The calm before…

It’s been an eventful day, England won the first Ashes test, Chris Froome accelerated away from his rivals in the Tour de France to win on the summit of Mont Ventoux and yet I sit quietly, unusually passive in the face of such sporting feats.

Tomorrow I will start psychotherapy. My number has finally come up and I will sit down with my therapist at the aptly named “Complex Needs” team. Even now I still don’t know the exact format, I believe it is one hour, once a week for the foreseeable future but information is hard to come by. In all honesty I am unconcerned, I’m just grateful for the chance to sit down and talk about how things are for me.

Since I last blogged about my health they have changed my medication and the transition was very difficult. Although I’m more stable I can feel the lethargy in my mind. A frightening prospect for me, someone who has always lived on his wits. This dullness is alien and very disorientating. It also makes me fearful that I will forget something, that I won’t explain myself clearly to the therapist and thereby undermine the potential for recovery.

So my breakthrough today is that my fear is actually about trust. I’ve already met my therapist in the assessment phases last year. I feel that we built good rapport and I trust her. I’ve learned to generally trust the process even if it does seem exceedingly slow. However I’m not sure I can trust myself in this situation. This is the first time I’ve truly embraced medication and undoubtedly it has helped but now I feel that it leaves me exposed, unable to articulate what is truly going on in my mind.

Which I guess is the point of writing this blog, to allow me to set out my thoughts, organise them and see what is missing. I have to learn to trust my mind again, whether on medication or hopefully later when I don’t need the chemical assistance. That is what has been missing for me, the ability to trust my intuition and take good care of myself.

I truly hope that therapy doesn’t stir lots of things up for me but I do know that today, right before the potential storm, I am calm. That in itself is a small victory.

3 thoughts on “The calm before…

  1. Keith Simpson Reply

    Jon

    It is good to see this pop up now and wish you well on your journey – or another strand of the journey. That saying about life being a tapestry has always felt apt for me. Our own tapestries are always rich in our way.

    I hope we can meet up again in the future but know for a few months at least I will be addressing my issues of fear, uncertainty and trust of self.

  2. Pingback: Seven spaces | Project Libero

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