I see you little one.

I see your eyes sparkling with delight behind your long lashes.

I see your easy smile.

I see you use words like ‘love’ with an easy familiarity.

I see you sing loudly even when you don’t know the words.

I see you watching all that she does.

I see your bright little face crinkling in laughter at the joke you don’t quite get.

I see your little legs running to catch up with the bigger ones.

I see your little hand outstretched to join the circle.

I see your relentless enthusiasm.

I see your rage, your hurt and your bewilderment.

I see you abandon things you held so dear because you’re a “big girl now”.

I see you play the goof for attention.

I see when your face crumples in on itself after a careless word.

I see you delight in their successes.

I see you stamp your foot.

I see you try again and again and again.

I see you hold steady and true to yourself when you know you are right.

I see you rage against the injustice of their rules and your place in the age hierarchy.

I see you copy the things they do – both the good things and the bad.

I see you delight in the inclusion.

I see you hug without fear.

I see you make room for other people.

I see your kindness.

I see your effortless joy at living.

I see you try things.

I see you fly when you weren’t expecting to fly.

I see your big heart make room for everything they hold dear.

I see you settle into your space beside her when the friends have gone home.

I see your connection with the person you love most fiercely of all.

I see you loved back just as fiercely.

I see you little one.

I see you.

There are thousands of moments in our lives where we do something and the thing we do is of no consequence. Things that might make no sense in retrospect or are hard to explain, but that you have done a zillion times before with absolutely no need to tell anybody. And because there is no consequence, the thing is of no interest to anyone, so therefore, it goes undocumented, unremembered, unimportant.

And then you fall off the toilet seat you were standing on in your bathroom and fracture the S3 vertebrae in your sacrum, concuss yourself and injure your wrist, and everybody wants to know why you were standing on the toilet seat.

You know something, the why wasn’t and still isn’t important. It’s something I’ve done a thousand times before, and which without a doubt, I will do in the future once this memory has dimmed. Of course it potentially, in hindsight, wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but as I said, if I hadn’t fallen, it wouldn’t have been a big deal, you would never have known. Nor would you have wanted to know. And most importantly, you wouldn’t be making a judgement call on it as if you’re some kind of perfect beast who has never done something without thinking that ended less than optimally.

Yes. I’ve gotten to the grumpy stage of recuperation.

The funny thing about breaking your bum is everybody kind of assumes it’s a self diagnosis. I can assure you it is not – I spent time in hospital being poked, and prodded. I’ve been x-rayed and had my first ever ECG and CT scans.  I have wept into the clean linen on the plastic beds in the short stay unit until the sweet blessed drugs took effect and dulled the pain a little. Since I left hospital, I’ve wept a lot more than I am comfortable with, but broken bums hurt. And I’m irritatingly, irredeemably, human.

Here’s the thing – fractured sacrums generally don’t happen to healthy 42 year old women unless they’ve been in a traumatic accident like a car crash.  They’re more common in the elderly or people with bone density problems. And since 42 is not old and my bone density is ace, it falls into the category of ‘bloody impressive fall Al‘.

It also falls into ‘your timing sucks Al’.  This Saturday I am due to fly to Indonesia with World Vision for a ten day stay visiting their projects (similar to what I did with World Vision in India last year). I’m not going. I can’t sit properly. Or walk properly. Or bend properly. Or lift things. For a while in the hospital, it was looking like it would be my call about whether or not I went – and I was still thinking of going. I mean what’s a broken butt really in the scheme of things?  But then just before discharge the doctor said nope.  And then he said No. And then he said it a few more times in case I wasn’t listening.

I was.

I am also 100% aware that the purpose of going with World Vision to Indonesia is so that I can form a connection with the works they are doing. It is to interpret the impact World Vision has on individual communities and relate it to my own life and experience in such a way that the people reading my blogs can better understand the work that happens.  The purpose is to put aside ‘me’ and immerse myself in the lives of other people so that I can deconstruct what I see and pack it up for you, the readers of this blog, to better understand a way of life we generally only see or read about through the finely tuned lens of advertising or media stories.

