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Let it Ride – how I’ve learned to deal with my depression and anxiety

25/7/2016

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I’ve been having some counselling sessions because I had an ongoing period of anxiety and depression recently. The sessions have helped so much and I’m so lucky that I’ve had access to them without having to pay because they’re delivered by the NHS.

To be honest, my mental health issues may have passed without having to see a counsellor. It’s happened before. But this time, the counsellor has given me some really helpful tips and phrases that I wanted to share with others who may suffer mental health issues too. I’ve had my last session so now feels like the right time to blog about it.

For me, the problem is when I’m either right up and enthusiastic, interested, happy, everything is amazing. Or I’m right down. Everything is terrible, nothing is worth getting up for, getting dressed for and everything in the world is shit.
In everything else in my life I deal with things by making plans, thinking about things, ticking things off lists. In the words of a friend, ‘You’re a real doer aren’t you? You don’t just talk about doing something, you jump in and do it.’ Pretty much yeah.
This works great for practical things like home improvements, organising to see friends and family, holidays, date nights, and also my writing.
Unfortunately, as I’ve learned on a number of occasions over the years, this doesn’t work for my mental health problems.
I’ve had depression and anxiety off and on in various levels of severity since I was a teenager. Back then I didn’t call it that, I just referred to them as my dark periods and I would always get very anxious about social things. My anxiety has definitely become worse as I’ve aged. I never used to be worried about flying until Dad died in a light aircraft crash and then the whole thing about flying started stressing me out – the crowds, the lack of control, the lack of space, the flying in a metal tube in the air…
I have a number of techniques I use to manage my anxiety and depression:
  • Since December 2014 I’ve started doing more regular exercise which helps both anxiety and depression. Simply going for a 40min walk while listening to a podcast (Women’s Hour / Great Lives / Great Reads are my favourites, all free from BBC Radio 4) usually shakes off minor anxiety or a low mood.
  • I also try to eat healthily and in moderation most of the time. I’m all about the 80 / 20 rule.
  • I tend to avoid lots of news because a few big very sad news stories can often tip me over the edge. I know it’s avoidance, but for me it’s just taking care of myself.
  • I use reading as its own version of therapy and escape into a book I know ends happily.
  • I write a diary every day about what I’m worried about, how I’m feeling, and often simply writing it down helps put anxieties to rest.
However.
Sometimes.
The thing I fear most returns.
The black nothingness of depression wraps me up like a suffocating blanket.
I once had a dream about being in a supermarket wheeling my trolley around and the other shoppers were putting their packets of sadness into my trolley. There were packets, tins, bags, jars – all labelled with SADNESS – 100ml / 500g etc.
Even writing about it now actually makes me tear up slightly.
Being a control freak that I am. I freely admit this. I think it’s what makes means I’m such a doer, and so driven on things I want to focus on. Anyway, being a control freak means it’s really hard to deal with the fact that something about myself – something happening in my mind isn’t in my control. Intellectually I understand everything in the world isn’t in my control. Like, I don’t try to shout at the sky when the weather is crappy. But because depression is in me, it feels like I should have control of it.
Despite my best efforts – exercise, food, deep breathing, avoiding the news – sometimes IT will return.
The worst thing about the depression returning is that because it’s so all encompassing, it feels like it will NEVER leave. It feels like that’s how I will feel for ever and ever.
This is so painful that it’s hard to get up, eat, drink, wash myself, dress, be sociable. It takes away all the small pleasures in life – at its worst I didn’t even enjoy a cup of tea or my favourite TV shows (Ab Fab, Gilmore Girls) and for me that’s really serious! I remember Himself had bought me a baking book from the Great British Bake Off. I stared at the bright cover with a pink cupcake. It meant nothing to me. Not one part of me wanted to bake. I flipped through the pages and put it aside. ‘There’s nothing you can do out here’, I gestured to the air. ‘Because what’s wrong is in here.’ I tapped my head.
Himself, just like me, was powerless to do anything about my depression when it was that severe. And when you feel in such pain, or see someone in that much pain, that’s really hard to get your head around.
In my last counselling session we talked about this fear. The fear of IT never leaving me and how all encompassing that is for me.
This is what my counsellor told me: ‘Let it ride. Let the darkness pass. Stay with it. Sit with the darkness. Every day is a new day. Let it ride. This is today. Tomorrow is another day. Keep yourself in the moment.’
In life nothing stays the same. Life is about moment to moment. I know that the depression is part of me. And I’m fine with that.
Life is about loss – everything, everyone, ends. Life is about appreciating the moment. To appreciate the good you also have to experience the bad, the black moods, the bad times.
But remember, life is about moment to moment. This is the moment for now, and there will be another moment later.
Simply letting myself lean into the feeling, sit with the depression, rather than fighting it is somehow quite freeing. It’s a bit like not getting angry about the weather or a train’s delay. These are outside of my control and I don’t rage against them (I used to, but I don’t now I’ve mellowed with age). But before, with depression, because it was about me, I always felt the solution was in me to deal with depression.
The counsellor also said, ‘Depression shows you what’s important.’
It can tell you the need to slow down. To take time doing the things that are really important. It can tell you not to stress about the little things in life.
The last few times I’ve fallen off the happy wagon as I sometimes refer to it, has been due to a series of things. In late 2011 I was very stressed and busy at work for a whole host of reasons, then my friend Nick told me something about his health that made me think of him dying, and then, the straw that broke the happy mental camel’s back was a colleague’s dad dying in a car crash. I’ve learned that this response to very sad events is normal. I shouldn’t try to shy away from sadness.
I remember sitting in the office crying at my desk. Another time, I wheeled my suitcase along the platform at Paddington station to catch a train to the South West and tears were streaming down my face. Later, I sat on the tube to work and tears rolled down my cheeks. It wasn’t about anything specific, it was just about EVERYTHING. Life. The sadness. Death. Loss. I remember driving up the M11 to a meeting and being hardly able to see because my eyes filled with tears.
I now know that this wasn’t normal sadness, this was more, because it took away all enjoyment I felt in life. Normal sadness doesn’t do this. Normal sadness passes.

