Healing the Whole ...

This week I have moved house. It is apparently the third most stressful thing you can do (along with getting divorced which is why I am moving house!) but coupled with that over the last 14 years I have fallen in love with my house. And I don’t mean I love it like the inanimate object that it is or I love the memories I have made in it. I mean I am in love with it like you are in love with a person. It is part of me. It is my safety net. My comfort blanket. The one that is always there. The one that will never let me down. I know where I stand and it always delivers exactly what I expect every time. I could go on.  I have been through some very difficult times in my house but it has always kept me safe. I never witnessed nor was the victim of any violence in those four walls. It never gave me anything but support. Four walls of it. And a front door that locked and shut the world out. I have lost count of the amount of times I have been hiding in my bed while the door knocked an...

I have come to the realisation that I have a sensitive heart. If you met me, sensitive is not the word that would spring to mind I admit. I did some DISC profiling on a leadership course today and I am, as always, a high D with elements of C. D is for dominance. I am assertive, forceful, results-driven. But that is my mind. These profiles rarely give you an opportunity to delve into your heart. And my mind is strong as I have already mentioned in this blog. I am not surprised as I have spent years and years strengthening it. Being clever was my thing from an early age. I remember being 4 or 5 years old and being able to name every member of Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet as my party piece. I wasn't particularly pretty as a child (or teenager for that matter!) and although I liked athletics I was consistent rather than exemplary. I also wasn't creative in anything valued like art or music. As a child I shut myself in my room and read books and as a teenager I wrote dark poetr...

"You ok?" A stock phrase we often use as a greeting. See also "How's things?" or "What's up?" But in using them as a greeting I believe we risk forgetting what it is we are actually asking. And vice versa, when asked, we may lose the opportunity to respond honestly. In my new book, The Superhero I was Born to Be, I talk about letting go and being real. Giving away a small piece of myself in order to build my superpower team around me. Giving everyone a chance to build a bridge of trust. And accepting that some people will want to and some won't. I have started using the question greeting as an opportunity to give away that little something. Instead of giving a stock answer of "yeah, I'm fine" or "things are ok"; I will offer a real response. And often this is not what the recipient wants because they didn't really want to know if I am ok. They were just offering a greeting. For example, recently the man I used ...

I am in the longest period of continued darkness that I can remember for a while. It's now in its 5th week. This time it is different though. I am functioning well. Probably at about 60%. I have made all of my commitments. I have not shut myself away or spent days in bed. But I know the darkness is there. My anxiety churns over and over in the pit of my stomach. The darkness manifests itself in little ways: I am not using social media. So much so that people are messaging me asking if I am ok. And I should probably think this is nice but I don't. I want to be left alone. A friend went to hug me as we parted company the other day. I froze. I didn't want her to touch me. I felt my skin crawl as she embraced my stiff, tense body. And I am a girl who loves physical affection. But not when I am trying to shut the world out. I wanted to tell her not to touch me. It took a whole lot of energy to restrain myself and allow my body to be held. I am getting tension headaches e...

I have already confessed my anxiety to this blog. I suffer from what has recently been described as high-performing or high-functioning anxiety. The more I feel I am losing control of the world around me, the more anxious I am, the more desperately I struggle to regain control. Often I can't and so it can quickly become a spiral of helplessness dragging me down into a pit of despair. I used to spend days in this pit of despair. Often in bed unable to face the world. I wonder writing this how many meetings I have cancelled by email too petrified to lift the phone. I wonder how many people suspected the real reason behind my last minute change of plans. My business mind starts to calculate the money lost. The productivity hours wasted while I lay in bed mentally paralysed. I am managing it far better now. Five years of hard work on every aspect of my personal development. Physical. Mental. Emotional. I can't neglect any part of my whole else I will end up back in the pit. It...

I am very similar to a teenager. To know my mood, all you have to do is listen to the music I am playing. Linkin Park if I am angry. Lionel Richie if I am sad. 90s dance if I want to get motivated. Motown if I want to fall in love. When I lost my babies I couldn't listen to music. It was too painful. I didn't feel there was a song on this earth that could match my emotion. It wasn't a conscious descison though, much of my life after that was on auto-pilot, so it was in the car I first noticed it. I'd usually have my music blaring out loud singing along, but it was several months before I even turned on the radio. My grief felt so unique that no one could possibly understand it, let alone have written a song about it. I wrote poetry as my own outlet. It was about a year later when Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven was played while I was with a group of friends. I knew the story but this time the song spoke to me totally differently. I had to leave the room as sobs wra...

