Pain into Passion

January 25, 2016.Reading time 13 minutes.

25th January 2016

I’m standing on a hill overlooking hundreds of miles. Scenery, fields, trees, the sky, houses, cars and people just going about their day to day lives. Has anyone noticed I’m here? Looking down and just watching them, watching life. Probably not. Eventually someone would notice, but right now I’m just here – unnoticed, undiscovered and unobtrusive. I sit on a little bench as the sun starts setting and the cold wintery air tries to pierce through my layers and my skin. I can see my breath as it escapes the warmth of my body and disperses into the mist hovering the fields around me.

I feel alone. The type of loneliness where you can be sat in the middle of a room surrounded by a hundred of your friends yet you’re still alone. As I look out and see the hundreds of cars driving back from work eager to get home to their families, people walking hastily down the streets anxious to get out of the cold and into the warm to nestle in for the night, it hits me how vastly huge the world is that I live in. The hundreds of people I am watching right now but don’t even know. The millions more who live in my country and the billions beyond that who live on our planet. The world is a scarily big place and sometimes I can’t help but look out and feel so isolated and separated in the midst of so many thousands of people, immersed in a restless world that never sleeps, never rests and never stops.

I feel an ache in my heart. A pain that I can’t seem to shake. I haven’t injured myself, I haven’t physically hurt myself, but that pain – it’s real. And the more I let myself go there, the more I let my mind run free from the restrictions I so often put around it, the more real the pain becomes. Suddenly I’m so overwhelmed, everything becomes too much. I choke up and before I can gain back any control the tears come bursting through, exploding out as if they had been tied up and restricted for far too long. I’m crying, sobbing, shaking uncontrollably. All I can do is sit back, my arms tightly embracing my legs, trying to shrink into the smallest ball I can possibly become, powerlessly giving in to the pain that’s now so bad I momentarily think maybe this is what having a heart attack feels like.

As I let it happen, as I let the tears run freely, I think back over the years trying hard to remember why this pain and these feelings feel foreign yet so simultaneously familiar. There haven’t been many moments like this in my life but suddenly I realise the ones that have happened have been strangely significant and impacted my life in ways nothing else ever has.

I was about 17 and I became very very close to a girl called Lucy. She, like me, was addicted to drugs – mainly heroine – but unlike me, she had no life. She was homeless in Oxford, lived under the bridge where so many others spent countless nights, she at the age of 24 literally had nothing and no one. We met one night in Oxford and our friendship grew from there. I used to bring her food and fags and we spent days and nights in each other’s company talking about life and faith and what we would one day go on to achieve. I will never ever forget the day I got the phone call from the police, saying they had found my number on her old bashed up pay as you go phone that never had any credit on it, and I needed to come in to identify her body. She had committed suicide. No note, no message, no warning, no nothing. She had taken an overdose and they had found her body under the bridge. They tried numerous numbers on her phone but they were all dealers or crack addicts who couldn’t care less. I didn’t even know her surname. I still decided to go in and identified her as Lucy but I couldn’t tell them anything else. Till this day I will remember that moment standing next to her cold hard body, eyes sunken in, face so pale, she was gone. That was the pain. The same pain. The pain of such sorrow, such a monumental loss, a moment I felt more alone than ever before. For days and weeks after, I would think about her, and that same pain would crash in all over again. I would never ever see her again. She was gone. Gone from this world. Gone from my life. There were moments I wanted to go and do the same. Moments where I had so much anger inside of me towards this world and the life I had been given, I wanted to shove two fingers up at it and take back control and follow in Lucy’s footsteps.

But actually something else happened. I began to see life differently. It was almost like a surge of determination started taking over inside. Once the pain stopped completely choking me and space freed up for me to actually be able to think again, I knew deep down I didn’t want to end up like Lucy. I didn’t want this world to swallow me up like it had done so many others close to me.