Depression is the same thought repeated: I am useless, the world is dangerous, everyone I know is dying, the world is filled with sadness...
My mistake, I now realise, was that I tried to fight the depression then. I tried to think and plan and reason my way out of it.
This is both exhausting and ineffective.
The best thing to deal with depression is not to try to think and plan but to let it ride, remind yourself it will pass, and if you can, to do something physical that is totally absorbing and not too mentally taxing. For me, walking, baking and writing helps me. You do whatever activity you can manage that’s absorbing.
Thankfully, you can’t bake about depression. You simply bake and at the end of following the recipe you have a lovely cake to eat. During the time I baked I didn’t worry about whether the depression would continue for ever, or what I should think about to shift it. All I thought about was mixing sugar, flour, butter and other ingredients and watching them rise in the oven. Marvellous.
I’ve resisted antidepressants because I saw what it did to some friends. They weren’t depressed any more, but also they felt detached from reality and unaware of things happening around them. For some that’s exactly what they need, and if you need to be on beta blockers, or any other medication for depression and anxiety you do what’s right for you. I’m not hating on antidepressants.

I worry if I took antidepressants I’d not be able to write and I know that would tip me over the edge and I dread to think where that would lead me. So antidepressants aren’t for me.
The reason writing is so important to me is because even during my long dark periods when I couldn’t bake, walk, get dressed, I’ve always been able to write. I’ve kept writing my diary every day. Writing about how shit I feel. How terrible everything is. And then one day I’ll write about a nice song on the radio I enjoyed. Or a chocolate biscuit I enjoyed with tea.
Enjoyed is the key word there.
Depression takes the enjoyment, the joy, out of everything in life. That’s its power. Until it passes. Until you move onto the next moment.
After my friend Nick’s funeral I didn’t know what to do with all the sadness. So I wrote about it. I wrote 5000 words about the funeral, about meeting Nick, about knowing him, about things we’d done together. I cried the whole time I wrote it, but it felt good to get it out of me.
After my 2011 blip, I wrote And Then That Happened, and the experiences of the main character’s mental health are all based on my own. The trolleys of sadness, the counsellor (I didn’t get on with that one, it’s important you get on with your counsellor, you have to click) the news blackouts, everything really.
I know some authors who have mental health issues don’t write about depression because they fear it will drag them down. Everyone has to work out their own way of coping in their own way. For me it’s the exact opposite.
I’m writing this because I want to be open about my mental health issues and explain some of my coping mechanisms and what I do when I can’t cope, which I also think is useful. The more we talk about mental health issues the more people will help others about it.
When I sat crying at my desk at work, no one asked me if I was all right. I think – but can’t know – that if I were a woman, someone would have asked me if I was OK. But a man crying in public, is a whole different messy let’s-not-go-near-him ball game.
Next time you see someone looking a bit down, on the verge of tears, or actually crying, ask them how they are. And make sure you really listen to their answer.
It doesn’t take magic or rocket science to help someone who’s struggling with their mental health. It just takes a few open questions, an offer to make a cup of tea, to listen to how someone’s feeling and to say you’re there if they want to talk again. And that it’s all right for them to feel this way and that this too shall pass. Let it ride. Encourage them to walk, bake, make paper chains, draw. This too shall pass.
Liam Livings xx



