The After Effects

One of Newton's Laws of Motion (I can't remember which) states that for every action there is an equal, and opposite, reaction. I believe that this goes for more things than just motion.

When I went to see my GP on Monday I was feeling pretty good. He has even written in my notes that I was the happiest that he has seen me for a very long time. When asked by him to what I attributed this improvement in my mood I said that I felt that the reason for this improvement in my mood was due to two things; first the increase in medication that had been decided upon while I was in hospital, and secondly the incredible visitor figures that my blog had started to have as a result of my having started to write about what had happened to me after he referred me for admission to hospital.

On Tuesday I went to see the psychologist and wrote a bit about it here. I was still feeling pretty good when I arrived at the hospital and I saw a couple of members of staff from one of the wards that I had been on and they both commented on how good I was looking. The session with the psychologist was difficult; these sorts of things always are. I found myself crying as he was asking me things and one of the things that I hate is being made to cry.

When I eventually got home on Tuesday evening (I'd gone to the library from the hospital so that I could do some work on my course) I was feeling drained. I couldn't face making anything to eat, so I just went to bed with a glass of milk and lay there reading a book. I'm not sure how many pages I turned, but I do know that I didn't take in anything that I was reading. By about 8pm I decided to take my night-time medication and try to get to sleep.

Sleep came pretty quickly, and although I did wake a couple of times during the night, I just turned over, snuggled further under the duvet and went back to sleep. Wednesday morning dawned and that horrible old feeling had returned. I didn't want to get out of bed, and I didn't want to do anything. I did try writing a bit more of Part 4 of Tackling the Mental Health Minefield, but although I knew what I wanted to say, the right words just didn't seem to come to mind. I decided that I should give Wednesday a miss and ended up watching a few videos and catching up with television programmes that I had missed.

It was another early night, again my sleep was interrupted with a couple of wakeful periods but I probably managed about six hours in total, which was pretty good because I had been getting only a couple of hours a night just a few weeks ago. This morning I got up early, got myself dressed and ready to head off to the library again. For some unknown reason the bus that I needed to catch has been a bit thin on the ground this last week or so. They are supposed to run every 10-12 minutes, but this morning I was standing at the bus stop for 40 minutes before one arrived. I eventually arrived at my destination and found myself a nice quiet corner in the library where I could sit down to do some work.

I did managed to finish the first block of material for my course. I had to read several bits more than once to be sure that I had taken on board the information, but I had managed to complete in three days the work that was planned for two weeks in the course calendar. My next decision had to be did I have a look at and start working through the second block, or should I have a look at the first TMA which is due in tomorrow. I do have an extension of a week for submitting it because of my having been in hospital when the course started so I don't have to struggle to throw something together for submission tomorrow.

In the end I decided that I would start looking at the TMA and I have started to draft the first 500-word story that is required for it. There are three parts to this TMA and each of them requires me to write 500-word stories or parts of a story. Five hundred words shouldn't be difficult for me to put together. Many of my posts on this blog are much longer than that, but they are about 'real' things and the course is about writing fiction. I realized that I couldn't think up things because there was so much real stuff going on in my brain. Going to see the psychologist has had a greater effect on me than I had thought possible. Suddenly as I was writing my notes and drafting the start of my first story, there were tears rolling down my cheeks.

I had deliberately chosen to write about a real event, but something that occurred before I was born. That way I knew that the story would not be in any way autobiographical. But just the effort of thinking about being the child who is telling the story of what they had seen in a street in a city started to bring things into my mind that I had wanted to keep well hidden away.

It seems that there are after effects from my appointment with the psychologist that I had neither expected or been ready to have happen.