Ren Warom's Blog, page 7

2015 Reading Challenge, Book 15: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

This is a very interesting book of post-apocalyptic fiction in the Wodehousian tradition of a salty lark told in florid and often exhaustively descriptive terms. I described it on twitter as fight club on LSD meets the Expendables and sort of explodes in slow motion. It’s a little more complicated than that, after all it is literary speculative fiction, but that’s a good description of the core story.

I found it a little meandering. Lots of asides about characters, history and background, som...

MHM: Recovery – Feeling Like Going Out

For me, and a few others people I’ve known who suffer from MH disorders, the first real signs of recovery involve a strange internal shift about going out. In that, rather than finding the thought of strange new places, or even familiar places that take a lot of psyching up to go to scary and unappealing, you find yourself actually wanting to explore. It’s a very weird sensation, and one I’ve had a difficult relationship with. Last year I managed to go out quite a lot as the thought of new pl...

2015 Reading Challenge, Book 14: Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

This is not the book of the film, the film is the film of the book (what a mouthful!) and the two could not be more unalike. The film takes a lot of liberties with this material, it kinda has to as the story in here is jumbled and personal and contains a great deal of philosophical and meditative exploration of the mental state of someone suffering from a disorder.

In that sense it’s an excellent, informative, and interesting read. The difference in social status can be a bit jarring. These g...

2015 Reading Challenge, Book 13: The Martian by Andy Weir

Soooo, this is the book I tweeted about being absolutely amazing.It follows Mark Watney–astronaut, botanist and mechanical engineer–as he’s accidentally left for dead on Mars and has to try and find a way to survive on his own for long enough to meet up with the next batch of astronauts. Easy right? After all it’s only four or five years! *maniacal laughter*

Of course not everything goes exactly to plan, in fact very little does, which leads to what I’ve referred to as a very ‘Carry On Get Me...

Favoured Fives… Bruce Willis Movies

I told you this would take a while, but my original reasoning was flawed. I suspected choosing would be difficult, and it wasn’t, the real difficulty was getting around to doing this post. Seriously the past few weeks have shot by and it gets to Wednesday and I realise I haven’t written this post, so I throw up some poetry instead maybe. *sigh* Today though, we’re doing it. We’re blogging this shit. RARGH!

FAVOURED FIVES: BRUCE WILLIS MOVIES

Falling down the stairs into number 5 is:DEATH BECO...

MHM 6 – PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)

This last week of delving into my disorders with greater depth focuses on PTSD, with an emphasis on untreated PTSD and the consequences of that. Hopefully it might encourage a few people to go and talk to a medical or mental health professional if they’ve suffered from a trauma or series of traumas and find themselves experiencing symptoms of PTSD.

Onset is usually within six months of the event or events (so it can occur in the midst of ongoing trauma if it lasts a long time). Symptoms prese...

2015 Reading Challenge, Book 12: You Get So Alone… by Charles Bukowski

Now, I know Bukowski is dead, so I have no idea why a great deal of this vlog speaks of him in the present tense. I did have a bit in there about not speaking ill of the dead, but I’m not really speaking ill just pointing out the obvious really, so I chopped it out.

I chose poetry because there was none (WTF challenge folk?) and I chose Bukowski because, whilst I often instagram or tweet quotesby him or from his poetry, I actually have a very strong opinion that he’s not that great. Check out...

Poetic Interlude… Still

I remember
Everything still
Night breath held like
The endless dark

Stars ceased their whisper
And turn

They held their memories close

Until one blazed
Rebellious
Across the pause of night

And broke it

Filed under: Mad Utterings Tagged: being present, difference, dreams, memory, musing, philosophy, poetic interlude, poetry, words, writing

2015 Reading Challenge, Book 11: Wasted and Madness by Marya Hornbacher

I chose to read two books for this category, both memoir as opposed to biography. Marya Hornbacher gets right to the nitty gritty in these books, she tears down any veils of gauze to show herself exactly as she was. That in itself is both vital and hugely helpful, especially for those of us who suffer similarly. We often lie to ourselves that things are not that bad, that we’re OK, coping, doing fine, when the opposite is true.

We hide out of shame, because we fear being stigmatised and judge...

MHM 5 – Social Phobia/Anxiety Disorder

This week on Mental Health Monday I’m talking about social phobias, focussing on my experience of them and how I handle them whilst also trying to give an overview of other ways of coping. Possibly better ways than mine, but I am resistant to medication (as in even headache pills rarely work on me) and I am too good at arguing myself out of therapy solutions (AKA a stubborn idiot with a brain that sometimes refuses to see the sensible options).

I cover panic attacks, social anxietyandagorapho...