As I’m standing on a hill overlooking hundreds of miles, the uncontrollable sobbing gradually subsiding, the intensity of the pain slowly decreasing, I’m reminded of something a wise friend once shared with me; “Pain is the fuel for passion – it energises us with an intensity to change that we don’t normally possess.” That statement to me couldn’t be more true. You see, when Lucy died something in me that day changed. It didn’t suddenly transform my life overnight and I became Margaret Thatcher. No way, not even close. But it gave me a passion inside, a determination to change my current circumstances and do something with the life I had been given. Within a matter of months after Lucy’s death I broke into the Scotland Under 21’s international hockey squad. Not long after I met some people through an organisation called Christians in Sport who have since played an incredibly significant and enormous part in me finding a faith and starting the journey which years on has helped me get to where I am today. It’s not been plain sailing and during the last 10 years it has been one endlessly long hurdle race and I’m still nowhere near the finish. Sometimes the jumps are too high or my legs get too tired and I mess up, give up and temporarily make a mess of the whole course, but eventually we find our feet again, we muster up the energy once more to keep going and we get back on track. That pain all those years ago, the same pain which has reared its ugly head on multiple occasions throughout my life, it could crush me or it could push me. And I chose for it to push me. Just like now, it’s been a heavy and tough week for different reasons, but I have felt the same pain boil up inside of me. Do I let it destroy me? Momentarily I let it consume me. Momentarily I let it come out. But that’s just it, it’s the word momentarily. Then I take back the control, I see the pain for what it really is, and I use it to propel me into whatever lies ahead of me.

Some people say time heals all wounds. I don’t agree. The wounds will always be there but over time they are protected and covered by scar tissue and the pain lessens. But the wounds are never fully gone. To me they are the reminder to keep on going, each one holds a lesson and I was taught through it, it was that pain which fuelled the passion to choose a different path, to make a different choice, the scars remind me I’m still fighting the race and as of yet nothing has been able to stop me.

We live in a world of over 7 billion people. Yes, sometimes I look out and feel like I’m being swallowed up by the vast enormity of life and everything in it. Yes at times I can be surrounded by a thousand people and still feel like I’m standing all alone. But it’s in those moments that I look up and my faith becomes more real than ever before. It’s in those moments that I know I serve and am loved by a God who is larger than the planet I live on, bigger than the 7 billion people who live on it and greater than every single thing that tries to stop me or hurt me as I attempt to complete my journey through life.

This week has been tough but I know it’s also going to be instrumental to me for my future. I’m taking every bit of pain and I’m going to make sure I learn every possible lesson I can out of it. Sometimes hurt is needed to make us grow. Sometimes failure is needed to make us know. Sometimes loss is needed to make us gain. And often the greatest lessons are learnt through our deepest pain.

A New Year – Time to Smash Fear

January 9, 2016.Reading time 18 minutes.

9th January 2016

January 2016! Wow! I don’t think it’s still fully sunk in yet that we are once again in a new year. Once again another whole year has passed. And once again every time I need to give my date of birth I seem that much older!!

There are moments, especially surrounding birthday’s and New Year’s, where I panic. I panic that life is passing by too fast. I panic that I haven’t achieved anything yet. I don’t have my own house. I have bounced from job to job, started climbing the ladder of one career only to realise it wasn’t me and jumped off it again, tried another and just repeated the same mistakes all over again. Some years have been just one big vicious cycle and as I’ve hit another New Year the feelings of dread, failure, panic and disappointment all just try to come flooding back in again. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Well I hope I’m not anyway!

We live in a world where the bar has been set pretty high. There are standards. There are ways of doing things. There are unspoken rules hiding behind every corner telling us to be someone at a certain age, telling us to be somewhere at every phase of our lives. And if we don’t hit that criteria, if we fall out of the norm, if we are just that little bit different or have done things just that little bit differently, we almost automatically become immersed, by default, consumed by feelings of guilt, self-condemnation, anxiety and most of all – fear.