Source: Monty Python

And I can’t do that if I quite literally can’t sit myself down and be part of it. I do World Vision no favours and I definitely don’t do the Indonesian communities any favours by merely observing from a distance perched upon a plastic ring, or lurching around the communities with my antalgic gait, like somebody from the ministry of silly walks.

So instead of going, I’m going to be amplifying all the amazing stuff that Virginia from www.challengeyoass.com writes (you should follow her blog as well – I was late to the party but fell in love by the end of the first post) and the musings from Carly who blogs at www.smaggle.com, who most people know already.

You see, we think we understand what organisations like World Vision do. We’ve seen the adverts. We’ve paid our $43 a month to make sure that Javier in Honduras* is doing okay. But the reason World Vision invests in sending bloggers to visit the projects isn’t to tell you what you think you know. They want you to understand, really understand, how your donations manifest in the real world. They want you to understand how the money doesn’t just send Javier to school. It empowers his mother, it gives his sister medical assistance, it provides his father with dignity, it puts toilets into villages, it gives a slum full of single mothers their financial independence, it provides education, clean drinking water. It provides access to people’s fundamental human rights.

Donating money for us is a no-brainer. But on the ground the impact of those dollars is breathtakingly visceral. It is physically disruptive. It is supportive. It is liberating. It is transforming. It is driven by the communities recognition of what they need and how they need it. It is delivered by some amazing people who are at heart, believe themselves to be staggeringly ordinary, who are actualising extraordinary change.

The work that World Vision does is life changing.

And while advertising gives you a glimpse of that, it is in the telling of the stories from a personal perspective that people come to understand the transformative reality of ‘donating a goat’ or ‘sponsoring Javier’.

So even though it won’t be my bum on the ground this time round, I’m proud to be a blogging ambassador for World Vision and looking forward to learning more about what they do in Indonesia, through the creative and talented word stylings of Virginia and Carly.

*Made this name and country combo up for the purposes of this post.

It’s World Health Day – 7 April – and this year they want us to talk about Depression.

Sometimes, I feel that I talk about depression a lot. But other times, when I encounter people living with it and they are feeling like they can’t talk to anybody about it, I feel like I don’t talk about it enough.

Turns out I like to write about it roughly once a year ((For the record – I’m okay to talk about it any time – just get in touch) …. see – here I talk about PND and then I talk about PND/PTSD and then I talk about learning to accept that I live with depression, and then I’m pissed off to add a fourth kind of depression to my collection here, and then I talk about how I had ‘suicidal ideologies‘ and then shortly after that the ‘oh, here I am‘ post happened.

And then here we are…. or more precisely, here I am (again). I live with depression and probably have since I was a teenager and used to slice my thighs with a razor blade, because I had all the feels and no way of coping.  Back then they called it ‘cutting yourself’ or ‘attention seeking’, and now it’s ‘deliberate self harm’ but either way, it did fuck all for making me feel better and made wearing jeans very uncomfortable.

I am what is known as ‘a high functioning depressive’. This basically means on the outside I’m what people recognise as ‘me’ and on the inside, my brain and I are struggling.  It’s not about life circumstances. It’s not going to be fixed by a change of attitude. Or exercising more. Or eating different foods. I can’t snap out of it. Just because I’m not sobbing on the floor in front of you or refusing to get out of bed, doesn’t mean that on the inside I’m not thinking about being dead. People find it hard to comprehend because ‘I have nothing to be depressed about’ or I’m not ‘acting depressed’. Trust me on both fronts – I know and depression is not an act. It’s exhausting being two versions of yourself.

The first version is the you that you want to be. The second version is the you that you are. The truth is, I am both versions of myself. All of the time.  All. Of. The. Time.

