It’s Mental Health Awareness week and this year the theme is “loneliness”
Over dinner, my family is asking me if I am intending to write something on the subject this week.
I tell them that I can never think of anything to write other than pointing out that developing a feeling of love for oneself means you’ll never feel as lonely again because you’ll always have you.
They laugh and tell me that this is the “Holy Grail” of mental health, the art of loving oneself.
“That’s like telling someone to cheer up without telling them how,” my daughter says.
It feels harsh, but I take her point.
The runner beans are pressed against the window in the spare bedroom pleading to be put out into the garden.
Earlier in my life, I would just have planted everything outside and hoped for the best, a strategy that garnered great support from the slugs and snails.
Having lost all of my crops I would curse my impatience and tendency to cram too many things into a short space of time combined with an unwillingness to see any of them to fruition.
It created loneliness of sorts. One borne from a misunderstanding and intolerance of myself.
When, as an adult, I was diagnosed with ADHD, everything began to change in small almost imperceptible ways.
I still felt impatient and wanted to move on to the next task before finishing the one I was working on, but I found more compassion and kindness towards myself which helped me to moderate my destructive behaviour.
I’d have a similar experience when I tried to organise myself in other ways, making notes in a host of different places with no hope of collating them into anything coherent, forgetting to get rid of data I no longer needed, and falling all too easily down a rabbit hole in which buying some bootlaces for boots I hadn’t worn in years became bewilderingly more important than finishing a piece of work I was already halfway through.
Understanding myself better was the route to mitigation, where the sort of highly regimented routine that I actually need and enjoy became a wonderful way of keeping my more skittish self in line, but with kindness and humour rather than anger and annoyance.
Over time, I developed other ways of balancing out the more inconvenient ways in which my brain wanted to direct me.
Impulsiveness was managed through talking to myself as a nurturing parent would a headstrong child, time management got better as I learned how to say “No” through gritted teeth, and coping with stress became easier as I started to actively get rid of as much of it as I could.
Similar strategies are as good a way of combating the loneliness which comes from poor self-awareness for the neurotypical as they are for the neurodiverse.
In an interview for a podcast this week I was asked if therapists are in therapy and, if so, what do I get from it?
I told her that many remain in therapy although I can’t speak for all and that, personally, it has brought me to a place of peace with and appreciation of myself that I couldn’t possibly have achieved without it and that, although I didn’t realise it at the time, it was the path to self-love.
Taking the vegetables out to plant into the newly established raised bed I can feel the beans’ excitement. Especially so as, these days, I have taken the time and trouble to dig right down and establish a barrier of cardboard that will stop the grass growing through, give the crops at least half a chance against the slugs and the dogs, and help me to remember how much nicer it is to feel that I’ve supported myself to do something properly rather than cutting adrift leaving myself alone.
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