My New Year has already not started out the way I had intended it to. Since Monday the 16th of November until just 3 days ago I have been in and out of hospital 5 times, spending a total of 35 days as an inpatient due to a mixture of severe asthma attacks and vocal chord dysfunction. As sick as I have been it didn’t stop me from doing stuff though, and each time I was discharged it was just a matter of days until I was back doing life at full speed, which would then lead to the next attack followed closely by the next emergency admission back into A&E. And then Saturday happened. My body just collapsed and gave up. I’d been discharged and out of hospital just one day. I was found upstairs, completely unconscious, and once again I was rushed into hospital by ambulance. My body was so depleted, so exhausted, had gone through so many bouts of lack of oxygen and severely dysfunctional breathing and I had pushed it beyond the limit, past my reserves, that it just couldn’t keep going. I was out of it for literally days and when I finally came round with slurred speech and blurred vision and unable to barely stand or walk more than a few metres without almost collapsing again, I think I got my wake up call. I know it hadn’t been my first wake up call over the past couple of months. I’ve had some very hairy moments where I couldn’t get in enough oxygen and I know I’ve come very close to it really being ‘it’ for me in A&E a few times. But it was a big enough wake up call to really make me stop and think.

And that’s just it! In those moments it’s ok – we have an excuse – an excuse to not be living up to our world’s expectations of where we should be and what we should be doing. BUT, the moment we’re not in ‘hospital’ or ‘sick’ or have a legitimate ‘excuse’ by the world’s standards, it’s in those moments that the pressure seems to hit us in the face again – normally harder and harsher than ever before. I’ve been put on bed/house rest for 3 weeks to let my body completely recover. That was ok for the first few days! Because I could barely move without being out of breath. I looked grey and I was incredibly weak. But as the days have gone by and I’m feeling myself getting stronger and stronger, I’m sat at home, and I feel the uneasiness, the pressure and the need to be showing everyone around me that I’m busy being successful, and just the personal need of ‘needing’ to be busy and show that I’m fine, return all over again. Why?

As I’ve sat and really reflected on where it all comes from – I put it down to fear. A fear of not being accepted. A fear of not being good enough. A fear of being ‘less’ than everyone around me. Unsuccessful, useless, fruitless, ineffective, unproductive… a failure. Apart from us all eventually dying I think the second biggest thing we all have in common is fear. We all fear something. Whether it’s big or small, significant or insignificant. They exist. It exists. But what really is fear? The best way I think I can describe it is this:

False

Evidence

Appearing

Real

Yes bad stuff happens! Yes horrendous things happen. But fearing something or having a fear almost always comes from an experience you experienced or may have witnessed. But then continuing to have that fear of that ‘thing’ or that ‘something’ is based on a perception that is no longer there or the probability of it happening again is so slim it really is False Evidence Appearing Real created in our own minds to stop us from actually becoming free from it completely and being able to succeed in ways we never even thought possible.

I want to show you exactly what I mean in just one way that I have experienced this in my own life over the past few months. Like I said right from my very first blog I’m only gonna be real with you all. I’m not gonna tone things down or make them sound more rosy to try and paint a nicer or easier picture. It’s not who I am and I feel I can only make a real impact and help people if I’m honest in every part of my life.

