Not a Day for Dancing,

I was going to write this several days ago, but the events of the day stopped me, but I figure I will write it now. 

A few years ago I made the decision that I didn't want to faff about taking the pill because I would forget to take it at the right time, or I'd forget when the week off was supposed to be. It just didn't work for me as my scatterbrained self, so I made the decision to try something a bit more drastic and get a tiny piece of plastic shot into my arm. That's not even me being that dramatic. You get anesthetic stabbed in first - I really don't do needles so this was always going to be me being a bit dramatic - and then it's kind of like a piercing gun, just without it coming out the other side of your arm (thank the gods!)

Well, anyway, these things only last for about 3 years and then you have a decision to make - is it working for you, or are you going to try something different? (Or, of course, do you want kids, which is currently a firm no from me.)

For me, it was a pretty simple decision that I had made months ago and it was one of the things that kicked me up the butt to finally changing my GP. I knew I needed to get this seen to and also the whole vegetarian/blood donor/not being careful of my iron intake causing anemia, but it was probably mainly this... This little thing in my arm means I don't have to be taking pills every day or worrying and it also means I'm not in what was pretty crippling pain one week out of every four. I mean, on the bathroom floor, in the fetal position in the middle of the night kind of pain, so to say that this was an easy decision for me is an understatement. 

Now, saying that I knew what was going to happen to get it changed and it wasn't exactly taking me to my happy headspace, to say the least. Whilst I've previously had to attend A&E for having stuff embedded in my hands (cinder from a disused railway line - there is a good story there, but I'll leave that one for now) I've never had to have an interaction with a scalpel before (at least, not to my memory) and to say that I wasn't looking forward to that bit would be one of this century's biggest understatements. 

If you're squeamish, don't read the next paragraph. Or the one after. Look for the TL;DR.

The theory is that after a local anesthetic is injected into the arm and given a short amount of time to work, a small "nick" is cut into the arm where the previous implant is to expose the end and then this is pulled out before the new implant is put in. The problem I had was that I have gained a good 2-2.5 stone in the last 3 years, so several layers of fat have been deposited on top of the thing, so that small "nick" ended up being my GP digging around in my arm for about ten minutes trying to get to the damn thing and get it out, which also meant that I had a massive bruise where the new one was put into a different place, so it was back to the surface of the skin, as intended. My GP asked me if I wanted to see the old implant, but I was pretty sure I had bled like a stuck pig and, while my fear is not blood, I was doing really well at keeping my vision straight and not feeling like I would lose my stomach contents, so I was more than a little reluctant. 

My GP then puts adhesive stitches over it, then a big plaster and then a bandage around my arm, telling me to leave it there for a week, but be aware of infections and heavy bleeding. She also told me not to run for a week and I had to stop myself from laughing. 

A couple of days in, I got really worried that doing very little with my arm had actually caused the wound to reopen and bleed, so I took all the bandaging off, cleaned it up and redid it, but my big mistake was using micropore to attach one of the bandages. That evening it savagely tore a section of my skin off, and so the zombie bite was complete. Partly a surgical scratch, partly a large colour changing bruise (about the size of a credit card) and partly this new bit where it looks like my skin had fallen off. 

TL;DR It was a bit of a hellish experience, compared to what it should be and it's why I was talking about having a zombie bite on Instagram. 

Whilst it's not an experience I am falling over myself to repeat, what I would say is that I recovered pretty well from it, despite some pain in the first few days, but paracetamol cleared that. I am going to have a small collection of tiny scars down my arm, but it's worth it to have one less worry on my mind. I can just leave it where it is and live my life, and there's a lot to be said for that, even if dancing around my living room like a loon was off the agenda for a few days due to injury.

How to Be a Duck and Not Be a Duck,

I think that the idea of talking about ducks and mental health is quite a nice idea. Maybe I'm wrong, but hear me out (well, read me out, I guess). 

There are two ways I have either heard or used the image of a duck in talking about mental health. 

Duck Number 1

Duck number one is the sort of duck that is very resilient. I'm going to use Daisy Duck as an example, because why not? Daisy Duck let's everything roll off her back. She's a good duck. Everything rolls right off, she rolls with the punches and nothing much really phases her. Being a duck like Daisy is a pretty good place to be, but then you have...

