Touch

Image credit: pensierro/463810343/flickr.com

For the longest time I have purposely avoided human touch.  It’s pretty easy to do when you cut yourself off from current friends and do your best to avoid making new friends.  I just didn’t want to go there.  I have a bad habit of expecting that I will be trapped or suffocated by people if I allow them to get close.  So I don’t.  I build up walls and keep them away.

I don’t do hugs, or so I say.  One the rare occasion that I could admit to needing a hug, I gave myself three options.  Firstly, I have a good teddy bear who is very special to me (as you can read about in my book).  Ted is a good size for a hug but if you’ve ever hugged a teddy bear you will notice that they are unable to squeeze back.  And that squeeze back, to let you know that they are as into the hug as you are, is vital.

Secondly I had my cat Penny (who died six months ago).  Penny was amazing for knowing when I needed her love, but I’m sure she would have met some DSM-IV diagnosis as amongst other things (like extreme anxiety) she didn’t do hugs either.  She was more than happy to come and sit on my knee, or sit next to me but she needed to know she could escape when she was ready.  Actually she sounds like me.  Did I teach her this fear of getting close?  I don’t know but we had our own way of being close that was acceptable to her.  But yet again, it wasn’t quite enough.

The third option was to allow a hug from my Dad (he has also died now).  He was the only one I would allow to touch me.  It didn’t happen often (out of my choosing) but every so often his hug would tell me that he was on my side and he loved me.  Every so often he would reach out and hold my hand to tell me he was there.  Now that he has died I have somehow transferred the right to hug me occasionally to one of my brothers (the one who grows mushrooms).  Again, the occasional hug I get from him tells me he is on my side, he loves me and he cares.  My brother’s daughter L also gives me cuddles and somehow they don’t feel at all trapping and suffocating.  I know she gives them because she wants to, rather than out of obligation and that means the world.

Really though, I don’t get much human touch, and it didn’t bother me.  Actually it was a way to keep myself safe from some perceived threat.  It’s funny now that I find myself longing for touch.  Only a few days ago I read a post by my friend Frank at Shitegist about his own need for human touch.  I was quite moved by what I read but I told myself that it wasn’t something I needed.  I had conditioned myself away from this kind of contact.  Only days later though, I find it is exactly what I need and exactly what I long for.

This week (and it’s only Thursday) has been tough.  Actually it’s been very stressful and at times I have been completely devastated.  A little of it I have shared with readers in To Earn Trust After Past Mistakes, but most of it I have kept to myself.  For once I was lost for words (that doesn’t happen often), as well as not having the physical wellness to sit at my computer and type.  I have felt very alone, although I acknowledge (and greatly appreciate) that I have been supported wonderfully by a few people who knew.  At the end of the day though, I am alone and I simply wanted to be held.  I simply wanted someone who loved me to whisper in my ear that I’m not alone and they will be with me.  To know that I matter.

It is very weird for me to feel this way.  A few weeks ago I found myself wanting friends.  I don’t mean friends through the internet, and I should say I am very lucky to have some wonderful friends around the world.  But I found myself wishing for real, flesh and blood friends.  Cyber hugs are great, but they’re not anywhere near as great as the real thing.  Cyber conversations are also great, but they’re not the same as sitting down in the same room with another and talking.  While I have purposely distanced myself from friends because I was so afraid of being hurt again, I now find that actually I think it would be okay to take that risk again.

When I told my therapist this, a few weeks ago, I fully expected that he would fall off his chair in shock.  He has heard me say so many times that I don’t need real people in my life.  Somehow he didn’t fall, but he was surprised, as well as being happy, I had come to this stage.  Now that I find myself wanting to be held, I am positively certain that he will fall off that chair.  I’ll be sure to let you know.

I don’t for one minute think I am alone in my fear of human contact and I suspect many people with both mental illnesses and chronic physical ailments get to a point where it has been so long since someone reached out and touched them physically, that they don’t even realise they miss the human contact.  Human touch is a form of communicating our feelings to another, but it’s also a form of healing.  For so long I wasn’t going to let a single person near me.  My Dad was allowed occasionally but only because in over 40 years he had proven to me that he actually did care and he really did love me.  The last thing he wanted was to hurt me.  He knew though that there were times when I couldn’t allow him that near, and he totally accepted that.  Now though, I wish he was here.