Just six months ago, I was pretty sure I was going to die. I saw no point in my existence. I couldn’t see the value I added. I felt like a burden. I believed my family would be better off without me. I cried so much thinking about how much I was going to miss my girls and then I felt awful because how selfish that I was thinking about me and how I would feel, when they would be clearly better off without a parent who was going to fuck them up.  My husband would be clearly better off without me. This went on for weeks, then months…. getting progressively worse. First you feel a bit flat, then a bit down, then a bit sad and before you know it, you’ve fallen over the edge and you’re in free fall.

Long story short for those that are new here – treatment works. There was an intervention, medication was upped, I started seeing my psych again regularly and I’m better than I was. I wasn’t instantly cured. I’m not ‘better’. But I’m managing my illness now so that mostly I feel like the version of me I like best.

Mostly. Some days I live in a state of tightly controlled overwhelm and feelings of immutable failure. Even on the drugs.

Depression is an insidious fucker. You might be functioning, you might be holding it together externally, but other balls are dropping. Once you hit free fall, you start smashing through the things that keep you stable. It impacts your work, your relationships, your finances, your hobbies, your social life, your esteem, your eating, your self care, your ability to respond appropriately. It makes you feel thoroughly no good and irredeemably worthless.

Depression sits in your chest, a physical lump pressing on your vital organs. It thrives by consuming your insecurities and regurgitating them, repackaged and repurposed, into your brain. It weights your limbs, distorts your vision. Your brain ricochets between the walls of your skull, pulsing with nervous energy, anxiety, emotions, thoughts at an ever increasing speed, and the stress of ‘coping’ stretches your body and mind so thinly that the smallest bump would cause it all to explode. You get so that the idea of being in a lifeless state – be it a coma or death, becomes an overwhelming urge.

The siren call for people with depression is not death. It’s peace.

So let’s talk about depression. Let’s talk about how with the clarity of being in a ‘better place’, I can recognise my resilience. Let’s talk about how that ‘better place’ allows me to recognise the courage that gets me up and getting on with it no matter how I feel inside. Let’s talk about how I am not the only one that lives like this. Let’s talk about how it’s an illness not an attitude problem. Let’s talk about how if we could choose to have an illness it would never be something so dreary and unsexy as depression.  Let’s talk about it so when that clarity isn’t around for me, or any one of the thousands of people living with depression, that reaching out is possible.

Let’s talk about it so when somebody hears the mournful melodic siren call, they don’t dash themselves on the rocks, but steer towards the lighthouse.

Let’s talk about it, so people don’t die when all they want is peace.

I lay in my bed last night, sobbing my eyes out, as I watched the ghastly video of the children of Syria dying as the result of chemical warfare.

I read the articles, trying to get my head around who was responsible. And I realised it didn’t matter. Whether it was government forces or rebel forces – we are all responsible.

The west gassed the children they sent to fight during the first world war.

It was ugly then. It is ugly now.

Source: The New York Times

Wilfred Owen, a soldier and a poet, fought in the first world war. I read the poem below when I was about 13 or 14, and it has always stuck with me, his words painting a scene and an experience so vividly, so viscerally, I could see it in my minds eye, feel the panic, sense the terror.

And last night, I watched it not in my minds eye but on the screen of my phone.

Humankind’s ability to inflict the unimaginable on itself continues – one hundred years after the war to end all wars.

The old lie –Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. – it is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country – is still bullshit.

*********

12 years ago, I was living in Dublin and my then boyfriend (now husband) was still living in London. We talked every morning. I’d be sitting at my desk in the Microsoft offices where I worked, and he’d be sitting on public transport running late for work, which was located just off Russell Square.

Yes. Every morning. Some things don’t change no matter how many years pass.

This one morning, we were chatting as he got off the train to switch to the next one and he said that he had to dash as the train line was closed for some reason and he was going to head out, walk in the direction of the office and hopefully catch a bus if he could beat the crowds swarming out of the station.