Duck Number 2

Donald Duck. Donald isn't the same stroppy duck he's always been in the cartoons. He's a well turned out duck, a duck that looks well like he's coping. He's bobbing along on the top of the water, and he's looking good, but that's because we're only looking at the surface. Under the surface, Donald's feet are going ten to the dozen to keep him either still or going in the right direction. Donald Duck is struggling and if he keeps going like this he might have a little ducky heart attack and that would be all folks. 

If there was one thing I could say to everyone about mental health it would be, you don't have to be like Donald Duck. It's so tempting. Unfortunately even now there is a big bloody stigma around mental health. It's getting better, but the temptation is still to hide it. We're expending so much energy treading water that we haven't got time to recover, but it's fine because it looks like we're coping. Let me spell this out for you very clearly - THIS IS NOT OKAY! 

A lot of people with mental health issues will feel the need to do a Donald (make as many MAGA jokes as you want right now) but it's worth recognising that the only time that it works is when you can talk to the people around you about it. I'm really lucky - I have a boss that empathises really well, listens to me and tries to help accommodate my needs when I'm struggling. I have a really good group of friends who will try and do everything that they can to support me. I know that some people are not understanding, I know some workplaces don't make accommodations, but you can only be a Donald if something else is happening as well. You can only tread water for so long, especially at that speed. 

What's In a Name,

I'm not talking about roses or anything sweet. 

It has taken a damn long time for people to accept that my name is Charlie and not Charlotte, and I still encounter issues with it. My old landlord had this exceedingly rude habit of calling me Charlotte, not Charlie, but didn't have a problem with calling Christopher, Chris. It made him more comfortable.

Since when is my name about other people's comfort? 

Okay, I get it. People I'm romantically involved with don't always like calling me Charlie because it's traditionally a male name. I, sometimes, give them a bit of room with that because the likelihood is that they're going to get somewhere in the region of 19 pet names and I will expect them to respond to every one, but for anyone else, I'm sorry, but that's my name. 

People wonder why I make so much of a fuss about it. It's not like I'm transgender or have some sort of heinous name that doesn't bear uttering, and I know that. There are occasions where I have to be called Charlotte - it happened when I graduated, it happens at job interviews, it'll probably happen on my wedding day - but there is something different about it. I'm "Charlotte" in formal situations and mostly that's because I don't have a choice. It's not a name I really identify with a lot, and it's not something I often answer to anymore. Being Charlie is as much a part of my identity as a different name is for anyone and it's neither fair, nor right, nor anyone else's place to try and tell you what your identity is...

So, why am I bringing this up? 

Recently I signed up with Macmillan to run the London Landmarks Half Marathon in March of next year. I'm looking forward to it, but there was one thing that did upset me and it hasn't been the training. When I ordered my running shirt I was told that I could only put 6 letters on it. Charlie is 7. Charlotte, well, thankfully that also don't fit, but I spent a long time pondering over all sorts of options (Chuck, Chucky, Lucky, Peanut would even have worked...) but finally decided that I would go with my childhood nickname of Lotti, but I was far from settled with it. In fact, I was dreadfully upset. It's ridiculous really but I resolved, after much upset, to take it to a t-shirt printers and get Charlie put onto it myself in whatever lettering would fit. And then the thing arrived...

When I opened the parcel last night, a C-H-A-R-L-O and 2 Ts dropped out. Clearly, provided there is space for your race number, they don't mind how many letters you put on it, so I was straight on the phone requesting an I and an E wondering why this had to be such a drama from the start. 

In other words, panic over, crisis averted, but my God, did they have to wind me up in the first place?

I Hate Writing Blogs Like This,

Blogs like this being the ones that I write because I'm never going to sleep anyway, so might as well do something productive. I didn't used to post them, but now I do.


This morning I woke up and felt much as I have for the last few weeks. I was a bit perkier, I was up a little earlier, and I made an effort to wear something nice and put some lipstick on. These sorts of days are not my good days - my good days tend to be me in jeans and not really caring who objects. Thinking about it right now, they look a lot like my bad days...