At the age of just 12 I became ‘friends’ with an older man. I was groomed – for those who don’t know what groomed is (it’s when an adult builds an emotional connection with a child to gain their trust for the purposes of sexual abuse or exploitation). I fell into that exact trap. Before I knew it I was forced into a world of sex, porn, prostitution, trafficking and abuse. They got me hooked onto every drug possible which made it easier for them to use me in whatever way they needed to. But on the very first ever day they did anything to me I tried to run and they held me down, restrained me and forcibly injected me with heroine. And that was it. For 7 very long years I would take any drug voluntarily and even happily as it made me feel better and it took some of the pain away. But heroine? Oh I would sniff it, smoke it – no problem. But I wouldn’t go near injecting it. But that was where the problem lay. For the kind of work I was forced to do they needed me hooked on IV heroine. Injecting heroine has such a different effect to taking it in any other form. It eliminates any feelings of sorrow, regret, anger, stress, guilt. It washes away any feelings that aren’t totally and completely amazing. But with it I knew I lost control. I became someone else. The relief of all anxiety, fear, loneliness, every muscle relaxes, it’s a feeling of falling into a warm soft bed after you’ve walked ten miles barefooted on spikes or burning coal. And you’re probably wondering ‘why the heck was it so bad then?!?!’ Because of exactly those reasons. I lost control. I lost control. I lost control. They could do whatever they wanted. And yeh maybe at the time I didn’t feel the pain and was completely dissociated from any feelings at all, but like any drug or like anything – it doesn’t last. And the comedown, the anticlimax, the complete and utter crash when it starts wearing off is more painful than anything else I can describe. Because it’s not just the pain of the drug wearing off and the feelings returning harder and more intense than they ever existed before, it’s the pain that starts kicking in of everything you’re body has suffered and endured during the high too. And so from day one it became my ultimate fear. Needles became my irrational phobia. I was held down and forcibly injected more times than I’ve probably ever kicked a football.

The thing is, the fear never just left. Even years after I was rescued from my living hell, I could still not have a needle near me. There have been times over the past 8 years where I put my life in jeopardy, rather dying than getting life saving treatment because my fear of needles was that horrifically intense and real. And to me once again it shows that fear is False Evidence Appearing Real. Yes, once upon a time it was a real fear, but now it no longer is. Being in the critical care unit for so long over the past few months I came to know and trust the nurses and doctors like I’ve never trusted nurses or doctors before. And for the first time in my life I started chipping away and eventually breaking through the incredibly thick wall of my fear of needles. I still need someone to hold my arm because my body has instinctively learnt to pull away as soon as I know a needle is near, but I can now let people take blood. I can now let people inject me. It’s the biggest fear I’ve EVER overcome and through it I now know that I can overcome any fear.

For some this might be an extreme example but to me it’s an example for anything and for anyone. I use what I have learnt through my needle phobia in the smallest of areas of my life now. Daily. From the dark to enclosed spaces, from lots and lots of people in one place to spiders, from Brussel sprouts to mushrooms!! The list goes on and on but I know that every single thing has stemmed from somewhere or has branched out of something.

And hear me when I say this… Fear can feel very real, but if I really REALLY stop and think about it, it’s danger that is the real thing. Not the fear. Fear isn’t real. It’s the product of the thoughts WE create. Danger is what’s real, fear is a choice. When I knew what was coming, when those men were coming towards me, when I knew I was once again going to fight a losing battle and be injected against my will – that was danger and it was beyond real. But over the years I have learnt and seen and experienced not only in my own life but in so SO many people’s lives around me, that too many of us are not living out who we are and are not living our dreams because we’re living our fears. Fear is an idea crippling, experience crushing, success stalling inhibitor inflicted by only ourselves – and if we can learn to push through those fears and realise that the majority of the time those fears aren’t even real and are certainly not even actually there – man the possibilities for us are endless! What a sense of freedom!

So what’s the reality of fear? You’re not scared of the dark – You’re scared of what’s in it. You’re not afraid of heights – You’re afraid of falling. You’re not afraid of the people around you – You’re afraid of rejection. You’re not afraid to love – you’re afraid of not being loved back. You’re not afraid to try again – You’re afraid of getting hurt again. We don’t fear the unknown – we fear what we think we know about the unknown. Danger is real. Fear is a choice.

