Depression is a lying little bastard - Part 2

Today I give you the second part of Gaynor Alder's series on how she beat depression.
This post can also be seen at MWSG.

Go here for Part 1 of the series.

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Depression in all its mind fuckery and trickery may have cloaked me with its darkness, exhausted me with its relentlessness, and picked away at my identity rendering me unrecognisable to myself, but underneath it all, I knew everything it was telling me was bullshit.
 
Yes, you depression. You’re full of shit. And I’m calling you on it.

Whilst at times it may have looked like I succumbed to you, as I spent another day pinned down to my bed by your force, trying to climb my way out from under the criticism, judgement, and torment you were serving up for breakfast, compounding on the grief my heart was trying to reconcile from all the other precious time you had already stolen from me, there was something you could never take from me.
 
My hope.
 
When you felt impenetratable and undefeatable, hope is what nursed from me from one minute to the next, one hour to the next, one day to the next. Hope that tomorrow would be better. Hope that one day it would all be over. Hope that you would eventually become a distant memory.
 
And with that hope, was a desperate determination to not fall prey to your lies. Your accusations. Your demeaning assassinations of my character. Because depression, you don’t get to define who I am. No depression, you’re not forever. 

And, I’m here to say you can be triumphed over.
 
And I emerged from you stronger. Wiser. Better. And my spirit is unstoppable. You’ve become something I look back on. Something I draw strength from just knowing I lived through you. Something I have stepped on top of to propel me further towards all those things my heart longed for when you were holding my dreams hostage.
 
With it I carry a deeper gratitude for life. I see the beauty in simplicity. Find great joy in small moments. An appreciation for waking up and just feeling okay. And I thank you for that. Reminding me of what’s really important and teaching me to pay homage to the beauty of the present moment. A love for romancing the everyday.
 
Overcoming you was never going to be a battle of force against force, or a change in my thought patterns, nor a matter of being strong enough. You’re not a battle of wits, because you’re a scheister who plays dirty. You’re an illness, not a mindset. You’re a flaw in chemistry, not in character.
 
What depression needs is gentleness. Care. Love. Kindness. Patience. Support. Understanding. Not only from ourselves, but also from others. Because we can’t do it on our own. And to find a safe passage through your 3 ring circus, requires a crack team of friends, outside help and medical professionals.
 
We need to call in reinforcements to help us find the courage and strength to hold on, to endure you for yet another day, and to remind us there’s a future beyond you, and it’s burning bright.
 
In the next installment of this series, Gaynor Alder talks about finding the right crack team, and why it took her so long to turn to medication for help.

Has depression given you a deeper understanding of life?

Gaynor Alder is a Melbourne based writer with a penchant for vintage glamour and all things Parisian. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Modern Woman's Survival Guide magazine and editor-at-large Teenage Girl’s Survival Guide, gallivants around the world as a Travel Writer testing the thread count of sheets and the fluffiness of hotel pillows and freelances in public relations.  

She started writing The Modern Woman’s Survival Guide, after the umpteenth person told her, you know you should really write a book. Her fingers struggled daily to keep up with the thoughts that desperately wanted to become words on pages, to take centre stage in a book that she knew was going to become the new voice of womankind. Her calling, her destiny, her whatever you want to call it, Gaynor writes because she can’t not write.

You can catch her being awesome here: 
www.gaynoralder.com
www.teenagesurvivalguide.com
Facebook - www.facebook.com/mwsgmagazine
Twitter - @themodernwoman

How much salmon can a bear bear?

Happy Friday, frog-lovers.

A little light stress-relief for you.

Feeling anxious?

Go watch a group of bears catch salmon in real-time. (I'd embed the video but it won't let me).

And if that hasn't relaxed you into a coma yet, try this video of a young guy raising a baby hummingbird:



Is that something in your eye?

You're welcome.

See you around the pond, frog-lovers.

A room full of nature nerds goes wild

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Last Friday I achieved a life goal I never thought possible.

