“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.” ~A.A. Milne

My moods are greatly affected by the weather, this morning it was warm, bright and sunny and I felt an optimism and I felt alive with the spring time. I have just ventured out again and it has turned overcast and looks like it is building for a storm. Almost in reflection to this I am feeling unsettled from work and pressured from many sources. I wish my job could be more outdoors instead of sitting in front of a computer. I am lucky in that the various jobs I do are flexi and as I am not employed full time I am the master of how I use my time and when I take breaks. This is a blessing and a curse. In some ways I wish I had the structure of a full time single job. I would also like to have work colleagues I could interact with and bounce ideas off for challenges. Full time work though would not give me the liberty I have to go have coffee with someone if I want to or do some painting or writing when I feel the urge.

Work is hard to come by these days and I must be grateful I have some work. I do question at times though if it is really what I want to be doing. My Mum loves teaching and it is her life. It has been her life for as long as I remember and at times it takes over the rest of hers and my lives. When I was little she ran a preschool from home. At times I would get jealous as the other kids got so much of her attention and at the end of the day when I felt it was "my" time and her attention could finally be focused on me she was often tired and grumpy. Being the eldest child I think I was put out when my younger Sister came along and I had to share my Mum with her. My Dad once said to me that I was not a nice child until my Sister came along which has stuck and stung for many years and also increased my resentment towards my Sister.

I think the day my Sister was born is a memory that has also churned and burned within me for a very long time. I remember my Mum going off (to the hospital it turned out to have my Sister, but this was not explained to me). All the other kids in the play school were collected and it started to get dark but my Mum didn't come home. I went up to the room where the domestic help Mary stayed on our property. She didn't really say where my Mum was or what was going on. Eventually, very late in the evening my Dad came home and he too didn't really explain. My Parents' marriage at that point was already headed for disaster and so my whole world with my Mum felt threatened.

Part of me also is resentful that my Sister does not remember as much of my Parents' divorce and the fights and tension that went with it as I do. I always had to be the brave one, the one who didn't cry and the one who said it was all going to be alright. I had to be the one who had to pretend everything was normal and be there for my Mum. It was always me that my Mum would off burden to and it is always me who has to be the one who has to help contribute financially when we get into a predicament. I hate being the older sister and the one who is supposed to be grown up and deal with problems.

My Dad used to always push me to achieve in school and it used to feel like nothing I did was ever good enough. The ghost of my Dad still taunts me at times and drives me to be a perfectionist and feel what I have done is still not up to scratch. It is a ghost that is not laid to rest easily and I often feel I have to prove myself and go beyond what everyone else is doing. I think I inherited my Dad's tendency to be a workaholic and I definitely get my manic and depressive moods from him. There are traits I get from my Mum though too such as not addressing problems and covering them up.

“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” ~John W. Gardner

A friend of mine is experiencing a bout of depression having returned home to live in Zim from Johannesburg. I can fully empathise as it is hard coming back and living at home with one's parents again after leading an independent life abroad. You no longer have your own environment and you have to comply with your Parents' rules for the house which often includes coming home to a curfew and going to bed when they do. It feels like you are a teenager once more and the life you led outside of Zim feels like a life time ago. The problem is rent is very expensive in Harare and so a lot of young people cannot actually afford to live on their own and meet the costs of living here.

Another aspect that is depressing my friend of returning to Zim is that there are not that many young people here and it is hard to make new social contacts and friends. The friends one has are also all often in relationships and partnered up and so to be single is hard and there are not many young eligible young men around. It also makes for the social scene being predictable and at times boring with only so much you can do and only so many people you know and will potentially then meet. Possibly there are more young people around than one things but Hararians at times seem clickey and don't venture out to make new friends readily.

It can feel like what are supposed to be best years of one's life are slipping by fast without too many new and interesting things happening. Also, with many friends settling down and getting married you feel life has passed you by and you are going to remain a spinster forever. Time can go by in Harare with the same old, same old and it is hard to account for what you've done and make a difference with this.

