewhere between those two. Wherever it is, in your mind it belongs to you and it is yours alone. Behind the pinky black of my eyelids, I am in a sunny bay. Bush covered hills protect my back. Along the ragged edges of the beach are a tribe of ancient pohutakawa spreading their arms open in welcome and dipping their leaved fingers into the golden sand below. The curving headlands hold us close within their embrace, a cosy little cove with only a hint of the endless coastline beyond. No need for great explorations they say. Stay here. Stop trying so hard to get further, to move faster, to climb upwards and onwards and ever distant from the things that make you happy. Be still. You can be contented here, they say. They offer up crabs, mussels, kina… munificent to the bounty hunters who scramble barefoot up their rough black rocks. Children stand with fluorescent hand reels dangling into the water. There’s no shop here, no dairy. A man in an ice cream van plays greensleaves as he winds down the hill every day, the familiar chiming drawing little ones out, coins hot and sticky in eager hands. On the kitchen bench are tins of cake and biscuits and rich Christmas treats and nobody notices or cares if a slice or two disappears, even at breakfast time. Bowls spill over with glossy cherries and almost-over-ripe strawberries leaking sweet red juice into the blue patterned china. Fingers stay stained pink for weeks. From early in the morning till the late summer sunset you can hear the gulls calling and little chattering voices drifting up on the breeze. Babies are rocked to sleep in the shade and rocketed to the water to be rinsed, small cities in sand leap up along the shore, the speed of industry rivaling the greatest of developments, older bodies haul themselves up from the sand in pieces to throw themselves in the lapping water. In the hazy sunshine nothing happens and everything happens. Everything is simple and momentous. The way skin prickles with the salt as it dries. The way fish tastes, fresh and subtle and secretive, when it’s come off your own line. The scratchiness of sand between sheets at night. The air smells like coconut sunscreen and citronella candles and barbecued sausages. Treasure builds up in piles at the feet of dozing parents: soft edged glass in jewel colours, shells with twisted passages, necklaces of popping seaweed, blue-toned feathers. Life falls into a kind of rhythm, suggested, but not dictated, by the gentle too and fro of the waves we are drawn to. Days are long but easy. Nothing is demanded except payment when someone loses another hand of deal and another beer whenever the next person stands up. Days pass in movable feasts, in cloudless skies, in books read in one go. They drift by in lemon flavored cordial sips, striped beach towels, exuberant sandy kisses from happy little girls. This is the place I come to when I close my eyes. And right now, when I open them, I am here too.

I love being here at the beach but at the same time I find it very hard to be away from home. It’s hard explaining every nuance of my condition. It’s hard to find an easy, understandable, uncomplicated and unemotional way to respond when people ask what I’ve been up to. It’s hard spending an entire extra day in hospital because they’re slow and unfamiliar with my protocol and untrained in the skills needed to implement it. It’s hard having to go in an extra day early. It’s hard that half my holiday is wasted in hospital. It’s hard that my nieces and nephew have to be told to be quiet with me, to be gentle, because I get too tired, too worn out by their excited, affectionate, sweet but demanding attention. It’s hard that we miss out on adventures or that if we go, I lose another day recovering from it. These things are hard, maybe even made harder, in a place that is so easy.

It has been hard, hasn’t it? For all of us.

Today is January 1st, 2017. Yesterday we had a brilliant day; saying goodbye in the best kind of way to a year that has been fraught and funny and frustrating and triumphant and terrible all at once. For me it has been a year of painful waiting and too-and-froing and complications and hesitations and, finally, two days before Christmas, the news that my surgery has been confirmed and in the new year I will get a new kidney and a new kind of life. It’s the second best present I ever got (the first being my two youngest siblings, mum was thrilled I kept asking for them). I haven’t told many people yet because it has taken me a little while to get my head around the fact that it is real, it will happen, but here, now, in this little blog that has become so precious to me, I’d like to share. 2016; the year of trouble, the year of shock, the year of pain and fear and seemingly endless despair for many around the world, brought me: a home of my own, a funny little kitten, even deeper and greater friendships, quality time with my beloved family, the joy of seeing loved ones commit their lives to each other, a garden to tend, new learning and better understanding, and this; not just the hope of a new future but the promise.

This year will be a big one. I’ve no doubt it will be challenging. There is a little fear here in my heart, I’ll admit. And it is still difficult to fully imagine or comprehend what these changes will mean and how completely they will alter my life. But, as I sit beneath the shade of this big, old tree, on a scarlet carpet on the sand, I feel good. I feel strong enough and brave enough and so desperately eager that it’s hard to quiet the dreams and plans and longing that are building up in my chest. My head is reeling with thoughts of all the lives I want to make and lead and have. I feel full and expectant and happy.

