Madsadgirl Is Two Today

Madsadgirl, my alter ego, is two years old today.

When I decided to start this blog one of the first things that I thought about was whether I wanted to be anonymous or to write under my real name. It didn't take me long to realise that I would probably be more honest in what I wrote if I was not easily recognizable. Yes, I would probably tell some people that I wrote a blog, but it would be my choice as to whether I told them the name of the blog, which was also the name that I adopted for myself.

I had been writing the blog for about three weeks when I told my GP that I had a blog. A few weeks later, while having lunch with Mr Smiley, I told him about the blog and he became a regular reader, and occasional commenter although always anonymously but I knew which were his comments nonetheless.

I thought that the blog might become a sort of therapy for me in my battle against depression. I was right. Originally meant as somewhere to write about how I was or wasn't coping with depression, it immediately became something more than that. I started writing about other things that were important to me and then about knitting, one of the things that has kept me going over the last few years.

I have tried to write every day, but sometimes the muse just wasn't there, and then there were the times that I was in hospital and therefore without my computer so the posts dried up. One of the things that I wanted to make sure I didn't do was write each day saying how awful I was feeling, so this led to posts about the strange, and sometimes funny, things that I saw around me. Writing about my experience of psychotherapy was another thing that found its way onto the blog, and was responsible for me being invited to give occasional lectures at one of our universities on the patient's perspective of therapy.

One of the biggest bonuses that I have derived from writing this blog is the array of virtual friends that I have made within the blogosphere. And some of them are not so virtual because I have actually met them and correspond with them outside of our blogs. And the support from other bloggers when things have not been going too well has meant a great deal to me too.

So, my third year of blogging is about to begin. Thank you for reading, and commenting. You have no idea how much it means to me.

Like A Drowned Rat And Feeling Stupid

After a period of hot weather which has left me flagging at times, this morning there was torrential rain in my part of London.There was no clear blue sky to wake up to, just unremitting grey clouds and a substantial amount of rain pouring from them.

The rain was not altogether unexpected, but it wasn't the light shower that had been forecast, something that would not have bothered me too much, and it was fairly obvious that I was going to get wet on my way to the bus stop. And I was right to expect to get wet because just after I had left the house it started to rain even harder and my waterproof jacket was finding it hard to cope with the rain.

By the time that I got to the bus stop I had a very wet jacket, rather wet trousers, and the toes that were peeking out of my sandals were both wet and covered with dirt from the splashing rain. Fortunately my jacket has a hood so I was at least able to keep my hair dry otherwise I would definitely have looked like a drowned rat. I looked at the electronic board at the bus shelter to see how long I was going to have to wait for my bus and found that one was due in just a few minutes and another was about five minutes behind it.

I like to make sure that I have my Oyster card in my hand before I get on the bus so that I am not scrabbling around in my handbag for it while other people are waiting to get on the bus. I'm pretty good at putting it in a place in my handbag where it is easy to find whenever I need it, but this morning it wasn't in its usual slot in my bag. Panic set in. What had I done with it? I had used it yesterday and although I had removed quite a few things from my handbag when I was looking for something in it yesterday evening, I was fairly certain that I hadn't taken it out of my bag.

There was only one thing for it, I was going to have to take things out of my handbag systematically so that I could find the card. Unfortunately this was easier said than done because there was nowhere for me to put the things as I took them out. My bus arrived and I still hadn't found the card but as I knew that there was another imminent I decided to let this one go without me so that I could search a little longer. I did eventually find my card as a bus arrived at the stop.

With card in hand I leapt onto the bus (well, perhaps I didn't leap on) and found myself a seat. These days there are a number of different seating arrangements on our red double-decker buses, and this should have alerted me as I got on, but it wasn't until the bus was moving and the speaker system on the announced its route and destination that I realised I had got on the wrong bus. And I only had one more stop that was shared by both this bus and the one that I should have got on. So, I quickly rang the bell to alert the driver that I wanted to get off and a minute later I was back out in the rain waiting for the right bus.

I really cannot believe that I boarded a bus without checking to see what number it was. I had to wait for about 10 minutes (the bus wasn't quite as imminent as I had thought it was) for my bus to arrive getting wetter by the minute. By the time that I had arrived at my destination the rain had stopped but I was still looking like a drowned rat and feeling a stupid one at that.