Within minutes, my screen was full of the news about the tube being blown up, and shortly after there was the news about a bus being blown up in Russell Square. I still recall the physical nature of the fear that washed over me when I heard the news about the bus. I started to ring his mobile, on repeat, over and over and over again.

I couldn’t get through to his mobile. Or his office. The logical part of my brain knew that the networks had been shut down but logic doesn’t play a part in fear. I had told my colleagues what had happened and Seamus* across the partition was repeatedly trying the lines too, trying to locate his three younger siblings who were living in London.

Logic also tells you the odds are that the person you are worrying about is highly unlikely to be affected.

Despite our boss being appalled by our, and I quote, “unnecessary hysteria”, no work got done. Seamus got a phone call from one sister. Then the other. They were both fine. He joked that his baby brother was probably so busy rubber necking it wouldn’t occur to him to check in.

And then Nick called. He could only speak briefly, but he was okay, he was in the office, he never got on a bus.

I cried. Noisy, messy, relieved tears. I felt a bit embarrassed by worrying about him so much as if thinking that he could have been hurt in the bombings was somehow presumptuous. My boss said dismissively ‘I knew it would be nothing’. I remember feeling ashamed for worrying.

The day kept going, the news out of London getting progressively worse. Emails started flying around, my friends and former colleagues in London reporting in safe and sharing news of friends that had been on the affected trains. One fellow had got off one bombed train and in a state of shock walked for two hours home because his shirt need a change due to the dust in the tunnel, before thinking to call his wife. Each of those stories made us feel that we’d got away with it, that on this most dreadful of days, none of ours had been hurt.

Then Seamus got a call from one of his sisters, his brother was in hospital. He’d been on one of the bombed trains, had gone through a window but from what was understood, the body of the person he’d been behind had largely protected him from super serious injury. He was hurt but alive.

All of a sudden, logic didn’t matter. It was serious. It was very real. Out of the millions of people in London, someone we were connected to was hurt.

And all of a sudden, every single one of us in that office, whether they had family or not in London, were Seamus. 52 people killed, over 700 injured and one of them was Seamus’ little brother.

It wasn’t logical. But it was real. We hadn’t been worrying for nothing.

Every single one of the people that were killed or injured in this week’s terror attack in London are someone to somebody. They have family or friends who will be heartbroken. Some will be thankful it wasn’t worse. Some of the affected will wish it had been.  Some will be living in limbo while they wait to see how injuries resolve. And for everybody that wasn’t injured, there are hundreds, thousands of people who will have been frantically trying to get hold of family and friends in London to check they are okay.

Logic telling them that they are probably fine. But logic is not always reality.

Those that witnessed the event, they will be desperate to speak to family and friends to reassure them, to talk through the trauma they just witnessed.  Some might be in shock and just trying to get home. That is why there is a man in the photo walking with his dog. That is why there is a Muslim lady on her phone. That is why there are people standing by seemingly just watching, shocked.

Accidents and terror attacks have one thing in common. They take people going about the ordinary day completely by surprise.  One day it’s a sunny day and you’re crossing a bridge, or you are running late for a meeting, seeing the sights – nothing more and nothing less. And then boom. Your world and the world around you is changed.

We process things differently. But the one thing that we all crave when something horrific happens is human connection. And whether that’s by holding the hand of an injured person, calling your partner, facebooking your mum, or taking the dog and hightailing it home to where you feel safe, we can’t judge those reactions unless we are there and know the complete story.

And out of the 7 billion plus people on the planet, there were only a couple of hundred people on the bridge. Even less who will have seen it actually happen. Even less who would have been able to process what they were observing at the time.

Westminster Bridge. Photo by Doug via Flickrpool

But every single person on that bridge matters to somebody. Somebody who logically knows they are highly unlikely to have been caught up in it. Some of the those somebodies will have been wrong.

So we, sitting at our screens are not the people to be judging the people we see in photographs. Or who are being interviewed. We can not begin to imagine how we will react in any given situation unless we were there.