Today was supposed to be an easy enough day before going back to the doctors to say to them again those words that I hate - the bad days outnumber the good, my anxiety is the one in the driving seat, I need help. I hate it because it makes me feel weak, I feel the stigma that is being "crazy" or "nuts". I've been called it to my face before, so why would people not say it if they knew I was in therapy or on medication because of an actual problem? It's part of this thing that people do called Catastrophising and I have to stop myself and ask, so what? Even if people do say that, and there is no guarantee that they do, so what? What does it change? Nothing, unless you let that be the reason not to do something about it. 

So, I used the phrase "supposed to be"... Suffice it to say today was not an easy day. 


I never know if it's unfortunate or not that anything at work that says "mental health" and "needs volunteers" I jump at, but it's something which I'm passionate about, so I jump and mostly it works out pretty well. Obviously it's something I have experience of myself, but it's also something I have seen around me a lot, and that only fuels my drive to talk about it, to learn about it, to share knowledge with other people because I whole-heartedly embrace the movement we are making away for a world that says "pull yourself together man!" to a world that allows men to cry over dog rescue videos or two guys to hug without being considered to be overly emotional or gay. Being able to express your emotions, or even just identify them is a big part of mental resilience.

Today was an event where I could learn more about Mental Health First Aid - something that I love as a concept, but in practice it's something that can feel a little bit brutal, and for me the hardest hit, and the one I should have seen coming, was the talk about suicide. I tried to just listen to it, tried to just be a duck and let it all wash over me (though in the context of that course a duck is something slightly different which I might actually write another blog about thinking about it...) but I couldn't. Today was not a day where I felt resilient enough to let it all just roll off of me, so I left the room looking rather frantic with only enough time to say no, I'm not okay over my shoulder when the trainer asked. The only thing I could do right then was extract myself from the situation.

I think if it had just been the stats and the figures, the red flags and how we can step in to prevent over 5000 people a year from taking their own lives I would have been fine. In fact, I know I would. It's hard to talk about, hard to hear, but it's about hope. It's about finding it, showing it, being it, whatever, but the difficult one is when we were discussing how a certain kind of suicide happens. How long it can take. The process of it. And I just broke and now I don't know how to fix myself.

Suicide itself is a tragedy. It doesn't matter who, how or why; it's just brutal for everyone who is left. Most times we forget that. It's easy to forget that in the midst of everything else, particularly when someone has jumped in front of a train and it causes delays. I'm sure everyone has heard someone in a train station telling people how selfish it is because of the impact on everyone else's day. We seem to be able to talk about it in the aftermath, but not before and we need to get better at that. 

Tonight, I don't want to go to sleep because I don't want to see my friend's face. I don't want to have to live through a memory created by a very unhappy bit of my brain and remember how he chose to exit this world, particularly not with this newly gained knowledge of how it happened. Thinking about it when I'm awake is hard enough. 

It's Night Time Again,

I'm slightly worried that this might start to sound like a story. It isn't a story. 

It's night time again and this is the hardest part of the day for me. I have anxiety and it has been playing up for the last few weeks, possibly a bit longer. Most times I cope pretty well with it, but right now is not most times. Unfortunately I always struggle more at night time than any other time. 

Now, there are a few reasons why it sucks that I'm worse at night. For one thing, it is really hard to get to sleep and not sleeping actually makes things worse. Another is that most of my friends, my support network, are asleep and they need their sleep. Finally, night time makes it impossible to be productive. During the day you can get in touch with your GP to try and out appointments or you can do other things that are going to help to either give you a bit of respite in the moment, or they are going to be contributing to the overall end goal of making you as resillient and well as you can be again. At night, most of that is not possible. 

Personally, I feel like anxiety eats away at my personality. Without it, or when it's back in the tiny box under the stairs in the corner of my mind, I am a happy, extroverted, extraverted, spontaneous and very silly person. I laugh a lot, at everything, sometimes at nothing. I launch myself headlong into things and enjoy the few moments of being unsure. With anxiety, I become introverted, I become self-conscious, I second guess myself and chastise myself for everything silly that I have said, every moment that I think I could have embarrassed myself. I overthink everything, and can't just relax. 

It's something I have learnt to live with, it's something that I manage most of the time, but occasionally I struggle. It's really difficult, partly because it makes me feel so introverted and so silly, to try and talk about it, but I do because I know that there is no other pathway around it. Sometimes you just need to talk about it.