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What I made of Barbara Cartland's philosophy of Life

18/7/2016

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Hello, and welcome to my 4th in a series of blogs where I discuss my thoughts on parts of Barbara Cartland's biography - Crusader In Pink. For previous posts, check out part one, part two part three. Italics are my thoughts, all comments not in italics are from Henry Cloud’s Barbara Cartland Crusader in Pink 1979.

Her philosophy of life
As the Radio Times said in its issue for the New Year 1929, Barbara Cartland introduces a new and most attractive theory. Her idea is largely to do good to others by doing good to oneself. It is possible, by putting on a pretty dress or making up one’s face to confer a good deal more gladness in the New Year than by stopping smoking or getting up early in the morning. This doctrine should appeal to all our women listeners.

‘Part of my philosophy of live,’ she says, ‘is never to admit that you’ve been beaten or done down. The moment you do that, you’ve lost. Quite early on I learned that the best way to survive is to pretend that anything unpleasant simply hasn’t happened.’
I don’t really agree with her first assertion I’m afraid. I think doing good for others is better achieved by actually...doing good to others, rather than one’s self. However, there is definitely something useful about her second assertion. I watched Jo Brand walking the width of England for charity. She, in her own words, is an obese woman who does little exercise, and this walk was meant to test her as well as raise money for charity. The way she dealt with her problems in life was, similar to Cartland, to not think about them and simply get on with it. The thought of the walk across England was actually much worse than simply getting up each day and walking until dark and doing the same thing again until she’d finished.

What do you make of this philosophy of life?
Liam Livings xx



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Shout out to readers of the blog - topics you'd like me to blog about

18/7/2016

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Inspired by the wonderful Women’s Hour listener week where they have a week of programmes based on topics listeners have requested, I’d like to ask all the readers of this blog what they’d like me to blog about.
Please let me know the topics you’re interested in and I will blog them (assuming I receive any) over a few weeks.

It could be anything (within reason) about my writing, my reading, my life, my studying, my views on current affairs, my views on books / films / TV series. Anything. Do let me know. You come up with the ideas and I’ll come up with the words!

You can reply on Twitter, Facebook, on this blog or through my contact me page.
Liam Livings xx


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Diary Days 4 July - Review

14/7/2016

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I went to my first Diary Day on Monday 4 July in Shoreditch.
After enjoying BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour podcasts series about diaries in which they mentioned Diary Days - events in London where people read extracts from their teenage diaries / letters, reading The Guardian article and keeping my own diary since 1997 - I knew I had to go.

It is part of very attractive, very personable and sadly very straight organiser, Jordi Sinclair’s philosophy to take us away from staring at screens and into events about more shared experiences with people face to face. And I for one am totally on board with that. Jordi’s events company, Smudged Lipstick events has a series of events in London working to this theme.

Some peolpe let Jordi know in advance if they wanted to read. Some people stood up to read without telling him in advance. Some people sat and enjoyed it without reading. There was no obligation to read. There was a bottle of vodka and shot glasses for anyone who needed some Dutch courage before baring their soul to the audience under the bright lights.

Pictures are allowed, but filming is not allowed.