My daughter came to me this morning and told me superheroes aren't real. That doesn't sound so bad but less than 9 months ago, before she started school, she wanted to be Batman when she grew up. Firstly she came home and told me she couldn't be Batman because she was a girl, which upset me a great deal. Now she tells me Batman and all his superhero friends aren't real because someone at school told her so. It broke my heart. In my 5 year old little girl I see perfection, innocence, sensitivity. I don't want her to change. I don't want the world to stop her being her. But I know it will shape her. It has to. It has shaped me. My job is to build her resilience with my love. I didn't have that growing up and have suffered from it. I was given pain at a young age but not the strategies to deal with it. My resilience has taken a long time to build. My inner core is still shaky and in need of constant support. I told her superheroes did exist. I said she ...

Yesterday I had an interesting experience running. I am training for a half marathon and I haven't been out for two weeks while I struggled with a chest cold. Feeling better but not having quite shaken off the cough, I headed out for a 10 mile run. I started too fast. Under 9 minute miles which was always going to be unsustainable for 10 miles even when I am in peak condition. Come mile 6 I had slowed right down to nearly 10 minute miles. By mile 7 I was walking. I kept telling myself to go steady but rushing at things too fast has always been my problem. I want to tackle everything at speed. And the important things never happen quickly. Like falling in love. I fell in love in August 2015 with a man who is still in my life. I fell hard and I fell fast. Too fast for him. By December 2015 he had let me go declaring that he could not love me in the way I wanted. I was bereft. I have spent the last 18 months pining for him. I feel like Prometheus. Chained to a rock having my l...

Recently I was approached by a friend for advice about his ex wife. He asked for my help and yet when I told him what I thought he fought it. Telling me that what I was telling him to do wasn't fair. My heart was firm. Love her. Care for her. Do what is best for her. She needs you to put her first. "I won't get it back", he says, "it's always me that has to flex." Yes. And it will be over and over and over again. Because that's what love is. It keeps no record of wrongs. He messaged me later to tell me what I had said felt like an attack. As if I was saying his relationship with his ex-wife and his children was transactional. I wanted to say that was because in parts it was. If his focus is the well-being of his children then loving their mother is just as much his responsibility as financially providing for them. The mental well-being of children is so dependent on the mental well-being of their parents. I speak from painful painful experience w...

I am frightened of a lot of things. I have got much worse as I have got older and especially since having my daughter. I am fearful not fearless. I cannot cope with hearing about bad things happening in the world. I don't watch the news and only read the local newspaper. I cannot watch the soaps or dramas. I can't bear to see how awful human beings can be to one another even in fiction. I am scared of anything that could bring harm. Heights is probably the big one that most affects my day to day. My daughter knows how frightened I am of everything. We make a joke out of it as she soars high on roller coasters with my Dad or my nieces and nephews and I stay a quivering wreck at the bottom waiting for her safe return. So last year when my friend asked me to loop the loop in a tiny plane over a local airfield, I was not keen. As well as fear, I suffer with motion sickness and have thrown up on planes, trains, automobiles, (and boats!) many times in my life. But it was for a char...

I struggle with my command of our oral language when it really matters. As an English Literature graduate I could write all day about my feelings, but when it comes to speaking about them I am reduced to drivel. What I say very often won't make sense even to me. I am not sure why this is but I could hazard a guess that it is because I never learnt to talk about my feelings when I was a child. I wrote a lot about them, mostly through stories, but I never shared them out loud. I think I was about 7 years old when I remember feeling sadness and immediately knowing I had to hide it. The times we lived in perhaps. Certainly now I encourage my daughter to talk to me about any and every emotion. Especially anger and sadness. The difficult ones. And through her, I am learning to talk about my feelings. Not in great outbursts which can often be too overwhelming for the poor recipient; but in little snippets here and there to different people. Trusted people. People whom I hope won'...

I have recently written a book to share a snapshot of my personal development journey (available in print on www.sarahwindrum.co.uk and digitally on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B077DVD5R2) I had written all of it by the end of 2016 but I spent six months struggling to find a nice clean conclusion I was happy with. Because there aren't any of those in life. As anyone who has undergone any significant period of personal change will know, it never truly ends. You learn strategies and you keep applying and adapting them .... forever. I struggle most when I prioritise either my heart, body, or mind and neglect one or more of the remaining trio. The key to my happiness is acknowledgement and awareness of all three and their needs. And from there follows a lifelong attempt to balance the triad as best I can. I have come to accept it will never be truly balanced. I find I always need one more than the others to tackle a specific challenge or moment in time. But as long as I chec...