Therapy

What is ‘being a friend’?

Ruth Depression, Friendship, Mental health, Talking therapies Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments
Picture of slogan that says 'you are as great as a dress with pockets'

A Christmas present from one of my great friends who knows how much I appreciate practical clothing… (from Oh Squirrel, ohsquirrel.co.uk)

It’s been a while. I lost writing mojo over the summer – and partly the worry about upsetting people, and pressure on myself to keep producing writing led to the exact opposite of what was intended with writing: to do something I love doing and expressing myself using a method that works therapeutically and effectively. Of course as it’s January you can all assume that new year, new blogging… I don’t do new year’s resolutions, utterly pointless, as they become something else to berate yourself about. So consider this me not berating myself and the timing coincidental.

I’ve also had the relief of a fortnight away from working and commuting because of the joy that is our festive period in the UK, and that has resulted in some reflection and thinking about where I am and what makes me happy. I don’t have the answers, but back to the berating theme, I do know that I constantly feel there are things I ‘should’ be doing, and those pile up to the point where I do none of them, and thus back to the start. On the principle of one thing at a time – a principle I frequently exhort to friends – I figured that while I’m in a fairly calm place (the time off) I should use that as a place to begin with. The things I really have to do to survive (food shopping for example) manage to happen, and some weeks that really is the only thing I do that I ‘should’ do, but I won’t die if I don’t find the perfect relationship this week… Admittedly that last one is a fairly big one thing so incremental steps with that.

Friends are where much of my strength and inspiration to do a few ‘one things’ come from. I’m a shy person and much of my life one who has doubted her self-worth and finding people who want to spend time with me for the pleasure of only that, spending time with me, has been a source of constant amazement and disbelief. You may also experience that self-doubt, I have no idea, because I wouldn’t dare express it for the genuine fear that people would think either that I was very strange or that actually perhaps I was right and not a person to be friends with. What this manifests as is a constant need to be a source of help and advice, wholly unintentionally at first, but then a behaviour that I am unable to shake. The wanting to help people is not a bad thing, far from it. It being the only reason I think I am someone’s friend, as in, as long as I am constantly helpful I am worth being in someone else’s life and as soon as I become a person with problems or is unhappy, needs help or cannot be available all the time, then I must be a bad person. And I don’t say any of this because I think any of those things are bad things. Only that they are in me, because why else would I be liked if I weren’t providing some type of physical, active assistance, that if I can’t always ‘be there’ for someone I am not a worthwhile person to be friend. As I wrote down when a previous counsellor made me list the feelings and things I liked and didn’t like about myself, some of the latter included:

  • That I feel guilty for not doing enough
  • That I’m a not a good person if I can’t ‘be there’ for friends
  • I put myself last and don’t think I’m important to anyone
  • That I can’t support everyone I want to

I don’t expect this of my friends! They have been a constant source of joy, learning, inspiration, support, laughter, strength and love, and yet I find it hard to believe that they would find any of those things in me. I’m not saying this for pity or sympathy or dramatic effect; it was and has been my reality in my view of myself for years. And it is not because any of those friends have made me feel that way. It is my own sense of self-belief and self-worth doing that to myself. That, readers who’ve stayed this far, is hard work to fight when you have an illness that tells you all the bad things you already think about yourself are true, and a hundred times more true when it has a very strong grip on you. On normal days, I still fight an internal battle with myself about my closest friends who I still think will decide they’ve had enough and find new and more interesting, positive and entertaining people to spend time with. I know it’s crazy. And I know (well I think I know, but of course I wait to be corrected) that they would say it’s crazy. I don’t know why I think the friendships I have would lie on such fragile ground, but for some reason I do, and I hide how much pain the sometimes constant thought of they’re going to decide I’m not worth it causes. Because it sounds stupid and egotistical, and as if I’m selfishly trying to get attention.

My counsellor asked me to read out the list I wrote in response to her request to record the things I like about myself. I won’t lie, it wasn’t an easy list to start but it got easier! When I finished she asked me what I thought about knowing the person I’d just described, and I had to say that they sounded like a person I would want to know. It was a really huge stage to reframe my thinking in my head and that was four years ago; I still battle but I am looking at the ‘like’ list right now and it reminds me of what I have achieved. Just some of those things I like that have resonance with this post:

  • That I care and that I am emotional
  • That I have very good friends
  • That I want to help people
  • That I think trust is really important
  • That I think of my friends and my family

If you’re batting with similar thoughts of self-doubt and self-worth, I hope you can put them aside in time, or find strategies to reduce them. As always, links in About, and always believe you are a person worth loving.

Knitting and its therapeutic benefits

Ruth Books to read, Childhood, Memories, Mental health, Therapy Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
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Knitted ladybirds for an amazing friend of mine. Many thanks to the pattern from Stitch London Blog.