Contemplations

Today we helped with the yard sale for an elderly couple who are downsizing and moving into an old age home. The yard was filled with their belongings collected over many years. It made me think about what the point of life is and how at the end we have worked towards aquiring things and made some sort of career but at the end we have to look back on what we've really achieved and we collect so much along the way that to others seems meaningless and of no value, but we invest so much into it all.

With work looking for work fulfillment and with trying to decide what I really want to do I keep pondering on why we work and how we are prepared to invest hours and hours of our life - more than the hours we have to spare for other things into what we are supposed to hopefully enjoy doing. But what if it's not what we want to be doing and whey does so much of it depend on the economic standing we already have, the starting capital we have and our education. For some people these three things don't matter but for many they are vital. Why? And what is the ultimate point? To just get by in life, to make a difference and if so in what way, or to just earn so you can buy more and perpetuate a cycle of never finding satisfaction?

I guess I'm just not completely happy in what I'm doing but I need something to earn money but also to stimulate me and to find rewarding to make the work worth it.

Memories

As part of my therapy I've been tasked with writing memories that are painful and getting down in words things I've kept inside. My Mum is a hoarder of note but there are artifacts from her life she won't go through and in order to create space in our home I have gone through boxes and boxes of loose papers, old bills, teaching materials, magazines, abandonned projects and much more. The back bedroom which was a junk hole was filled with things associated with my Parents' marriage. My Mum doesn't know that I had to go through piles and piles of documents relating to my Parents' divorce - painful affidavits detailing the abuse, unpredictability and damage my Father did. I haven't ever told my Mum I had to plough through all of this. It brought back painful memories reading through some of the material but in a way burning it on a bonfire was cathartic.

Another thing I find painful at times is looking at family photographs, especially those of my early childhood when my Parent's marriage was first disintegrating. From the facial expressions of my Parents I can detect strain in their marriage and some of the photos bring back memories of some of the last times my Parents were together and how I had to try and pretend things were normal and look happy and smile for the camera. I remember the period after those photos were taken when my Mum and I moved out and stayed with various friends and my Dad would suddenly show up where we were staying and things would become extremely tense and my Dad's presence would feel menacing. I remember moving from friend's house to friend's house and then occassionally staying with my paternal Grandparents, never knowing when my Dad might show up and hoping he wouldn't.

All of this is there in my memory but I only sometimes allow myself to think about it an it is usually photos which trigger me to think back.

Cracking open

I haven't been on here for a while but today I went to see my therapist Rona after quite a long gap. My session started out with me on what I thought was an even keel but some cutting questions brought to light things that simmer and pain me underneath the surface. The root cause is the unhealthy relationship I have between my Mother and Sister. Prodding and poking my therapist hit on raw nerves and some of the causes of resentments I have towards my Sister. At times my irritation and frustrations stem way way back to my childhood and my coping mechanisms from during my Parents' hostile divorce. I opened up to things I realise I have never talked about to anyone and have kept bottled within, poisoning me and my relations with my family today.


As a little girl my Mum used to always say whenever I had a problem or felt upset that I must always remember other people had worse problems than I did. Although this was supposed to make me feel better, it invariably made me feel that my Mum did not take what I had just said to heart and was making my problem seem insignificant and not worth talking about. To this day I still find it hard to share on my problems to others and tend to still keep them internalised.

My Parent's prolonged separation and eventual divorce was seared with violence and abuse and I was often caught in the crossfire and split loyalties. My Sister, due to her being three and a half years younger does not remember as much as I do and unlike me was not forced to try be an adult in an adults' cat fight. This is where some of my resentment starts and where there are wounds which have never healed.

I will be working through some of my past in the next coming weeks but I feel fragile as things that have never been spoken of or I have kept hidden deep down in the dark come to light after years of tight storage.

Coming to terms with the past …

The 18^th of February is not only my younger Sister Beth’s birthday, but also now the anniversary of the day I had my nervous break down. Last year and the year before, the date was a painful reminder and I went back into a semi-decline. This year however I have made some significant bounds along the road to a healthier mental outlook. I did receive a reminder though in the form of a letter from the secretary for the laboratory which I worked in in Switzerland. I had completely forgotten that the day before I ended up in a mental hospital I was trying to organize to go and see my principal supervisor in Besançon in France. 

