Ren Warom's Blog, page 5

July 27, 2015

MHM Recovery 7: Illness As A Comfort Zone

Talking today about how it is your MH problem can become your comfort zone, making it hard for you to move beyond it into wellness and the larger world even as you recover.

When you’re ill and can become anxious even about familiar places, you might end up stuck in a very small environment with yourself and your thoughts. That becomes a familiar and safe place to be, whilst everything else looks unsafe and alien. Of course there is nothing pleasant or comforting about illness, but your intern...

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Published on July 27, 2015 07:17

July 24, 2015

2015 Reading Challenge, Book 25: The Silence by Tim Lebbon

A cave left sealed for millenia is discovered and blasted open ready to be explored, releasing a never before seen species of bat into the world. These bats, isolated and highly adaptable and apparently very hungry, like to eat human flesh and swarm across Europe consuming whole towns and cities. As they go the news follows them and the only way to avoid being eaten is discovered: silence.

If you don’t want to be eaten you have to be quiet.

In England people watch the news in mounting disbeli...

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Published on July 24, 2015 09:46

July 17, 2015

2015 Reading Challenge, Book 24: A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

A tale of philosophy, quantum physics, human connections, history, family, the destructive power of nature and our ability to influence one another. The story of Nao, told through the diary she writes and sends floating off out to sea, and Ruth, who finds the diary washed up on the shore of Vancouver island where she and her husband Oliver live.

I pretty much devoured this book. It’s gloriously written and realised and covers so much, it pulls you in to the stories of these wonderful characte...

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Published on July 17, 2015 04:56

July 13, 2015

MHM Recovery 6: Empty Days

Talking this week about those days when you wake up hollow and out of all resources. I see them as days when the collected stress of trying to cope with mental illness or recovery and trying to deny that it’s as hard as it is become too much for your head and it just taps out. Takes a rest whether you want it to or not, leaving you to deal with this awful sense of being empty or non existent. A zero spoons day if you will.

When I was ill these happened a lot, and I hated them, and in recovery...

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Published on July 13, 2015 05:29

July 10, 2015

2015 Reading Challenge, Book 23: The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist

This book is set in a future within which women at age 50 and men at age 60 are given two choices if childless or in a dispensible profession: euthanise yourself, or enter The Unit. In The Unit, every possible comfort is provided, but only the healthy can go in as the payment for this comfort (which you have no need to pay for) is the donation of organs etc to those in the outside world who may need them and participation in all manner of research testing.

The novel’s protagonist Dorrit Weger...

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Published on July 10, 2015 05:15

July 3, 2015

2015 Reading Challenge: Book/film compare and contrast: Under The Skin

A little something different today, a compare and contrast of the film adaption of the book and the book itself. I know these are normally fairly redundant but in this case I felt there was a precedent, in that the choices made for the film are entirely bewildering given the richness and multilayered complexity of the book. The film in this instance is more than a poor quality reduction, it’s a mutilation as complete as the character Isserley experiences in the novel.

The film is a one note ‘...

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Published on July 03, 2015 13:08

July 1, 2015

Poetic Interlude… Synergy

You roll your feet
Imagine roots
Dug down deep
Searching heat at the core
It would warm you from the
Inside out
A perpetual fire

Stretch fingers to the sky
Soak in rain
Call sunshine down to hungry hands
To meet fire with fire
Co-mingle and spread
Become a divinity

You think it must be easy
Roots to dirt
Branches to sky
Nourishment above and below
You forget drought
Forget the edge of the axe
Forget rot and blight and fire

Forget to look deeper
To see clearly
To witness how little differen...

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Published on July 01, 2015 04:28

June 29, 2015

MHM Recovery 5: Self Care 3

Talking today about the four things I try to keep an eye on and a routine with because I know doing so will help keep me level. Those four things are:

Diet: Not diet-ing, just what I eat. I hate salad (not all salad just can’t eat it too frequently because it’s boring and doesn’t fill me up) and I’ve tried things like clean eating in the past and it just bores me to death having to watch what I eat. I also find when I want to reach for my comfort foods and can’t that I’m basically asking for...

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Published on June 29, 2015 08:19

June 26, 2015

2015 Reading Challenge, Book 22: The Yesr of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

This is the follow up to the wonderful Oryx and Crake. We see the events before, during and after the catastrophe from the point of view of two characters: Ren and Toby. When we first meet them, both are trapped; Toby in a health/beauty spa and Ren in the medical isolation unit of the exotic dance nightclub she works at. There’s a lot to love in this book, the wider context of the world and how it works as told through the experiences of these two characters, and the chance to revisit charact...

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Published on June 26, 2015 04:46

June 22, 2015

Life Stays The Same…And Then It Changes…

The email from my agent came hella late on April 7th, after I’d come back from viewing Furious 7 with my spawn (it was a touch magical realism, but we dug the hell out of it). I thought nothing at first, maybe just an update on subbing process, probably another lovely pass (I’d had two at that point). But it wasn’t. Jen (my super agent, Jennifer Udden) was checking to see if I was available to skype. HOLY SHIT!

Anyone who knows this merry-go-round of submission, knows a phone call is a GOOD T...

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Published on June 22, 2015 05:15