Things have been kind of busy round here. Easter was supposed to be days of writing, knitting and seeing family, and instead I got sick (not, you and I both relieved to know, the shitty illness, but a bog-standard cold). And then life stuff took over for a few weeks, which is what happens, but I have missed writing, and realised I need to carve out time for it. And also that it’s ok if I don’t write for a couple of weeks so I shouldn’t beat myself up about it. Plus I wanted to finish a knitting project, and knitting has been therapy over the past few years. Writing and knitting, both creative activities and ones that require very little in the way of equipment or space, and inexpensive too.

I learnt to knit from my paternal grandmother, and still have a memory of sitting in her living room on a sofa patiently, and badly, making a scarf under her supervision. I don’t recall exactly how I felt as I knitted, or attempted an approximation of knitting, and I don’t think I’d have been more than 7 or 8, but mostly my memory is being happy spending time with my gran and making something. I remember a blue knitted jumper she made me which was one of my favourite items of clothing. Handmade items are made with love, made for a particular person in mind, and that love and care radiates from whatever that item is.

It was many, many years after that time on the sofa that I picked up knitting again, and I forget what entirely inspired me to re-learn. I knew I wanted to do something creative, that could occupy my hands, that might be useful in some way, and the memory of knitting stayed with me. Not the memory of how to knit though, aside from it requiring knitting needles and wool (yarn, people, yarn. As I now know. Wool is yarn, but not all yarn is wool). I bought such items and ‘Knitting for Dummies’ – yes, it exists – and set about trying to teach my fingers to repeat the stitches I’d learnt to make decades before. Unfortunately all that happened were incredibly tight stitches, holding such tension on the needles that it was a physical effort to knit into them, and rather than creative relief, it was mainly creative frustration that resulted. And so while I prefer to learn by myself, I knew I needed to find a teacher. It’s the kind of skill that is best learnt watching someone.

And so the needles and the yarn sat around for a while as I procrastinated about how to find a teacher (one of my strengths, procrastination), veering from being too busy to fit in classes when they were running, to why would I think I’d be any good at it, and back again. Until I needed a distraction, and knitting came to me as a possible solution. The distraction was needed when Original Acquaintance announced his depression, and started to ever so slightly withdraw, and the slow creeping pain of not hearing from him was a hole that I needed to fill. Knitting became therapy, and it is heartening several years later to be reading about how this form of creativity has helped others and provided the same relief to many people in the same way it did for me. Knitting allows my hands and my mind to be occupied, the latter being the most important. It requires attention to be paid to the task at hand, looping yarn round needles, counting stitches, following a pattern, counting rows. You can’t do that if you are thinking about anything except the knitting. The knitting itself isn’t a difficult thing to concentrate on, it doesn’t cause you stress (unpicking 6 rows because you went wrong is annoying, but you pick yourself up and start over), it doesn’t hurt you (I’ve stabbed myself with a sewing needle a few times, but I can live with that without it causing me sleepless nights), and when you have finished, you have a beautiful thing that you, and only you, have created. Despite whatever was keeping you awake once you finished the knitting, whatever you had felt during the day before you got home and picked up the yarn, there was something lovely and special, and an achievement when very little felt like it was worth doing.

And it inspires such wonder – ‘you’re so clever’ is one of the most frequent compliments you receive – especially on trains, as I am unashamed to pull out my knitting, mainly on trips to the south west of England, when you catch someone across the aisle looking across to watch, flicking their eyes back to the other direction when I look up, because, y’know we’re British, and that wouldn’t do. And I smile and go back to the knitting, not caring if someone is looking because they’re watching the craft, not staring because they’re judging me (which is my usual and wholly unjustified fear, and is, you are safe to believe, utterly insane and somewhat egotistical if you think about it.) And it inspires joy and calm, and I feel peaceful when I do knit.

It has been up and down, my relationship with knitting over the past few years. It was truly my therapy for about 3 years as I tried to deal with the grief of Original Acquaintance’s disappearance, and it was only when I couldn’t even find the energy to knit (its other advantage, you don’t need much in the way of physical fitness to pick up some knitting needles) that I started to realise that maybe something else was going to be needed. For several months I didn’t knit, I think partly because I was so tired that once I got home, it was a relief to do absolutely nothing, and partly because I knew that everything I had been trying to keep at bay was no longer staying away by knitting. But it has returned as my good mental health has, and while sometimes I can go several months without knitting, I feel so much more positive about myself when I pick something up and start again on a project. An excellent friend gave me The Mindfulness in Knitting (by Rachael Matthews) for a very recent birthday and I read the first 2 chapters with pleasure sat out on my balcony in sunshine (sunshine is also very therapeutic). That also sounds more glamorous than it is, but in London any outside space is a joy. And I am far from the only person to think knitting is therapeutic.

The picture with this blog is the project I was aiming to finish, for another incredible friend and her school class (I told you there might be pictures of knitting at some point). My next creative skill to master is crocheting. That only requires one hook, so even less equipment… 

If the thing you’ve been using to hold stuff at bay isn’t helping at the minute, then links to help are in About. And if you’re a knitter or some other crafter, whether you share what you do or not, hold your head up high, and be proud of yourself, especially when it shows you light.