I sat back and revelled in the teenage angst, drama, OTT and variety of experiences from a woman sharing conversations in a Whatsapp group she shares with close friends and sisters, teenage diaries from the mid noughties, a woman who’d just started writing a diary since attending the Diary Days events and another woman who despite most of her diaries being in storage in America, she read early noughties extracts from her diary she’d emailed a friend not long ago.

I loved it.
Every over the top phrase.

Every shared laugh or ‘oh no’ as it rippled around the room.

Most people seemed to have come in couples or groups, so as someone on his own I was a bit unusual. No change there then! It would have been nice to have chatted to people before and after the readings, which is just as much my responsibility as anyone else’s. I had to rush off home after it had finished but next time I think I’ll stay for drinks, Nachos and chats.

I will definitely read from either my diaries or letters I wrote friends but in the meantime, here’s a few of my diary entries from the 4 July:

4 July 1997
Car service – Autotechnik.
8.30. New Forest Enterprise Park. £85 all inc. Rushington Business Park.
Shirley. See video in Chandler’s Ford.
This was within the first 3 months of my diary keeping. It’s in a Filofax which only gives a few lines of space per day. As you can see I’ve got a way to go before it becomes interesting.

Let’s see what happened on the same day a year later.
4 July 1998
PRIDE IN LONDON
9.30 Basingstoke group for lift to London.
Get up at 6.30 and walk dogs.
Arrive B’stoke 40mins later @ 8.50. Quite a few others go that I’d met at the group on Tuesday.
Camp Nick complains about my music taste. James cracks on to me till I tell him no. Steve and Andy celebrate their year anniversary – aahh.
Katherine has her banner. Arrive @ Hyde Park @ 11.00. Meet Evan and friends. The march (mince) starts @12.00. The feeling is great – cool solidarity and real Pride in being gay.
At the end I phone Mel and they say they’ve got to leave really soon (3.00). We go to Soho and look in Clone Zone. Absolutely packed. Sit in Covent Garden & Soho Square. Full of benders – great. Arrive B’stoke @7.30. Go with Nick to Sainsbury’s 4 tea. He drags me across Sainsbury’s 4 a pizza – v embarrassing. Everyone meets @ Nick’s place. Including Matt? Or Mike? - James’ work friend. We go to Reading Gay pub. Live entertainment quite cool.. Talk to Matt 4 whole night. He’s really cute and doesn’t look gay at all – lovely. He’s not out at all and admires my confidence. He hates “all this camp” however says I’m not too camp! Cool eh! Despite numerous interruptions from Nick and looks from Andy we talk all night. Leave @ 11.00. Drop x in B’stoke and get lost. Drop Matt off. Ask him 4 a drink – yes!! He fancies me. I’ll see him on Tuesday.
How things move on in a day! By this time I had a small page per day diary with 33 lines per page, allowing me much more room to write about what had happened, what I thought, and seemingly specify every time during the day preceded by @. I’d started going to Salisbury and Basingstoke youth groups by this point. I would cruise across Hants and Wilts in my little car with a core of friends meeting new ones. What happened to Matt? We dated for about 2 months until he dumped me and traded me in for a ‘cute young blond boyf John’ – who I met at the Christmas party of the youth group on 19 December. It’s like Dawson’s Creek in Hampshire, UK isn’t it?

If you like the sound of this, then my Best Friends Perfect series is semi-autobiographical story full of teenage angst, Pride parades, love, friendship, camp and nineties nostalgia.

Until next time,

Liam Livings xx



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My 6 months into the year review

3/7/2016

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Today is Sunday, a day I try to keep ‘laptop free’ after spending the other 6 days in front of the laptop, but today it’s not possible, because I have a busy week coming up and wanted to take time to reflect on the past 6 months. I'm also just back from a week in Cornwall where I *basically* went laptop free - only using it for one self-edit of my dissertation piece and some UK Meet panel beating - so I'm less fussed about being 'at laptop' today.

I have to keep reminding myself it’s OK not to be writing lots of new fiction because I’m studying full time, while working full time. So here's what I've done so far this year under a few broad headings.