I’m sorry if I’ve blabbed on in this blog. It was just heavy on my heart this week to talk about this subject because it’s effected me so much in my own life for too many years. I hope we can start this New Year together in a new way. In a way more free than ever before. Let’s become fear-less people of everything and anything. Let’s make 2016 a year we look back on and go ‘Yeh!’ I did what I never thought I’d do. I’ve done what I never thought I could achieve. I pushed past that fear and it has taken me places above and beyond.

I’m ready! So ready! Bring on this New Year and lets absolutely smash it!

It’s a Wrap!

December 30, 2015.Reading time 13 minutes.

30th December 2015

I struggled a bit to figure out what to write about this week. I got discharged from hospital two days before Christmas and since then I’ve barely stopped. Don’t worry I’ve been taking it easy!! But having had Christmas Eve with my first ‘adopted’ family, Christmas Day at home with my second ‘adopted’ family, Boxing Day with my ‘actual’ family, and then a couple of days with one of my best friends, oh and add three days of epic sales shopping in there to finish it all off – it’s been an amazing Christmas, but in fact so good that yesterday I had a panic that I didn’t know what to blog about!!

But this morning I woke up and just smiled. Today is the 30th of December. It’s nearly the last day of 2015. We’re approaching the final hours before we hit a new year and we start all over again. Why not take this incredible opportunity not just to look forward and get excited about what lies ahead, make awesome plans, give up the things that have tied us down and that we are not taking with us into a new season, but also to look back…

And for me looking back starts exactly 12 months ago. Wednesday the 10th December 2014. The day I took an overdose so big it should have killed me. I have my journal entry from that day in front of me and I’m gonna be honest, it’s not the easiest read. Why? Because the feelings from that day were so real, the emotions from that moment leading up to the overdose still so raw. And it’s funny because as much as I have no recollection what so ever from the entire week after the overdose, I can remember every moment before it as if it was yesterday.

Never had I felt lower in my life. I’ve hit some pretty dark places and reached some pretty low depths. But the 10th of December was different. I just gave up. Life became too hard. I was exhausted from having to battle day in day out with myself, with my mind, with my faith, with the people I loved most and just with life. It wasn’t planned. I didn’t have some massive grand design mapped out to leave this world. There had been a mix up with my prescription tablets, I’d lost one bunch, the doctors gave me a whole new set, I’d been rubbish at taking them anyway, then I found the month’s worth I had lost in the boot of my car, so basically I suddenly had about three months worth of strong sleeping tablets of all sorts suddenly sitting there in my possession. And that was all I needed. I was done and I couldn’t see a way forward any longer. So I wrote in my journal. A letter to God. I said sorry. I pleaded for Him not to be angry but just to understand. But mainly I just explained why I couldn’t do this anymore. How I felt like such a burden, how it wasn’t fair on the people I loved most to keep having to support me and do what they do day in day out. That this was my way of releasing them from it all and my way of making life easier for so many around me. I felt that everyone who supported me did it because they had once made that decision to and have since never been able to give it up and still did it out of duty and because they felt they had to.

It took me a very long time to realise that they support me and do what they do not out of duty or moral obligation, but simply out of a love for me that just blows my mind. To them I am not a burden but a blessing (although at times I know and they have agreed a burden fits the criteria much more!). But the point is, we so often as human beings see everything as one big negative in our own heads. We not only let our own feelings take full control but we hand them the steering wheel as if we have suddenly become incapable of driving ourselves. As individuals we seem to decide what other people’s motives, thoughts and opinions are. We almost can’t just simply accept that maybe someone is there because they do actually care. Maybe someone cares because they see ‘us’ for who we really are and they love us and accept us just as we come. Baggage and all.

I was found a few hours after taking my overdose collapsed on the floor upstairs completely unconscious. I was rushed to hospital by ambulance and on route the ambulance had to stop twice because I stopped breathing. I woke up in intensive care in hospital 3 days later. It’s a genuine miracle that I am alive. The doctor stood in front of me just before I finally got discharged, once again just days before Christmas and told me the volume of sedatives I had taken and the bottle of vodka I had downed, I should be dead. Those words have never left me and it was from that moment that things really did begin to change for me.