This realisation of my need for human connection and human touch leaves a big aching in my heart, because I have built a wall around myself to purposely keep those things away.  But I realise that it is part of the healing journey for me.  I know it is still going to be weird to accept those things but I am determined to somehow break through my fear.  This week I have had a taste of how alone I am.  I knew I was alone but I hadn’t stopped to consider how physically removed I have let myself become from other humans.  It leaves a deep longing, that doesn’t feel very comfortable or very nice.  It is going to be a risk to let someone that close to me, but I know it is part of the process to win my life back.

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

 – E.E. Cummings

Related articles

• Tonight (shit3g3ist.wordpress.com)
• To Earn Trust After Past Mistakes (infinitesadnessorhope.wordpress.com)
• Importance of Human Touch (livestrong.com)
• 6 Reasons You Need To Be Touched (pickthebrain.com)

Lighting Up Train Tunnels

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

I have been talking about hope a lot lately, and somehow that’s made me think more about trains.  You can read my last post about trains here.  Perhaps the thought of trains links me to hope because of the whole ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ thing.

Some years ago in my younger, fitter, more healthy days (they did once exist) I did a weekend mountain bike trip with a couple of girlfriends over the Rimutaka Incline Rail Trail, just north of Wellington (where I was living at the time), NZ.  It was fantastic.  One of the best weekends of my life.

Location map of the Wairarapa area, Greater Wellington, North Island, New Zealand (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Rimutaka Hill is pretty steep, and I certainly wouldn’t have been on to bike it by road but the Rail Trail, based on the track used for Fell engines from 1878 to 1955, makes it a great bike trip over to the Wairarapa region.  From there, we biked down to the south coast of the North Island and back around the Pencarrow Coast to Wellington.  Two days biking was made easier by a truck carrying our gear (the easy way!).  At the time I didn’t have my own bike but my very generous flatmate (room-mate) leant me his.  He didn’t even mind when I brought back what was a perfectly clean bike, totally covered in mud.  What’s more, if memory serves me correctly, it was him that cleaned it down.  But hey, I had fun.

The Incline included three decent length tunnels.  The good thing is that if a train can make it up there you’re fairly sure of making it up on a mountain bike.  What I remember though was that each tunnel I rode into, I had an irrational fear that a train was going to come the over way.  Trains hadn’t been on the route since 1955 but I still wondered what I was going to do when one approached.  I had the idea that ‘what if the light at the end of the tunnel was simply another train’.  This was well before my days of diagnosable mental illness but it does show a certain pessimism creeping in.

There were no trains coming the other way.  I didn’t enjoy riding in the dark much, our bike lights did little to light our way, but as there were many of us there was a decent amount of light provided.  It reminds me of something I saw this week:

“Believe that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Believe that you might be that light for someone else.”

 – Kobi Yamada

The start of the Rimutaka Incline and shelter shed. Photographed by Matthew25187 on 2006-12-28. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My friends biking with me, provided light for me.  The light I had on my bike wasn’t enough to sufficiently light my own way through the tunnels and so their lights helped me to feel safe.  I have to say that shortly after exiting the final tunnel we had reached as high as we were going (for then anyway – one steep climb the next day) and it was all down hill.  What a ride!  I had so much fun and any fear I had in the dark of the tunnels was gone by the exhilaration of speed.

As regular readers will know last week I changed the name of my blog to highlight the role of hope in my journey.  There have been a few hiccups along the way, and I apologise for that.  I still not sure that a hiccup-less (new word!) way is a possibility but what’s done is done, and hopefully readers have managed to find me.  What has been really nice for me has been the feedback I have had both here, and through other avenues.

Firstly, there has been the encouragement of people pleased for me that I have got to a point in my journey when I can feel hope.  That’s so nice and quite beyond what I expected.  I think that many of those dealing with mental illness don’t really get much encouragement.  We can be a pretty isolated bunch, often of our own choosing, but for some it is forced upon us.  Regardless though, of how the isolation has come about, it gets lonely, and there’s not anyone around to say “you’re going great” when you are, or to give you a hug when you’re not.  While I have said before that I have some issues over my safety in social media, I am so glad I ventured into it because now I get the encouragement that I needed, but didn’t often get.  I think part of that is that no one else realises just how desperate we are to know there is hope.

