Time to Find Me Again!
Following a rather difficult summer things are starting to return to normal in our household. Mollie’s attempts to socialise were very successful in many respects but very stressful in many others and completely upset the balance of calm that we had managed to maintain in our household for the past few years. Playing out everyday saw the return of meltdowns, obsessions around people and a complete inability to moderate her behaviour with regard to turning our house into a youth club. The stress that this placed on my very battle fatigued and fragile emotional state was very damaging to say the least and I am still struggling with depression now.
The good news is that life is now back to normal but the door to the outside world remains ajar. She will spend days locked in her own world communicating with no one and then she will spend days socialising with all of her family and wanting to engage in activities. She has actually asked to go somewhere today and just over a week ago she actually went to the hairdressers to have her hair washed, cut, blow dried and straightened. Now for any of us PDA parents who are few years into this journey we all know that achieving anything at all in relation to any type of personal hygiene is nothing short of a miracle!
She also, on the odd occasion, will go out to play for a short while with children in the street. So what was an impossibility prior to the summer is now an option that remains open to her and is one that is under her control. Therefore Mollie currently has access to her family, her Personal Assistant (PA) Ann (funded by direct payments via Social Services), peers of her own age in her street and the opportunity to go out to various activities.
Next week she is going to the theatre with my mum and dad and she is going to be a play critic and write a review for the play in a book that my mum has prepared for her. That’s the theory anyway, demand avoidance permitting of course. Getting her to the play won’t be an issue but writing a play review might, however we can but try these things and I think that this is a great idea of my mums because it brings together Mollie’s love of giving her rather direct opinion, role play as a theatre critic and literacy as well.
Life is so much easier and my life is now a doddle compared to many parents who are either only just beginning to tread the PDA journey or have little if any support. So, why oh why do I still struggle so much to simply feel happy. Why do I appear to spend most of my life feeling low, stripped of confidence, not quite knowing who I am anymore and depressed?
Is it a consequence of the journey that I have been on, year after year of being abused by my own child while fighting the Professionals for some kind of support or even recognition of the degree of difficulty that I was and still am experiencing?
Am I just not as resilient or not able to bounce back as well as I assume that other parents possibly do or is this feeling of emptiness the same for everyone?
Could the isolation and loneliness of being housebound with a child month after month, year after year be the reason why I feel so lost and without any direction? I do receive lots of visits and support from my parents and I have a wonderful support network but somehow it just doesn’t seem enough to replace the void that has replaced what my life once was.
Perhaps it is the self loathing that I feel when I look in the mirror and see the bloated figure that stares back at me due to trying to black out my feelings by drinking too much wine on a nightly basis.
Or do I simply just have a natural tendency towards depression or is it down to a combination of all of the above?
Whatever the reasons I have had enough of feeling low, despondent, depressed and waking up each morning with no direction, nothing to look forward to and simply counting down time until it is wine o’clock. I do have periods of feeling fine, in-fact, almost bouncy and cheerful but these appear to be very intermittent at the moment and have been for some considerable time.
Life is easier, the huge battles are over and so it is now time for me to sort myself out and to make some positive changes. I can’t change my life or my situation but perhaps I can become more positive about me, perhaps now is the time that I can re discover who I am, what I want out of life and try to put some positive strategies into place. I have spent years giving so much to everyone else and putting myself last but now it is time for me to become a person again within my own right rather than just being an extension of PDA.
I derive a huge sense of achievement from writing my blog and from supporting other parents and it is this that has given me a really strong sense of purpose during the past couple of years. But I need to do more and it has to come from within. I need to feel proud and happy about myself again instead of hiding in the artificial environment that has become my whole world.
It is time for me to stop relying on the emotional crutch of alcohol, to stop hiding from the world, to loose weight in order to replace my non existent confidence and to find something pleasurable to do that is just for me and that has nothing to do with PDA. Nothing major just a small hobby or something to while away the hours that is calming and non stressful. PDA has become my life and it has completely taken away my personality and it has completely and utterly defined who I am. Perhaps this is why I am struggling at the moment because without PDA, the fights, the learning and the battles of those early and troubled years I really don’t know where my place is anymore.
Mmmm perhaps in writing this post I have just hit the nail on the head. I need to be involved with PDA and I always will be because I almost feel that this has been my calling in life, a vocation if you like, and a road that I was meant to travel. However now that my personal battles and daily living is not so all consumed by PDA perhaps this is where the emptiness, the void and the lack of direction is stemming from. Yes, I think that I am starting to get it. Life with PDA took away everything that I knew and everything that was me, all of me was replaced by the daily battles of living with PDA. Now that the daily battles and the huge prevalence of PDA in my daily life has become substantially less the void hasn’t been replaced by anything. Me, as I was, can’t replace it because that person has gone and my life now means that I am limited with what I can do. The time has come for me to find a new me, a confident me and a positive me with new interests in life. Hopefully this will be my first step to truly recovering and moving forward with my life from now on.
I do apologise for the ramble and randomness of this post. I just started writing and as I wrote the words flowed but more importantly I think that in doing so I really do feel that I have found the answer to some of my issues and why I have appeared to be stuck in this rut for so long and getting nowhere fast.
For more information or support about PDA please visit
https://www.facebook.com/groups/pdaglobal/
http://www.pdasociety.org.uk/ & http://www.thepdaresource.com/