Every year I pick a word that describes the way I want to live in the 365 days that belong to it. Previous years’ have been to be intentional, mindful, kind, grateful. Last year I wanted to be more open and I think, especially in this blog space, I have been. It isn’t easy for me to let people see me struggle or hurt or be anything less than my expectations of myself but I have learnt a great deal by being more vulnerable and more honest. I am grateful for every one of you who reads my writing and is gentle with me. You have all made it possible for me to let my guard down and to share my story. I hope that my words might speak to you or express something you might also have felt. Or that it has helped you better understand someone you care about. I hope that in some way my openness has or might help you to feel you too can share your story. I promise you, if my experience has been anything to go by, you will be both surprised and incredibly moved by the support and love you receive when you let people know you a little more deeply. I have been surprised by you, by your love, by your support. I am an optimist by nature, a bright-side-looker, a glass-half-fuller, but even I am consistently astonished at the amount of kindness there is in this beautiful, flawed world that we live in.

In 2017 I am deciding to live bravely. And for me that means to continue being open, to continue being intentional, to continue being mindful and mostly, even when it’s difficult or costly or complicated or demanding, even when it scares me, to continue being kind. Because of everything, that’s what I want to be remembered for. Even if (and it won’t I’m sure) something in this major change doesn’t work out the way we want it to, 2017 will be a year to remember. And when people remember my role in it in their own lives I want it to be for that.

The title for this blog post comes from this beautiful quote:

“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Time of Rejoicing and Reflection

​I look well. So much better. Better than people expect after what happened. And that’s what happens. I’m resilient. I’m tough. But also, I try really, really hard. Tom gets worried because he knows that the sparkle, the surface, the smiling is all just force of will. It’s all just my desire to appear better, to be normal, to function properly. I look well. So much better. But I look better than I am. Because what I am is not quite coping. Not quite dealing. Not quite there. How much can your mind control your body? I think recent events have made it quite clear. And yet I keep trying far too hard. 

I don’t know how to not try. I don’t know if I am made that way. I understand that I am limited, and I really mean to be low key. But by even the end of a peaceful day I am sometimes sobbing quietly in my bed; frustrated at how useless I feel, how little I can contribute, how hard others have to work to pick up my slack.  

I am aware, when I am in conversations, of all the ways I am failing. Usually this is easy for me, I very much like meeting and chatting with people. I have never found these exchanges to be fraught or clumsy. But when I am talking now I find words missing in my head, I find no quick response or sense of humor. I am slow and heavy and lost for words. Usually I can be expected to bear most of the effort of keeping a conversation flowing no matter the subject. Now I am quicksand sucking it under. It’s disconcerting and a little scary to reach for something and not have it there. I have lost my ease and my language and I am left both bereft and awkward. 

I’ve always thought words were mine. That they belonged to me in a fundamental way; one I have worked at and cultivated and cherished, but one that I also inherited at birth. I think in long sentences, I see the world in paragraphs, I feel things in poetry. But in the last month I find myself struggling. That easy access to the words I need, that felt as natural as breathing, is gone. They don’t answer me when I call them. My brain has gone soft and messy and I don’t  know how. I don’t know why. I don’t know what to do to fix myself. Is this temporary? I try to tell myself I am just tired. I just need to be patient. But I feel like hard work and that makes me both embarrassed and anxious.

Christmas time is one of my favorite times of year. Yes. I’m one of those people. I love carols. I love decorations. I love sparkly lights. I love families coming together from wherever they’ve spread apart to. I love that we remember and take time to call or write cards to or catch up with people we care about. But Christmas is taxing too. It’s fraught and it’s joyful and it’s indubitably exhausting. At this time of year my usual routine for hospital visits gets truncated because I can’t last as long out. There’s so much going on and so much excitement and so many people. 

And this is the time of year we all try to connect. It usually makes me so happy to catch up with friends and family and to hear all their stories and news from the year. People I haven’t seen in a while ask what I’ve been up to. What have I been doing? And I’m not sure what to say anymore. Specifically… not a lot really. Gardening. Making things out of socks. Laughing at my cat catching flies. Trying not to collapse over the vacuum cleaner when I haven’t even finished cleaning one room in the house. Spending a lot of time curled up in bed or on the sofa. More broadly… surviving. Just barely sometimes. I don’t have any big successes to crow about. I don’t have any exciting work stories. I have dodgy kidneys and very little stamina. I love my life. I honestly have never felt more contented. But out of necessity and desire it is very simple, very routine, as safeguarded as possible. And the big things that have happened aren’t happy or easy stories to swap over beers and homemade truffles. It’s tricky. 

My twin and I have spent the last three Christmases in hospital. Not the whole day, last year we woke up in the ward and got to spend most of it at home. But this is what life is for us. We plan holidays around hospitals. And if we say we have twelve days on holiday, we don’t really. Because three or four will be spent in hospital and the day after is always painful and the day before is always bad so out of twelve we’ll get maybe four good days. And that’s good for us which isn’t the same as everybody’s good.