As I said in my post, Hope Is A Four Letter Word I Use Now I was actually a little nervous about talking about my hope because I think, too often, in the mental health area there is more bad news than good, and so to want to share a piece of good news I was worried about what reaction I might get.  Would someone tell me to pull my head in?  Would they tell me to wait and see how I would feel next week?  I didn’t really know, but almost had a sense of needing to be slightly apologetic for feeling good (finally).  Actually I didn’t get any of that feedback, just people happy for me.  People (mostly those I have never met) being happy for me is such a good feeling.

Even better though, a sense that my hope could provide hope for someone else.  One dear friend (who I have also never met but she’s promised to try her hand at making a pavlova when we do finally meet) wrote:

“I so often think of you when I am feeling as though the air will never clear because you DO give me HOPE!  Not unrealistic hope that I will be ‘fixed’ one day, but hope that tomorrow can be better and illness can be managed.”

Wow! That was actually what I was hoping for.  My illness won’t be ‘fixed’ as it is part of who I am, part of my personality.  But I firmly believe that tomorrow can be better, and that I can manage my illness so that I can live a good, satisfying life.  I also firmly believe that this will happen for my friend.  And if she can take hope from seeing where I am at, then that is simply wonderful.  It actually makes it all worth it, and I guess I didn’t ever expect myself to say that.  No doubt bad days will still exist, but I know now that the bad can ease.  It’s not always going to be black.

As I have been writing, the thing that has been stuck in my mind is the Just One Touch Campaign 2012, that many bloggers have joined.  My experience this week just reinforces my certainty that this is something we need to do.  I know it’s possible for all bloggers to be involved, and I completely respect people’s decisions to choose what is right for them but if we can do one little thing to stamp out some of the isolation resulting from mental illness, then I believe we will save lives and build hope.

I wish someone had shared their good stories with me, especially in the early days.  I remember one of my brothers gave me a book written by a woman who had been depressed.  At that stage I had been depressed for maybe six weeks and I couldn’t imagine in my wildest nightmares her tale of being depressed for two years.  I couldn’t finish the book, even though it was good because I couldn’t bear to think that was what I had ahead of me.  That was nearly 20 years ago.  I wish someone had told me that there was hope.  I wish someone had said “this is how I did it”.

For so long I existed on Borrowed Hope, and it worked.  I’m still here today.  And if that’s what’s going to get you through, then my best advice is to grab hold of someone else’s hope and hang on.  If I can be that for someone then, even though I’m not going to say I’m glad I have been down this path, I will say that it has been worth it.

Image credit: FB-Positive Outlooks

Related articles

• Riding Trains (infinitesadnessorhope.wordpress.com)
• Hope Is A Four Letter Word I Use Now (infinitesadnessorhope.wordpress.com)
• Borrowed Hope (infinitesadnessorhope.wordpress.com)
• Mountain Biking in New Zealand (gorentals.co.nz)

Just One Touch Campaign 2012

I like this a lot. It is incredible how one small touch can cause an on-going ripple, and make a big difference. I am certainly getting behind the Just One Touch Campaign 2012. Will you?

Voices of Glass

Choose to reach out and touch the surface of one isolated puddle and you will see the ripples spread out across that puddle. But what if instead of just one isolated puddle it was part of a sea of interconnected puddles?

Type ‘mental illness’ or ‘poor mental health’ or ‘bipolar disorder’ or ‘depression’ or ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘PTSD’ or any one of the numerous mental health related conditions into your search engine and you will see a sea of blogs and sites appear all dealing with those conditions.

But what you won’t see, unless you look a little deeper or have some personal experience, is that so many of the folk writing those blogs, creating those sites, all feel that isolation in one form or another.

The “Just One Touch” Campaign 2012 seeks to speak into that isolation and to combat it as best it can. For ‘Just One Touch’ is…

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