I sat in the same room as one of my childhood idols. If you follow me on Twitter you'll know that I was extremely excited to be attending Sir David Attenborough - A Life On Earth.

I couldn't quite believe it.

I was going to see the man who was responsible for my fascination with nature and in particular, animals. He's been a major formative influence in my life.

I'd spent the afternoon working myself into a slowly building crescendo of tizz. 

I dressed up. I put on makeup. I decided to drive into the city. I fretted about what time to leave.

I left ridiculously early.

I went to the wrong car park.*

Once I finally got to the right car park I gulped down a sophisticated pre-show dinner.

I am all class.

Blogger discovers that an iPhone camera makes an excellent mirror,
allowing her to touch up pointless makeup in the crappy Crown food court.

Then I realised that I had no idea how to get to the Conference and Exhibition Centre on foot.**

So naturally I walked in the wrong direction, my panic and stress reaching breath-stealing proportions.

Finally! Found the right place. Queued and bought his autobiography - DEVASTATED that I hadn't queued early enough to get a signed copy.

Not a signed copy because LATE

There was a real buzz in the Plenary, where an intriguing mixture of the very old, very young and hipsters in silly hats waited with a shared sense of excitement - we were about to see someone very, very special. 

I tried to control my nerves. I wanted to be totally "present" to soak it all in.

Why was I nervous? It was ridiculous. I wasn't going to meet him. He was about to come on stage in front of hundreds of people and he was probably less nervous than I was.

This blog post about meeting Attenborough by Lucy Cooke was probably playing on my mind. Attenborough is my Jesus too.

The lights finally dimmed. 

The man himself came on stage and a room full of nature nerds went wild with applause, whistles and there may even have been a small squee from this aging nature fangirl.

A terrible photo but a fantastic night.

I've written a review of the night here at the Shake. Please go have a gander, and if you get a chance, go see the man in person. You won't be disappointed.

* MCEC, the parking instructions on your website sucks.
** Crown, your signage sucks and your pedestrian precinct smells of excrement and vomit.

Mental nausea and a mixed metaphor about swans and snorkels

Actual author appearance may vary
© Murat Erhan Okcu | Dreamstime.com

Speaking to groups of people must seem a pretty self-flaggelatory* way to earn a crust, for someone who battles anxiety and other types of mental nausea**. 

I really love it. I just flick a switch in my brain and become a facilitator. I recognise how fortunate I am to be able to flick a mental switch in order to function on a professional level.

I remember an old boss being totally surprised - shocked - when I told him I'd been diagnosed with depression.

"But you're always so smiling and happy!"

I wanted to yell at him that I was just pretending. I HAD to pretend, or I'd just not function at all.

When things get bad, I operate on the swan theory***.

I'm a swan a lot in the evenings. Evening is when most people are active on social media. I love Twitter for the conversations I have, the interesting stuff I watch and read.

It's hard, though, to be social on demand. My Seasonal Affective Disroder (SAD) brings anxiety and fibromyaglia flares to accompany the dying of the light every frigging night in winter.

There I am being social, LOLing and retweeting and generally being frivolous and silly while on the inside, I'm slowly losing my mind.

I start to feel that horrible, pervasive scratching of anxiety under my skin, a gradually tightening fist inside my chest. Time to get my swan on (no, not in a bizarre and frankly ill-advised Bjork dead-swan-tutu way WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!).

Last night was particularly bad. As evening arrived and my serotonin levels dipped I was tweeting how bad I felt, while LOLing and replying cheerily to other tweets. It occurred to me today how weird that would seem.

It's not that I'm not real while I'm relating normally on the outside and being screamingly mental on the inside. That IS the real me. The me that isn't screamingly mental, I mean. The me that's the swan, gliding on top of the water, gently mental, rather than the utterly batshit self-destructively crazy part of me that's paddling like mad (literally) under the water.