The weeks that followed were some of the toughest I’ve ever had to go through mentally, emotionally, spiritually and also physically due to impact of taking such a high quantity of tablets and as a consequence of the decision I had made. But as my body slowly recovered and I was able to ease my way back into day to day life I began to realise that I now had the choice of what I did with what I’d been given. I could choose to stay the victim, be chained to the past that I had suffered, or choose to accept that I was a living, walking miracle. That I had been given another chance and that there must be a greater purpose for me being here and that I really was supposed to be alive. And for the first time ever – I went with option number two.

January of this year 2015 I was done! I was done with depression, I was done with letting my past control me, I was done with being a victim, I was done with everything negative and everything controlling. I look back at the last 12 months and I stand amazed at how far I’ve come from lying in CCU in hospital in December 2014 to lying in CCU in December 2015! Of course these last 12 months have been a journey. I have messed up, I have made mistakes, I have regrets and there have been plenty of times where I could have made better decisions or done things different. But guess what?? In my eyes – the positives smash the negatives! I have overcome more fears than I can count, I survived another month in hospital without completely and utterly losing the plot (sometimes just a little bit! But it was very momentarily!), I am living more independently than I have ever been able to do before, I am starting to find a confidence and security in who I am and what I have to give more and more each day and for the first time EVER I would choose life over death! And that alone is one of my biggest accomplishments so far.

I now want to live! I am now excited about the future! I will never ever let myself fall as deep and as dark as I did last year December and the lessons that I learnt through it and that I have learnt since have been invaluable. As hard as it has been at times I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Because as cliche as it might sound, it’s still true – everything that has happened, every moment of my past, every part of the overdose, every bit of pain and every heartache has led me to this moment. Has made me who I am. It has helped me become stronger. It’s given me more wisdom. It has developed my character. And most of all, it has shown me love and how incredibly powerful love is. I’m here today because God never stopped loving me and I’m here today because people never stopped loving me. Personally my faith has helped me get to where I am today. But whether you have a faith or not that doesn’t matter. If you have people in your life – love them. No matter what. People need to feel accepted despite the baggage they walk around with. Choose to love them and make sure they know they are loved. I genuinely wouldn’t still be here today if people hadn’t chosen to accept me and love me for who I am and continued to love me no matter what.

2015 has been some year! I think every year is some year. Because we’re people! And we don’t live through 365 days without something major happening that rocks us or tons of little things happening that changes us. But hey – we’re all travelling this thing called life together and I’m excited to enter into this new chapter together and see where the next 365 days will take us. So here’s my Happy New Year to you all. I hope and pray it will be one heck of a year!

Bring on 2016!

Life on Intensive Care

December 19, 2015.Reading time 14 minutes.

19th December 2015

Well blog number two. Firstly, my apologies there wasn’t one last week. I have been writing this one for almost two weeks now but it has taken a lot out of me and therefore taken me so much longer than usual. Sorry! This also wasn’t exactly what I thought I’d be writing about this week in all honesty but hey seeing as I said I was gonna keep this real, why not just write from the exact place I’m at – hooked onto and wired up to all sorts of machines, medication, oxygen and infusions in the heart of the hospital’s intensive/critical care unit where it’s all go go go and very far from my day to day normality.

You’re going to have to bare with me. My mind is slow, my energy is low and my oxygen levels have been somewhat below average for a while now. As I said before I’ve been attempting to write this blog since early last week and it’s been a bit of an uphill battle! As far as intensive care goes, it’s not the place where you come to be still, find peace and let the words flow from within. This place is beyond crazy and I have given my own head a new found pardon with the realisation that there are much more wacky and out there places to be than in my mind!

The last weeks have been a total rollercoaster where on occasion we’ve even veered off track and soared through some patches of whirlwind extremities. And today is the first time where I can sit back on my bed, breathe, take a moment and just reflect on all that’s gone on.