Holidays, even if we love them, are difficult. Stressful. Require lots of planning and patience. The truth is my entire day to day, my whole life really, is structured to safeguard my health and any disruption in that is dangerous and hard. There’s little room for spontaneity or grand elaborate surprises in a life like mine. Currently even the small and quiet life I’ve painfully dug out for myself has been too much for me. I am just ever so slightly overwhelmed.

I have been trying to write something for a while. Or meaning to. It’s never gotten any further than a few scattered sentences. But I haven’t really been doing anything really. I sleep or rest a great deal. I eat as often as I can. I try gather bits of myself back into order. My mum asks, are you OK? And I say, yes good. Happy. I’m just a bit tired. Only “just a bit” doesn’t come close. Because what I feel is more than that. I am tired. But I am so very very tired. Tired right down to my bones. Tired in the marrow that runs through them. Tired in a way that I can’t even describe because I haven’t the energy to summon the imagery.

Sometimes I find my head lolling just because I don’t have the will power to hold it straight. I’m trying. I’m trying so hard. But trying doesn’t beat tired. There’s no way to push through this; there’s neither anything to push with nor anything to push through to. I feel guilty and sad that I can’t spend this time how I would like to; helping my mumma,  visiting loved ones, spending time with family. I have to take myself off for rests in the middle of the day when I’d rather be painting nails with my sister or icing biscuits with my mum. There’s such a lot to do at this time of year and always so many people I want to see; there are presents I meant to give and cards I meant to write and baking I meant to deliver and visits I meant to make and I haven’t. I haven’t given or written or delivered or visited. I haven’t helped or iced or painted. I feel so angry at myself for the failures building up and yet I can’t fix them. I can’t stop them piling high. Every day another missed moment is stacked on top of me. I feel heavier. 

I wish I was better. I wish I wasn’t so darn tired.

My life is good. I feel enormously fortunate. I love being with my family, sitting in the sunshine in this beautiful place I had the good luck to grow up in. Mum’s garden is blowsy and lush with blooms. My baby sister is home for Christmas. I love this time of year and I am happy. I am glad. I am excited. I am just also not quite coping. I’m really tired, that’s all. Only I get scared that it’s not.

The title for this post is taken from a Winston Churchill quote; “Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection”.

All the Things You Never Said

Today I woke up feeling sad. It happens sometimes. It’s like opening your eyes and realising you’re underwater; you can’t breathe and everything around you is distorted. The world looks sinister and strange, colourless and indistinct, seen through a murky layer of disconnect. There have been periods of my life when I haven’t come up for air for weeks but, fortunately for me, that hasn’t happened in a while. Maybe I got better at swimming. Maybe I’m just standing in the shallows now. Sometimes people tell me, it’s totally reasonable to feel sad. You have things it is fair to feel sad about. And maybe that’s true but, most of the time, I am happy. I know I have a good life. I am very grateful for all the amazing people I have who love me, the beautiful place I get to live, the home we have worked hard to make ours. I am not a difficult person to please. I laugh easily, smile often, find joy in tiny, insignificant, everyday things. I get hysterical over lame memes, love cheesy comedies, derive a lot of pleasure from a good pun and freely act goofy and silly. But sometimes, I feel sad. And though I could pretend that this sadness is about my condition, and it would be stupid to say it doesn’t have some roots in both the chemical deficiencies it causes and in the physical implications that it has, the truth is that this sadness is rooted somewhere deep in my heart and that it doesn’t always make sense.

I have had a number of beloved people in my life who have been hurt or damaged by the spectre of this lurking, senseless sadness; clever, beautiful people haunted by an incomprehensible unhappiness. Recently I have realised that a great deal of its power over them, and over me, comes from the shroud of silence we drape over it. The most critical moments of my own debilitating depression were also the moments in which I felt most mute, most voiceless. And the real, if unfair and incredibly damaging, stigma around mental illness has, in the past, served as a very effective gag. There is something perverse in the way society as a whole sees anxiety and depression as a moral failure. It’s derived from the relentless focus on success, the commercialisation of joy and the endless promotion of happiness as the ultimate ambition in life. We fall prey to the urgent social imperative to be happy; insured against depression, inoculated against sadness. When we acknowledge that we have “fallen short” of this goal it is akin to admitting to a weakness or flaw in our character, something that has allowed us to succumb to our genetic or chemical makeup. We have not the force of will to push through and therefore, in this world, we have labeled ourselves faulty. Knowing that you are fortunate, knowing that you are loved, knowing that your depression is not necessarily a reflection of your circumstances doesn’t make any difference. In fact sometimes, those things only serve to make it more confusing, and to make you more disgusted with yourself at feeling this way; it is one of the primary reasons you hesitate to admit to being depressed. If you can’t explain it to yourself, how can you explain it to someone else?