I think I need to be that swan. The screamingly mental me really needs the gently mental me to keep up those normal interactions, like a weird mental snorkel, keeping just above the crashing waves of mental vomit****. Now and then a few waves splosh over and I choke and cough but the snorkel always clears again with some sleep and a few cuddles.

So next time you see someone being witty and frivolous, while saying they're depressed or anxious, don't say "Wow you always seem so HAPPY! I had NO IDEA you were mental".

Just know that they're trying their best to be a swan.

Oh and for fuck's sake, don't put your finger over the end of their snorkel or someone might DIE.

OK?

OK.



My lovely friend Dayle Walker from Simply Aware sent me this link, to Tina Turner singing a peace mantra. I recommend it for any of you aspiring swans out there. My domain manager broke my blog so I've listened to it eight times already today. So far.

Keep paddling like fuck.

* I don't care if that's not a word, it should be.
** Thank you Ben Pobjie for coining that phrase. Perfection.
*** The swan theory is about gliding along the top of the water perfectly calm, while under the water you're paddling like fuck. I would like to state that this is absolutely the only way in which I resemble a swan. 
**** Now try to un-imagine that, now you've read it. You're welcome.

Do you have anxiety?
Are you able to be a swan?

A man is not a financial plan. Having no plan is ALSO not a financial plan.

Are you a woman?

Do you want to live in poverty when you're older?

No?

Then please read this. I'm over at The Modern Woman's Survival Guide telling you to get your shit together. 

Please read it and encourage other women to also. 

See you in the soup, frog-lovers.

Sexy zombies and sleepy animals

Yes I've been tarting around elsewhere again this week. 

Please do go read what Vlad thinks about all those annoying zombie fans over here at The Shake.

And now something to put a smile on your face on a Thursday morning...



See you in the soup, frog-lovers.

I am not Michaelia Cash

Good morning everyone. Over here at the Lily Pad we're mourning celebrating surviving the start of the school holidays. So it's board games, boredom and tantrums ahoy.

Something weird happened this week. I went off-grid (because I'm cool and groovy and hip with all the latest digital terminology the young kids use) for two hours because I had to drive to the thriving metropolis of Colac. 

As an aside, Colac was very nice to me although JEEBUS it was cold. Come on everyone, wave to Colac! Hi Colac!

In those two hours you changed your Prime Minister.

I mean, come ON. I look away for JUST A MOMENT and this is what happens.

Never. Going. Off. Grid. Again.

Maybe.

As a result, I spotted this particularly edifying speech by Coalition Senator Michaelia Cash, who is the Opposition Spokeswoman for Women (whatever that means):




For Dog's sake, people, please know that, despite sharing similar names and I assume internal gentialia, this woman is NOT me.

Look, here's Michaelia Cash:

Scary image source

And now here's me:

See? Nothing. Alike. (Plus I spell my name correctly).

I hope that's cleared up this common but appalling misconception.

In way of apology for putting that hateful and ridiculous performance into your eyesockets and earballs, please bask in the majesty of the Aurora Australis, as it appeared in Geeveston, Tasmania, last night.

Gorgeous photo from Huon Photography

See you in the soup, frog-lovers.

Dramatic Pansy is dramatic (and other miracles)

Hi kids. Thanks so much to everyone who's read my praying mantis travails and had a giggle at Russell Brand.

I'm busy again with other "work" but I'm around here and there. 

If you look very carefully, you might spot random body parts belonging to The Frog here. Apparently boobs are extremely controversial and, along with fun, should not be allowed.

You can also catch me having a dramatic whine about the state of Australian politics over at The Shake. 

For now I'll leave you with this week's miracle - the pansy my son bought me for Mother's Day died in suitably dramatic fashion in the frost two nights ago and then BEHOLD! It rose from the dead on the third second day! (Mainly because I brought it inside out of the bloody horrible weather we've been having).

Dramatic Pansy is dramatic

It's a Monday miracle! Praise be to baby cheeses!

See you in the soup, frog-lovers.

How (not) to interview a guest on national television

Hi folks. Today I'm working on boring non-bloggy-type stuff but I'm also writing some HILAIRE stuff for The Shake.