I Knew Things Were Going Too Well

I started working on a lace shawl just over a week ago. It was started because I needed a break from knitting socks which had been taking up all my knitting time for some weeks. The first hundred or so rows were completed pretty quickly but as the shawl grew it took longer and longer to knit each row until it got to the stage yesterday where each row was taking something like 20 minutes to complete. But even though the rows were taking longer to complete, the actual pattern over these stitches was very easy to follow and soon became imprinted on my mind so that minimal viewing of the pattern charts was necessary.

Things were going smoothly until about 5.30 this evening when I discovered that there were some mistakes in the shawl. I started to unpick it stitch by stitch but with almost 500 stitches to the row, trying to find out where the errors occurred was going to take forever. So I did the unthinkable. I pulled the needle (I'm using a circular one because they are the best thing to use for shawls) from the shawl and started to unravel the whole shawl.

It may seem a somewhat extreme to do this but I really don't have the ability to concentrate on the shawl for the length of time necessary to unpick it a stitch at a time to find the errors. I often resort to this when knitting lace because it can be so easy to make a mistake which can take forever to find. Admittedly I have never managed to get so far with a shawl before making one of these catastrophic mistakes, but I know that the shawl will probably be better second time around and I am now more aware of the likely problem areas of the pattern.

I have already started knitting again and already have completed 13 rows of the first chart. It is likely that I may finish the first chart this evening and possibly even start the second one. Hopefully, this time I will be able to work on the shawl without having to resort to pulling the needle out.

Thinking About The End Of Psychotherapy

I'm not coping with this hot weather very well. I have lots of windows open but there is nothing much in the way of movement of air so it isn't helping me to keep cool. It's too hot to contemplate cooking which I probably couldn't cope with even if it weren't so hot, and I don't have anything that I can just throw in the microwave to heat up. Going without food is not a good idea so I have ordered a pizza to be delivered later when the temperature has hopefully gone down a little and the thought of eating something is not quite so unpalatable.

I think that it is unpalatable thoughts that have been part of the reason that I have started to go downhill into the depths of depression again. These thoughts invade my brain at any time that I am not actively concentrating on something else, and it is the difficulty of maintaining concentration that is inherent in depression that allows these thoughts in.

I live alone and spend most days isolated from the rest of the human race. Part of the reason for this is that I find it very difficult dealing with new people and have done for most of my life. The consequence of this is that I am alone, but that is not the same as being lonely. I don't feel lonely, just alone and as I get older this seems to get more difficult to deal with.

I have made efforts to change things. Recently I have joined the knitting group that meets at I Knit London a couple of times a week. It's not exactly local but close enough to home for me to make the journey at least once a week and sometimes twice. The ladies (and the couple of gentlemen) who meet at this shop for knitting, having the odd drink, and partaking in a lot of conversation, not all of it about knitting, are an incredibly friendly group and have made me feel very welcome.

My joining such a group would have been something unthinkable this time last year and I still find it difficult to believe that I have taken such a step. I still suffer great waves of anxiety when I set out to go to the group, but having to make a fairly lengthy bus journey to get to the venue does allow me time to try to relax. I know that I have most difficulty with group situations when I have to walk in on a group that is already present so I tend to arrive early so that the members join in ones and twos after I am already present and for me this is a more comfortable situation.

The strength to join this group has come about as a direct result of the psychotherapy that I have been undergoing since last December. This therapy was originally meant to finish at Easter but my therapist felt that further long term therapy, this time in a group setting, was needed so after having referred me to the mental health trust's psychotherapy services for assessment as to suitability for group psychotherapy, he decided that our sessions together should go on for longer.

This therapy is now approaching its conclusion. It will come to a close at the end of July, so with me being unable to attend one session because of my impending day surgery, I have four more sessions with this therapist. During our last session he asked if I was concerned about the impending termination of therapy. I replied in the negative, but I am now not so sure. I think that it is almost certainly one of the factors in my descent back into depression.

After such a difficult termination of therapy last year it is perhaps not surprising that the impending termination of therapy is playing on my mind. I know that it is going to be difficult, but I am being seen by a very experienced therapist, a senior consultant psychologist, within the mental health trust, and he is aware of how I was left feeling abandoned after my previous therapy. I also know that he is going to do everything in his power to ensure that I am not going to be left hanging as I was before.

I have made significant progress over the last few months. Psychotherapy is still something that I find difficult; I just don't like talking about myself and my feelings. However, we have worked hard on certain aspects of my behaviour and I am now much more aware of when I am moving into difficult territory and am therefore more equipped to deal with it.

