Hearing loss and living life
It has been a month, the month of June 2021. We had a beautiful holiday in Magoebaskloof. We did not see another soul and still came back after a week of fresh air and hiking to be tested positive for COVID. So be warned that this is not a perfectly planned and edited post, it may come off as a bit of a rant. So look at me being kind and inserting the ” read more” option here.
Continue reading “Neglect”
My dance class started again after not being allowed studio time due to the COVID pandemic and all the ins and outs of lockdown. Last week I was a little early and my dance teacher who is beautiful and dynamic and also married to a professional dancer commented on how hard she finds it to motivate herself in these strange times. I was quite surprised, because she is the perfect picture of drive and motivation.
This reminded me of a quote that was on the breakroom wall at one of my student jobs: “You will not always be motivated, so you must learn to be disciplined.”
The conversation was picked up by one of the other dancers who arrived and turned to how you should be disciplined in the most basic things in your day and this got me thinking of my own life. She used the example of something simple like, picking something up that had fallen beside the wastepaper basket immediately vs. leaving it there for later defines how disciplined you are. Little things like making the bed, sticking to a routine, getting up early…
I did the silent tally in my head. There are things that I struggle with that others have just made a part of their day. Something stupid like cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. I tend to stack the dishwasher and then leave the pots and pans that cannot go in there for… I don’t know… the fairies. And EVERY morning I am angry that I did not just take the time to clean it up. One would think that by your mid-thirties you would have started doing grown-up things. But no, every morning I have this fight with myself as I pack lunchboxes. At least I make the bed.
When I was diagnosed with depression and the associated anxiety, this was a lesson that my psychologist also wanted to teach me… but it did not root at the time. Looking back all the little changes that I started with to just cope were there to teach me discipline. Because the motivation at the time was just to keep the tiny Lilliputians alive.
When the prodding continued and we figured out that there were vestibular issues associated with my hearing loss, which obviously contributed to the anxiety, I had to go through rehab to literally get my balance back. Simple little things were not simple at the time and with despondence came disappointment and the motivation flew out the window. So I had to find some discipline to keep at it.
I have written a lot about routine and planning and how important those things are to me. And I realised that sticking to anything takes discipline.
The first step for me is therefore deciding what I want to achieve and formulate a plan. Together with that plan things need to be in place to help me stick to it. Some days are easier than others, on some days I get up feeling like I am going to conquer the world and then the discipline is not really needed and on other days I wake up feeling like I want to hide out somewhere and on those days, I just need a simple recipe to go through the motions. Thigs need to happen and I need to do them.
What is true is that I tend to stick to the things that I enjoy. So I stick to my bullet journaling and my morning pages and the planning, because I enjoy it. I stick to the running because I like how it makes me feel. I stick to the story at night for the Lilliputians because I love reading with them. But those damn dishes!
So perhaps I should figure out what the things are that I enjoy within the stuff that sometimes feels like work. Perhaps that will help me keep the momentum. I also need to consider that I may be avoiding something because I think that it is such an effort and then when I finally do it, it takes me 10 minutes.
And sure, I will also celebrate the things that I do manage to do and tick off the list. I will acknowledge tomorrow morning, for example, that even though I did not wash the pan, I at least made the bed.
I have always been an anxious type. Although I do not believe in star signs, this does correlate with me being a Gemini. When the Lilliputians were born, this anxiety manifested into full-blown postnatal depression, which is something that I am planning to discuss at a later stage. This post, however, is about the link between my hearing loss and the anxiety it caused and still causes. It also suggests a few things which help me cope with anxiety. Please note that this post is not based on researched medical scientific facts, but instead on my personal experience. I am planning to do some research on it, and will also post those findings when they are available.
My hearing loss was caused by a virus (varicella-zoster) that caused nerve damage. The virus, however, is one of those fun ones that hang around in your system for a long time and re-emerges when you are stressed or your immune system is having a tough time… or in most cases both. I therefore had shingles more than once and in each case, it caused a little more damage. Together with this damage came vestibular issues, which, like the hearing loss, were only identified later, simply because it was not something that we were looking for at the time. Bigger fish to fry, so to speak.
The saying goes, that hindsight is always twenty-twenty, and that is also true in my case. It is now easy for me to explain that that whole feeling of being out of control and never catching up was because everything was not working as it should. It was because some senses were compensating for others to make me do simple every day things like walk upright, and it was, of course, because I could not hear.
It is however much more difficult to address anxiety when you cannot pinpoint the cause. And that in itself causes anxiety. What a tangled web we weave!
The following, in no particular order of importance, were things that have helped me deal with my anxiety, and most of these will be discussed in separate posts.
Give it a name
I had to identify that what I was feeling was something that I needed to address.
Calling in the professionals
In my case the professionals were numerous and I am grateful for all of them:
What feeds your soul?
A big element that I have unfortunately only come to define in my 30s, was to figure out who I am and what I truly enjoy, what gets me excited and what sparks my interests. It was important to make a list (which is also one of the items J) of the things that feed my soul. NOT the things that I think are supposed to feed my soul, or the things that I think others would be impressed with, but the actual things. For me, it was also important to realise that as we grow and as we reposition ourselves in our various roles, this list also changes. So this is an adventure and not just map. I think that these various items will also find their way into this blog, so watch this space.
Just as a little side note here, I have realised that it is the things that feed your soul that I will be good at, at the end of the day and not the other way around.
What makes me feel like a grownup?
To manage my anxiety I had to make friends with it, and realise that it is always going to be part of my life. I had to however, make a plan to address it in the everyday things and that includes being a grownup: a mother, a colleague, a wife, a friend, a daughter, a sister, a Christian and a human being able to get out of bed in the morning and be accountable for themselves and their actions. In broad terms what I identified here was structure, and this is also something that I will drag into this conversation from time to time, as I have become a bit of a planner geek.
Mindfulness
I have realised in the last year, that this specific element, is something that so many people neglect, and perhaps now that I type here… it is something that pulls all of the above together. For me, mindfulness indicates a few simple things. A good example is that I should know that if I have too much wine, I am going to not only be hung over but also be disappointed in myself. Another is that I have learnt that I am extremely brave in text and cowardly in actual conversations. I can be blunt and insulting on a text message and say things that I will never ever say in real life.
This chat is a very early post of this blog, and I hope that it would grow from here. I still have a lot to learn about the process and many things that I want to do, but I am just leaving this here, for now.