I had an asthma attack – almost a month ago now. Sunday night the 15th of November. Who knew watching the opening show of I’m a Celebrity could have such an impact!! From that moment it’s all been a bit of a blur really. From being rushed into hospital, spending 9 days on intensive care, to finally being discharged, to relapsing again just a week later and spending another 15 days on intensive care. Today is day 25 in hospital and I’ve finally been moved on to a ward and the countdown for home has begun. With severe asthma, vocal chord spasms, and high stress levels also having an affect on shutting down my airways – all of it thrown in to the mix, it’s certainly not been the easiest three or four weeks. I’ve had to deal with some major fears regarding hospitals, needles, doctors, being very much trapped and I’m not gonna lie – lying in a bed in the same spot in the same room with the same view not moving much for 25 days is also not listed high on my skill set! For those of you who know me I have undiagnosed ‘too much energy and can’t sit still syndrome’ as it is.

But you know what? I’m grateful. I could sit here and rant and rave about how hard life has been lately or how my life can never just be simple. How I missed my birthday and might still even miss Christmas. Or how there’s always something being thrown at me to hinder it or stop me from doing all the many things I want to do but what’s the point? This is it! This is the one life I’ve been given and I have to just take it in my stride. I hate hospitals but over the past month I have met so many absolutely totally phenomenally incredible people who do a job I could never do and most people will hands down take for granted day in day out. But actually without them I’m really not quite sure where I’d be right now. I’ve been on the same critical care unit for over three weeks and in that time seen 3 people die. It’s only a 6-bed unit. To me that puts life into perspective.

About 3 weeks ago a lady got wheeled in on a bed opposite me on the unit. Her name was Darcy (not exactly sure of the spelling sorry). I was trying to guess her age with a few of my friends and we decided on between 60-65. She was 34. That’s just 7 years older than me… From the information I could gather on her over the next days she had anorexia at it’s most severe and her body had started bleeding internally and shutting down. She had no reserves left to fight. She was sitting it up and we exchanged words on that Thursday. On the Friday her body deteriorated and she had to be tubed and a machine was breathing for her. I spent days just looking at her. There wasn’t more than two or three metres between our beds. There she was. Just 34 years old. She had three kids under the age of 12. Her sister, Gemma, came in every single day and we used to chat for ages. They did everything together and were so close. Just a few days later Darcy passed away. Even now when I write this it hurts and I want to cry. I want to cry at the precious life that was lost and wasted. I want to cry for her children who will never know their mum. I want to cry for Gemma who lost not just her sister but her best friend. Life is precious. We only get one shot. And this is my biggest lesson I seem to be learning from all of this. Four weeks on and I’ve seen people die, people come in because their bodies are in a complete mess due to drugs, or due to unmanaged and uncared for diabetes. Diabetes so uncared for limbs have been lost and had to be amputated resulting in lives changed forever. The list goes on and on but I would say at least 80% of the time people are rushed into hospital in critical conditions because of a lack of self care. It’s why I ended up in the condition I was. I’ve had asthma for 14 years yet couldn’t tell you the first thing about it! I never used my preventative inhalers because in that moment I didn’t need them!! And that’s all well and good and bodies seem to have an incredible threshold for being able to absorb and withstand whatever is thrown at them… till a point. And then it caves. And for some it caves and you catch it just in time. For others it caves and it’s beyond help. Darcy came in and for her it was too late. Hope was the only thing left going for her. The hope of a miracle that just didn’t come.

I look around and I see a world of lost people. Who are living with a mindset that ‘it’ll be ok’. Who live like they are fine today and right now and that’s all that matters. But in four weeks i’ve seen and realised that living like that isn’t ‘fine’. Of course there are things that happen which are out of our control. That’s life. But most people only spend 24 to 48 hours in critical care so in three weeks I’ve seen a fair amount of people come and go and it’s just given me a newfound insight into self care and self management. And for me I know that it lies at the heart of my identity and who I am to myself. You can’t love someone you hate! And you can’t really care for someone you ain’t too bothered about!