I'm certain that I will still find the end of this therapy very difficult, but I know that it is only a matter of time before I enter a new phase of therapy, this time in a group setting. The talking therapies are regularly offered as the answer to so many of the problems that those with depression are faced with, but it is important that the therapist is well qualified, and because many of those who are most in need of such treatments have no means of paying for therapy and must rely on what little is available on the NHS, it is important that as many good therapists as possible work for the NHS.

In four weeks time I am sure that I will be sitting here contemplating my final therapy session with J. He has made a tremendous difference to the way that I am over the last six months and has helped me come to terms with so much that has happened in my life. I will, of course, thank him, but that seems so little when I consider what he has done for me.

Black Clouds Overhead

After a couple of weeks feeling rather better than I have for a very long time, over the last few days the black clouds of depression have loomed on the horizon and now are settled firmly overhead.

I have endured a very disrupted pattern of sleep. Sometimes I don't sleep at all and at other times I can't stop sleeping. Tears start flowing for no particular reason and the horrible thoughts are intruding whenever I am not focused on doing something.

Even though I have lived with depression for nearly 12 years, it still amazes me how quickly I can change from being able to cope with life to life becoming unbearable. I am finding it difficult to concentrate for anything longer than about half an hour so my knitting is being done in fits and starts. But even so I have managed to make good progress on the lace shawl that I started last Sunday. I have completed 208 rows and have 160 more to go. Each row is now taking about 10 minutes to complete so progressed has slowed considerably to what it was at the beginning of the week and as additional stitches are added (4 on each right-side row) it will continue to take longer to complete each row.

I have decided to continue working on the shawl over the weekend and then return to knitting socks on Monday. The break from socks has been good and will, I hope, enable me to get back to them with renewed enthusiasm.

Where Have My Followers Gone?

I have followers. I have more than 40 of them, but they seem to have stopped appearing on the side of my page. Yesterday they returned for a few hours and then they disappeared again.

The sad thing about not being able to see who is following me is that I have found quite a lot of really good blogs through bloggers becoming followers of my blog. Now it seems that I can see that I have followers on the dashboard, but not find out who they are.

Does anyone have an explanation for their disappearance and a way of getting them back on my blog?

Update: It seems to depend on which browser you use. I generally use Firefox for my blog because I had encountered some problems when trying to create posts using Google Chrome. If I view my blog using Firefox, then the followers are missing, but if I view it using Google Chrome then they are present. It looks as though I will be changing my browser to Google Chrome permanently if I find that the previous problems have now been solved. Thank you for letting me know that you were able to see the followers because that guided me to try other browsers.

Post 600

When I started this blog nearly two years ago I did wonder whether I would keep it up. There have been a few breaks in posting, the times that I was in hospital and again when I went through a really bad period of depression and just getting myself out of bed each day was a major achievement.

The blog was originally intended to document how I coped with depression, and to be fair it has continued to do this although I try not to make my posts depressing catalogues of how bad I am feeling. Instead I try to write about the things that I am doing to try to keep the depression at bay. And now I am writing the 600th post.

A number of posts continue to attract a lot of attention, even though they are now quite old. One is entitled 'Psychotherapy and Termination' (written in March 2009) and I can guarantee that there will be a couple of hits on this post each week. The post that is viewed most often however, is nothing to do with depression or psychotherapy. It is the post titled 'What is a Shetland Hap Shawl?' which was written as a result of a number of people asking me that question in comments to an earlier post that gave details of the Shetland hap shawl that I was knitting at the time. This post is viewed at least five times a week which is somewhat surprising considering its subject.

The posts that I am probably most proud of are those in the 'Tackling the Mental Health Minefield' series. Being admitted to a psychiatric hospital was never something that I had considered as being a thing that would happen to me. But it did, and I am just so relieved that I had enough sense to take myself off to see my GP when I started to do some really silly things that were putting me at risk. I tried to provide an objective overview of my time in hospital, the people that were supposed to be looking after me and the stupid rules that seemed to be there to make life easy for the staff with little regard to the effect that they may have had on the patients. Admission to a psychiatric hospital is never a nice thing but I hope that what I have written on the subject may help to give an idea of what to expect and how you can come out the other side without too much harm being done.

In eight days time the blog will be two years old. I think it is likely to continue to form an important part of my life for the foreseeable future, there are many things that I want to write about and I am sure that there will be more things that crop up as time passes. I hope that anyone who reads this blog will gain something from it, just as I gain something by writing it.

