Linda Bayley

17Feb 2018 by Linda Bayley

The issues

Musings

I'm afraid all the time. Afraid of offending somebody. Afraid of being politically incorrect. Afraid of expressing my opinion, or worse, having no opinion whatsoever to express. I know there's a lot going on in the world. I know that the man who shot Colten Boushie has been acquitted. I know that the man who shot Trayvon Martin was acquitted. I know that women all over Canada and the United States are gathering their courage to tell the world about the sexual abuse they have suffered at the hands of powerful men. These things hurt. These things are tearing our society to shreds. And I don't know what to do about them. I don't know what to say about them. But I feel like I should know, and I should…

04Feb 2018 by Linda Bayley

The spiral, hard and fast

Musings

If you have Borderline Personality Disorder, you already know how this works. If you don't, buckle in now, because I'm going to take you through the sudden hard spiral I took earlier this week. How I got in It started at a bus stop. I was at the far end of town, a foreign country as far as I'm concerned, and the bus service there is terrible. On the way there, I got to talk to my favourite bus driver, catch up on the news, trade jokes, that sort of thing. I asked him what stop I needed to get off at for where I was going, and he told me. To get home, I stood at the stop across the street from where I had gotten off. I waited…

28Jan 2018 by Linda Bayley

Task snooze override

Action

People think I'm an organized person. I'm not really sure how I give them this impression, unless it's by constantly taking notes, setting reminders, marking things on my calendar. Why they don't know is that I don't always re-read my notes; I don't always check my calendar; and worst of all, when a task reminder comes up, I hit the snooze option. I've known for years that it's in my best interests to cut up carrots and celery on a Sunday so that they'll be ready to grab for lunches each workday morning. But I so often act against my best interests. I hit the snooze option: I really don't feel like cutting up vegetables, I'd rather be reading, I'd rather be sleeping, I can just do it in the…

27Jan 2018 by Linda Bayley

Jumbled

Action

I'm having trouble organizing my thoughts lately. So many things I'm thinking about, ideas to test, words to be spoken, but they seem to swirling around in my brain, with no one thought rising to the top long enough for me to capture it. This worries me a little. I've had five good days in a row, after weeks of feeling like I was spiralling downwards. I've been hyper; I've been interrupting myself in the middle of sentences to get out other thoughts; I've been unable to hold conversations while doing menial tasks. It feels like a crash is coming. Hyperactivity leads me to hysteria; hysteria leads me to unstoppable tears. Unstoppable tears lead me to self-harm, anything to make the feeling stop. I don't want to crash again. I…

08Jan 2018 by Linda Bayley

The crack in the ice

Action, Musings

A few days ago, in a strange fit that was part sarcasm and part desperation, I asked JDS to tell me fourteen reasons why life was worth living. He told me that he would give me one reason per day for the next fourteen days. Reason One was a member of his family. Fair enough, I thought, and then felt guilty that in all of my casting about, family members didn’t present themselves to me as obvious reasons for living. That’s my illness though, and I need to not feel guilty about it. On my good days, my family members are the first things that I feel grateful for. But this wasn’t one of my good days. Reason Two was nowhere near as obvious as Reason One. Reason Two, for…

04Jan 2018 by Linda Bayley

Domino

Musings

Six years ago today, my best friend was so sick that he gave me a look, a very human look, that said, "I've had enough of this." And because I loved my friend very much, I brought him to the veterinarian who ended his pain, not quickly enough. Domino lived with me for seventeen and a half years, and I always believed that he had saved my life. The day I brought him home, I was on a day pass from the hospital, where I'd spent a few weeks after a second botched suicide attempt. I had no idea how to move forward, no idea how to start my life over again. But if I could learn how to take care of a cat, maybe I could learn how to…

30Dec 2017 by Linda Bayley

Can’t / Won’t

Action

Today I had to fight very hard to get past Can’t. My primary goal this morning was to spend some time with my mother in her sewing room. Her primary goal was to teach me a clever new way to make a pillowcase. In the past, I have been quick to pick up new sewing techniques and ideas. I have a great history of transferring learning, of picking up an idea from one project and adapting it to fit another. Lately, say the last three or four years, during this most recent bout of depression, learning has been very difficult for me. Because I am so used to being able to learn, this sudden inability to learn easily feels like an unforgivable sin that I am committing against myself. This…

20Dec 2017 by Linda Bayley

Ammunition

Action

My aforementioned friend, JDS, has this theory that women carry around a purse full of ammunition that they can pull out and use at any time, usually without warning. Not literal ammunition, of course; emotional ammunition. The things people have done or not done to them, said or forgotten to say to them. Past slights or hurts, major and minor: they all go into the ammunition purse. And you never know when you're going to walk into an ambush, and have all that ammo rain down on your head. I didn't think I was that kind of woman, until I brought up an opinion JDS had expressed about eight months ago, and asked him whether he still felt the same way. What he felt was ambushed. He no longer had…

19Dec 2017 by Linda Bayley

Keeping up appearances

Self-Esteem

My best friend, who we'll call JDS for now, is a photographer. He's also one of a handful of people that I can count on to tell me the truth when my thinking is skewed. One area where my thinking is often skewed is in my self-image. As my psychiatrist once put it, I am short of stature and overweight. Over the years, people that I trust have told me that I should get a bust reduction, that I should get my eyebrows waxed, that I have too much hair in the wrong spots. All of this means that I will never again pose happily in a bathing suit like I did in this picture, not even if I have water wings. Because my body is not right. JDS and…

18Dec 2017 by Linda Bayley

We should talk about this

Stigma

Today I noticed that the Twitter hashtag #MyMentalHealthIn5Words was trending. I had a look at what people were posting, and then made my contribution: We should talk about this. Mental health and mental illness both seem to be in the news a lot these days. Just this morning, the radio told me that the suicide rate in Bhutan is going up. (Sorry, I can't find the programme reference to point you to.) We're hearing constantly about the opioid crisis in Canada. We're hearing about our military veterans and their families, struggling to cope with what they've been through. And yet... we're not talking. We're talking in broad terms, of course. Like, Wow, there's an epidemic of depression / addiction / PTSD out there and we should really do something about…