Putting aside the fact that Pauline Hanson clearly doesn’t know that hashtags don’t have spaces, preaching hate or trying to push people into making this a general ‘muslim’ problem does nothing but make you an accomplice of ISIL. You do their work for them by spreading hatred. You do their work for them by isolating your fellow citizens on the basis of religion. You do their work by alienating their youth and having them live in fear.

ISIL is not Islam.

ISIL is not every Muslim.

But everyone of us is Seamus.

Everyone of us is the lady in the hijab.

We are ordinary people who will be desperate to connect with the people we love when the world makes no sense, no sense at all.

*Seamus is not his real name. 

This morning I was explaining to my daughters that today is International Women’s Day.

I ramped them up a little on the walk to school, calling out “WHO RUNS THE WORLD?” and they would yell back “GIRLS!”.

“But why do we have a girls day?” says Cassidy.

“Because women united can not be divided,” replies Tully knowledgeably.  No prizes for guessing who came along to the Women’s March with me in January.

I explained to them that today was about celebrating all the great things women have achieved all over the world, but also bringing attention to areas that women don’t have it so great. I tried to explain inequality as simply as possible, but Cassidy wasn’t having a bar of it.

“But girls can do everything! Everything!”

And right there, that very moment, was why we have International Women’s Day.  Somewhere between when we are almost five years old and later on in life, that simple belief in our capabilities and our opportunities, becomes eroded.

It’s not just men. Women do it to other women. Most damagingly, we learn to do it ourselves by modelling our own thoughts and behaviours on the people around us.

We can discuss and challenge the external factors that contribute to inequality, misogyny and sexism. And we should. Repeatedly. Tirelessly. Relentlessly.

But we need to ask ourselves what role we play individually in perpetuating inequality.

I mean it’s not like people haven’t been putting in the hard yards for us in previous years.  From Emmeline Pankhurst to Malala to Katherine Johnson we have a plethora of determined, intelligent and hellacious women to inspire us.

But our children – both daughters and sons – don’t need them to start with. They need us to step up and be mindful of our own behaviours and attitudes and how they impact the small people around us.

They need us to treat them the same way we want the rest of the people in the world to treat each other.  Irrespective of gender.

We need to be the change of which we speak. We need to be bold. We need to be unrelenting and fierce in the championing of our children – so that they know they are valued, respected and that there is nothing to fear in difference.

We need to be an example of how to live humanely, compassionately and fairly.

We need to speak kindly and encouragingly to our children.

We need to give them boundaries without crushing them.

We need to believe in them before they know to doubt themselves.

We need to love them.  Unconditionally.

We need to give them an education so that they are not only taught to read but to think.

We need to avoid labelling them based on their behaviours or bad days.

We need to fight for them so they are not alone.

We need to show them how to apologise without living apologetically.

We need them to know that what they think is more important than how they look.

We need to teach them to judge a person by their character and not by their shoes.

We need to allow them to be their own person irrespective of gender norms or our own comfort zones.

We need to teach them to stand up for others.

We need to teach them to stand up for themselves.

We need them to learn to articulate their emotions.

We need to show them how to proactively change the world around them.

We have to show them how to shout, how to rage and how to be angry.

We have to allow them to call us out when we don’t act as we ask them to act.

We need to teach them to be defiant.

We need to give them the respect we expect them to give others.

We need them to learn how to be wrong by being open when we are wrong.

We need them to know that hitting somebody for any reason at all is wrong. It is definitely not love.

We need to fill them full of confidence and not arrogance.

We need to teach them to challenge the status quo.

We should never utter the words ‘What will people think?’

We should let them be loud.

We should never say “boys will be boys” or “that is not very ladylike”.

We should encourage them to ask questions.

Most of all,

We need to love them so much that even when they doubt themselves, they don’t doubt that they are loveable, worthy and capable.

And then, tomorrow?

Tomorrow, we need to do it again. And then again.

We dream the impossible dream.

Until we live the life we imagined.

(Well get on with then….)