In the meantime, I give you some awesome from Russell Brand, taking down some idiotic morning television hosts in the US. 

Oh America. Any more conservative and you'd suck yourself up your own arse. 

If you're pushed for time, watch from 5 mins onwards. Rabbits. Headlights. Perfection.

See you in the soup, frog-lovers.

How I took a praying mantis to McDonalds (nature is an arsehole but humans are worse)

Nawwwwww such a cutie! But keep away from my fries, OK?

Last week I took a praying mantis to McDonalds. It was a female False Garden Mantid and I took her there by mistake, but it’s not the first time I’ve taken insects to random places. 

I remember having one of those plastic bug catcher toys as a child, a book on Australian insects and an insatiable curiosity.

Oh and a magnifying glass. Sorry, ants. I was an arsehole.

The praying mantis was a personal fave.

My long-suffering mother would ask, “You haven’t brought any creatures home today in your school bag, have you?”

“No mum.”

At that moment there was a more than 70% chance that in my bedroom was a 15 centimetre-long brown mantis swaying gracefully, tilting its weird triangular head from side to side, wondering how the fuck it had ended up on the bed of a small child in the suburbs of our nation’s capital.

There were also the countless tadpoles and frogs. Butterflies. Grasshoppers. Spiders. Snails.

All judiciously caught and brought into the house to be “looked after”. More often than not this served as a euphemism for being stared at for an hour, forgotten and allowed to run riot around the house.

Do you know how small a newly hatched praying mantis is? I do. The little nest I’d lovingly installed in my bug catcher broke open, spewing tiny, perfectly-formed mantis babies out through its holes, along the mantel piece to dubious freedom. We were finding miniscule mantis kids all over the lounge room for weeks.

“Watch out mum, there’s a mantis on your chair!”

(Deep sigh). “Of course there is.”

There I was last week, some 37-or-so years later, pulling out of the McDonalds drive-thru. I looked up and found my gaze unexpectedly caught in the steely triangular glare of two beady little green eyes.

Look at her ickle face! LOOK AT IT!

What the fuck?

Yes, there she was, a little green mantis, sitting on my car bonnet LOOKING STRAIGHT AT ME. Like the next wave in hood ornaments for the uber-environmentally-friendly motorist.

Except her look was anything but happy.

Her look said “How could you leave me on that basil plant? How can you expect me to survive on a diet of grasshoppers and aphids AND WHERE ARE MY FRIES, BITCH!?”

I was temporarily stumped. What to do?

If I drove off and she was blown away not only would she smash into the windscreen, breaking her exoskeleton and my heart, but she would also never get her fries.

So I did what any person in my situation would do.

I slowed down to 30 kilometres an hour, turned my hazard lights on, and inched home slowly in the left lane so that my praying mantis wouldn’t get blown away.*

I then took photos of her and tweeted about our little jaunt, before lovingly popping her back onto her basil plant. And not once did she bite me, despite me not sharing my fries with her because I love nature and all but come on, there are limits.

As a child, what I liked about creatures was that if you piss one off they’ll run away, bite or sting you. Nothing much has changed.

Nature is an arsehole, but at least it’s honest about it.

Unlike humans.

What a couple of fucked-up weeks we’ve had. Politics here has reduced itself to tales of men in threateningly blue ties, threats that an LNP government will interfere with our collective uterus, questions about the PM’s partner’s sexuality, and accusations that the leader of our country has breasts.

How very dare they.

Humans really are arseholes.

I’m always rescuing creatures that could bite or sting me and releasing them while those around me are screeching “Kill it! Kill it!”

They may have a point, but frankly I find humans far more vicious. So I’m off to find a small animal to take on a trip to the post box.

* Yes I know they have wings and she could have flown away SHUT UP.

My son found the photo and created a Minecraft/Praying Mantis mashup.
You're welcome.

 Have you ever taken part of nature somewhere random by accident?