Lace Again

The shawl that I started (twice) on Saturday was finished yesterday. It didn't take long because it was the simplest pattern possible. Buoyed up by completing this project I decided to start work on another shawl. I prepared needles of the correct size and started work on this shawl yesterday afternoon.

While taking a break from knitting I spent some time looking at free patterns for shawls on Ravelry. There were hundreds to look at but one in particular attracted my attention. It wasn't the first time that I had looked at this pattern, but it was noticing that the pattern's designer had used yarn from one of my favourite yarn producers, Cherry Tree Hill, to make this shawl that decided me to take a closer look.

I had a ball of Cherry Tree Hill yarn waiting for me to find a suitable project so I decided to give it a go. Yesterday evening I cast on the five stitches that formed the starting point for the shawl and got stuck in to the pattern. I have now completed 94 of the 368 rows of the pattern and the stitch count has risen from 5 to 192.

There is still a very long way to go until I complete this shawl, and it will certainly have to take a back seat again so that I can get back to work on the socks for the design competition. However, it is a long time since I have worked on a complicated lace pattern such as this one and the fact that I am progressing so well has made me feel a little better today.

Once all the socks are completed then I will be able to devote all my time to the shawl, but until then I will content myself with doing a couple of rows a day so that it continues to grow albeit at a much slower rate than it has over the last 24 hours.

Taking A Break

I seem to have been knitting socks constantly for the last few weeks and yesterday evening I felt I needed a break from them. So after a brief foray on ravelry, a wonderful site for knitters and crocheters, I found a shawl pattern for one of the lovely yarns that I have in my stash.

It couldn't be more different from knitting socks if it tried. Although sock yarn is used for both, the socks are knitted using 2.25mm needles and the shawl is knitted with 8mm needles. It's like knitting with pencils after having spent so much time with very fine needles.

Work on the shawl progressed well last night and again this afternoon so that I was heading towards being at a stage this evening where I could start working on the ruffles edging. As I say, I was heading towards the final stages of the shawl when I found that I had dropped a stitch.

Dropping a stitch would not have been a problem had I been using needles more suitable to the yarn, but because the needles are so large it meant that as I watched the stitch just kept dropping down through the rows until it reached a point where it could go no further. Unfortunately that meant that the only way that I could retrieve the situation was to unpick much of the shawl. Having looked at it, and said a few choice words I ended up unravelling the whole shawl and starting again.

Second time around the shawl is growing. I am about half way to point where I cast off the centre stitches and start working on the front corners. I'm not going to get to the ruffle tonight as I had hoped, but work is commencing at a good enough rate that I can realistically expect to finish the shawl tomorrow.

I must be feeling a little better because had this happened to me a week ago I think that I would have gone to pieces and thrown the yarn and needles across the room. Instead I have just got on with things and started again. One thing is certain, I am going to keep a very close eye on the work and make sure that I don't drop a stitch again.

Ladies Who Lunch

Yesterday evening saw me at the knitting group. I have come to really enjoy the company of this group of ladies (and occasionally some men) on a Wednesday evening especially because it can be enjoyed with a bottle of wine or some other alcoholic beverage (I have acquired a taste for strawberry perry). It can be rather amusing to watch the expressions on the faces of passers by when they see 20 or more people sitting down in a shop knitting and chatting.

Yesterday saw me showing off my sock designs to a few of the people present and they received many favourable comments. When I showed the first design (the only one of which actually has a pair of socks at the moment) I was immediately asked if the pattern was for sale. When I showed my 'Cards' series of socks there was more encouragement and amazement at my creativity.

I explained that I had even more design ideas tucked away in my brain and that I had given up plans to submit a lace design for the competition so that I could concentrate on socks as my entries for this year. It was at this point that Lorraine the lovely lady who works in the shop and answers all my emails about competition entries suggested that this could be the basis of a book. This set me thinking and maybe she is correct. Perhaps this competition has given me the push in the direction that my life needs to move in to. They say that there is a book in all of us, and it is possible that my book is not a novel or a piece of historical research as I had previously thought but something for knitters everywhere.

As I was chatting with the lady who got me to join the knitting group she asked if I was doing anything today. When I said that I wasn't, she suggested that I might like to join a small number of the knitting group who lunch together on a Thursday and who then make their way to I Knit London for the Thursday knitting group. With nothing of any importance in my diary for today, that is exactly what I am going to do.

I am going to be a lady who lunches and who knits too.