I had experienced depression before in my life and looking back in hindsight had been psychotic previously. In my teenage years it was at one point thought to be a case of M.E. or to be attributed to the events happening in my life with my Father’s erratic untreated manic phases. Our family doctor, an elderly Scot did not believe there to be anything seriously wrong with me, despite my at times debilitating mood swings. Depression was not afforded the fashion status it receives now and I honestly don’t think it ever occurred to my doctor that this is what was ailing me. Even if it had she was from the school of thought that one just had to pull one’s self together and snap out of it.

So that Friday when I went into the laboratory at EPFL in Switzerland and announced that I was quitting my PhD and entered into a nightmare of mental flailing was the culmination of a struggle I hadn’t really acknowledged I’d had for many years. The ensuing madness and destructive thought patterns had been insidiously encroaching into my mind and then sparked by a series of stressful incidents flamed into a fiery internal hell my mental inferno of self doubt, paranoia and malaise. The convoluted and distorted thinking that clouded my outlook and tortured my internal psyche rapidly unraveled and my grasp of reality disserted and tormented me.

This past Saturday at a dinner party I met an intern working at the local government hospital in the psychiatric ward. I didn’t initially divulge that I have bipolar. She described the type of patients she treats and I realized that some of them suffer from what I myself have experienced. I tried to sound like I was asking purely out of curiosity what the conditions were like and how these patients were treated. She mentioned that some of them had to have handcuffs and in my mind a Victorian asylum sprung to mind. I wonder whether this is the case. In my own experience in a private hospital here in Zimbabwe, I found that most of the nursing staff were uninformed when it came to mental illness and as there are no tangible physical ailments, many of the nurses I encountered could not fathom why I was there or see what was wrong with me. There is no direct translation of the word depression into Shona, the closest phrase being “to think too much” or Kufungisisa. 

Reflecting back on my thoughts and my interpretation of the events that happened I realize that I had partly lost my mind or my mind had over analysed and misinterpreted what was happening around me. The disintegration of my sanity culminated from a number of things. I returned to Switzerland in January 2010 after what should have been a vacation but which had actually been a stressful time of completing end of year assignments and studying for exams. I therefore was not rested and returned to a pressurized work schedule. I consequently went down sick soon after returning and fell behind in my work. Thinking that I had just had a holiday my supervisor was not impressed. Unguided in my research I was starting to get stuck in a quagmire of details that were not actually that pertinent to my main questions. I realize now I was manic, not settling to anything and my thoughts being all over the place. Outwardly I seemed precocious, highly sociable and rather noisy and brash, to all intents more out going than normal and the life of the party. Inwardly though I was feeling ostracized, isolated and alone and frustrated with my lack of progress on my project. I also felt ultra sensitive to any reproaches from my supervisor or others.

Running circles in my mind

With my therapist today I looked at how my decision making seems to take me around in a circle. I start out wanting to be in the working world and doing development/environmental work but I come back to the ever pressing question of whether I should try tackle a PhD again. There still is a fear that lurks in the corner of failing again and not coping.
I have had a good run for quite a while now, without any major blips. My current cocktail of medication seems to be keeping me on an even keel and I have managed to not have to go on lithium which I am very thankful for. Slight mood swings do scare me slightly I won't lie. There is the fear of losing it again and sinking into another hellish emotional war zone. I wonder how much I over analyse elevations in my moods and fear them to be the first cruscendoes towards a manic pitch or how I am unnerved by dips and wonder how long and how deep they will go. In a way I can no longer take life's natural ups and downs as just that, instead of scrutinizing where they will lead me to. I need to try learn how to master these and not be cowered by them.

Another challenge from today's therapy session was to look at how I can fill up my days more so that I can try to cope with a full day's work and the stresses that go with it. At the moment I am doing bits and pieces and trying to keep myself occupied and employed. Tutoring biology and maths, trying to write a paper on collaborative mapping for indigenous community conservation initiatives, procrastinating on a report on the economic value of Mana Pools and in between doing some work on the Millennium Development Goals, my day is still unstructured and unfulfilled. This takes me back full circle though to my employment connundrum and the indecision regarding braving a PhD once more.