Liam Livings Writing

  • First draft of Two Big Ifs – aka Hacienda Story – which came out at 62,000 words.
  • First chapter and synopsis of the m/f women’s fiction story – which was about 5000 words in total.
  • Short story for a writing competition entry – 2500 words. Even if it disappears without a trace in this competition, which I fully expect, it’s been a great exercise in writing to deadline, writing to word limit, and it’s also given me some great characters I fully intend to write about in a novel.
  • Self-edited, submitted a novel and synopsis to a publisher. It was rejected, but the rejection was the nicest one I’ve ever received. They like my writing style and want to receive more of my work, but the one I submitted wasn’t for them [insert long list of reasons why!] This was very helpful, and certainly much more than the ‘thanks but no thanks’ I received from another publisher.
Other Writing

I’ve written, for a client, the first half of their memoir – which came out at 38,000 words (it’s with the client for comments and then I will continue with the second half of their story) This involved about 14 hours of recorded phone interviews which I transcribed and structured into the three act story structure.

MA in Creative Writing - studying

I’ve written, self-edited and submitted and had marks back from the first 4 modules of the MA in creative writing. I’m pleased to say I’ve had confirmation that I’ve passed these and am now able to proceed to the final term and assignment, which is the dissertation, over summer. Before submitting the assignments, during the 2 terms, I read weekly lecture materials or watched videos of lectures posted online, read assigned texts. I followed a weekly schedule of post work / comment on others’ work for feedback between the other students and tutors on the course. The four assignments I’ve completed are:

  • A 3000 word critical essay in which I compared the portrayal of the heroes in a gay romance about a bodyguard and a straight romance about a bodyguard. In both stories the bodyguard fell in love with the person he was guarding.
  • 5000 word start of a novel.
  • A portfolio of writing exercises – 3 poems (an ode, a villanelle and an unstructured poem), 8 pages of a play and 2000 words of life writing.
  • The 5000 word start of a novel.
Separate post on my reflections of studying the MA to follow, but if you have anything specific you’d like to know about it, please let me know in the comments.

Reading

I’ve read and made notes on (things I liked / disliked, techniques I wanted to learn from about the writing etc) on 17 books.

Networking etc

  • Organised a write in at my local library for the local writers group I help run with two other published authors.
  • Delivered a few talks on craft at the above group.
  • Delivered a talk at the RNA London Chapter on marketing for authors.
  • Supporting UK Meet by doing the panel beating and liaison of the two excellent keynote speakers. I firmly believe in this event because it’s the only space in the UK where readers, writers, bloggers and publishers of GLBTQ fiction all come together. There are events in America for romance readers to connect with authors in the wider romance genre. There are also events in America for authors and readers of mainly gay or male male romance.
Now I’m reviewing all this, I feel better about the fact that I’ve only written one novel so far this year, which also makes me feel less worried about not doing Camp Nanowrimo in July. Because I’m a writer, I like to always be writing, and because I’ve only written one novel of my own this year it’s felt like I’ve not been writing enough, but now I stand back and look at it, I can see I’ve been busy enough on writing in all its various guises. And even though I’m all about the productivity, the MA has taken priority this year, because the assignments had deadlines y’know, unlike the unwritten novels I have swirling around my head. I also realise that to be productive you also need to have down time.

What do I have planned for the rest of 2016?

  • Finishing my MA – dissertation of 15,000 words of fiction (the start of a novel) plus a 3000 word reflective essay on my process for writing the fiction, books, articles, techniques I’ve been impressed by that have influenced and helped how I’ve written it.
  • Finishing the memoir for the client – it’s planned to be approximately 75,000 words in total as a full manuscript.
  • Self-edit, send to beta readers, polish some more and then submit some of the six work in progress novels I’ve written needing various amounts of work.
  • Write a gay romance Christmas novel, the rest of the m/f romance, and the rest of the gay romance story I submitted for the competition.
  • Finish reading and writing a report on the RNA NWS manuscript I’ve been allocated, and take on another 2-3 manuscripts.
  • Build my author services work – ghost writing, marketing support for authors and manuscript appraisals.
If you have any questions about how I’ve found studying the MA in creative writing, or anything in this post, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Liam Livings xxx

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    Liam Livings

    Gay romance & gay fiction author

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