And that’s the crux of my post today I guess. As I continue my personal therapy journey and continue to work through my own years of abuse, the horrific memories that still at times paralyse me at night, and the places I still can’t go to in my head, let alone physically… I just need to stop and think of the impact. And if I’ve realised the impact in my own life then maybe others can realise the impact in their lives. If there are parts in us we hate, or we have never come to terms with, we don’t care about or shut out… what long term affect might it be having without us even having any knowledge of it whatsoever?

I didn’t care about my asthma. It wasn’t affecting me day to day and I wasn’t massively bothered about my health. 15th November that changed and I’ve just spent a month in and out of hospital because of it. It’s been painful and really tough at times. I’ve cried, I’ve felt out of control, I’ve been angry, frustrated and felt so alone. It never even needed to get to that point. I hope you can take a moment at some point today to just reflect and make sure you don’t have to go through the same. Because it happens and it happens when we least expect it and usually at the most inconvenient time too! And then all we can do is wish. Look back, regret and wish we could have just…

Anyway! I can now finally see the light and I should be home within the next few days!!! And as always I just want to say thank you to so many people. I have an absolutely totally incredible support network around me who just stand with me through anything and everything no matter what. And I also want to say the biggest thank you from the bottom of my heart to the MANY doctors and the PHENOMENAL Critical Care (CCU) nursing team. I could name them, each and every one of them, individually. Without them I can guarantee these weeks would have looked very differently. You’ve all played a HUGE part in getting me home. So thank you.

Have a great week everyone and hopefully next week I’ll be writing from home! :-)))

Making it Count

November 30, 2015.Reading time 4 minutes.

30th November 2015

Do you ever just take a moment out and think what is it all about? Ever just stop and look around and wonder how the heck you ended up here? Do you ever look back? Look forward? Or simply just question why and how?

I do. And I’d say on a fairly regular basis too. Because life is pretty crazy. And mine has definitely not been the straightforward or simple one I had in mind.

My name is Chi! It’s short for Chiara but I only ever get called that when I’m in trouble or there’s a serious matter at hand. I love words and I love to write. I dabble in poetry and over the past few years I have started telling parts of my story through filming and editing. Sometimes this world can be suffocating and in those moments I find myself alone with my journal or camera and just write and film, reflect. When your head is so full it can be hard to communicate those feelings and so difficult to make sense of the confusion. It can be hard to find the right person to talk to or even get the right words out. I have journals full, thousands of words, dating back years and years. It has showed me light in some of my darkest times and been a comfort when there was nothing else close. But now I have decided that I’m ready to start making it count. I’m ready to re-journey my past and the very many lessons I have learnt along the way, I’m ready to keep moving forwards and enter new terrain.

Today I woke up and decided that despite the pain and the heartaches, the years of struggle, the fight and the very long and challenging journey it has been so far, I want to start making it count. For what? I’m not sure. How? No idea! Where will this take me? No clue. But just like so often before, you take a breath, a step forward and you cross into the unknown.

For so long I was so ashamed of my past. My guilt kept me silent and my shame chained me up. But every day I become stronger and every moment I move up to places I’ve never experienced before. And I’m so ready to start becoming proud of all the scars in my life. Each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons and I hope through my honesty and in just being real I can somehow, somewhere, make a difference to someone else and their life.

Welcome to my blog, my very personal story and my very own journey. Welcome to the good and the great and at times even incredible but also into the hard and the nitty gritty, the painful and the bad, the challenging and the tough. I hope you’ll step into this new world with me where I don’t have the answers or the right direction, but I’m ready to start making life count. Ready to make the lessons learnt worth it. I’m excited about this new adventure and I’m pumped to see where it may go.