I recently read an article that described depression as the “common cold” of mental illness and it was, for me, a rather chilling comparison. In the context they meant to imply that it is widespread and frequently occurs but the unspoken implications of that metaphor are that it is harmless and short-lived; that with lots of vitamin c and a good night’s sleep you will bounce right back to normal. And for some people it is simpler and easier to recover from their depression than for others but there are people who might never “get better”; people who might always need to medicate; people who must remain vigilant for the rest of their lives. And I don’t know anyone who has suffered depression who has gone back to the same person that they were before it.

They say you “fall into depression”. In my experience the phrasing of the idea that you “fall'” ill is particularly evocative; everything about my depression feels like falling. I have friends who describe their own as a listlessness, an apathy, an absence of feeling rather than an extreme sadness. I know depression comes in many colours; black, blue, endless skies of grey; a murky, opaque filter like dirty glass through which you view the world. I have heard it described as a cage, a tunnel, a dog. But my depression feels like a dropping off the edge of a cliff. Falling falling falling without knowing when you’ll hit the ground and always conscious that the further you fall, the worse that landing will be. My depression comes with overwhelming sadness, a heart aching, heart breaking despair. In the midst of the worst parts of my history there has been a sense of desolation; my mind becomes an empty desert, and depression will not let anything grow. I think that has been always the most difficult thing. I no longer fall to the same depths, but in the past, when I have, depression not only steals my calm and contentedness; it steals my creativity. It is an evil thing. It will take from you the things that most make you who you are. And it will isolate you so you no longer hear the people who would remind you.

It’s also wrong to assume that you will be able to tell when someone else is suffering. Many of my friends have maintained their outward appearances; keeping their careers intact, keeping their houses clean, keeping their smiles in place. Sometimes this wasn’t long-lived and everything came crashing down around them; sometimes just one or two balls slipped out of their hands; sometimes they managed to keep them all in the air just long enough to still be there to catch them when they fell. But I think the pressure to continue juggling can make depression even more difficult and the inability to reveal your struggle makes it impossible for anyone to help you hold it together. In the past I have been extremely reluctant to open up; I am, despite all this sharing, a naturally private and self-contained person. And it’s more than an inherent reluctance to share. There’s the fear that others will judge you. There’s the guilt that you feel for burdening someone.  There’s the guilt that your loved ones feel because you are suffering. You want to tell them, this isn’t your fault anymore than it is mine. My sadness is not a reflection of your failure in my life. Then there is the absolute impotence to articulate what it is you are feeling. We live in a world where answers are always demanded; why are you sad? What is wrong? How can we fix it? And that phrase in itself is painful. Because people, people that love you and care about you, want to fix you. And when depression is something you might bear for the rest of your life, you want to know that that doesn’t mean you are broken; it just means you get depressed sometimes. Much like someone else might have asthma or someone else never loses that last bit of weight. You want to tell everyone, this pain, this hurt; it doesn’t define me. It doesn’t make me any less than I am. It is just a part of what I am made of. At the same time you want to reject it completely. This is not a part of me at all; I am not a depressive. Your desire to denounce something that causes you so much anger, frustration, sadness, guilt and self-disgust is in part rooted in its impact on your life, and in part a reflection of the shame the world has made you feel over experiencing it.

I want to tell you why I’m not ashamed. Some of the best, brightest, most sensitive people I know are the ones who have had depression. I have watched them tackle it with grace, with guts, with grim determination. And, in many ways, my battles with it have made me who I am. And I like the person I have become. I do. Even when I still have moments I tear myself to pieces. Here are the things that come from struggle: compassion, empathy, strength, resilience, understanding. I am proud of myself. I am proud of you. Proud of you who are battling. Proud of you who are juggling. Proud of you who are staying.  Proud of you who are supporting. Proud of anyone who has or had depression and all of you who are loving them through it. This isn’t just a part of who you are. This can be the part that makes you.

I am tired of depression being a dirty secret. Depression festers and grows more potent in dark and secret spaces. Now, when I am mired in despair, I talk about it. I tell people. Not everybody, that would be a strange bus stop conversation, and not everything, since sometimes I don’t even have words for what is happening, but enough of what I am feeling to enough of my people that they can turn their lights in my direction and shine them on my sadness. Illuminated, I can see the edges, and I know I can make it out.

There are some really good, thoughtful, sensitive and helpful resources available if you, or someone you love, is suffering. I always recommend finding and talking to a doctor you trust, but it’s also worth checking out http://www.depression.org.nz and http://www.mentalhealth.org.nz.

For my younger readers http://www.thelowdown.org.nz is a really amazing and ambitious project. They do a lot right on their site. 

Lifeline offer a 24/7 service if you need to talk to someone outside of friends or family. You can call them on 0800543354 at any time.