Have some patience

This might seem like bad advice or even a little redundant but I know I’ve suffered a lot from impatience. I wanted to be well a long time ago and quite frankly I’m still not there and it’s frustrating. There are still times when I need people to remind me that things take time and that I’ve come a long way since I first started to get well.

I know when I first started out it felt like it was never going to end. 

The pain was just going to always be there and that nothing was going to change and I still get times when I feel like that. In the beginning I guess I always felt people were wrong too, things were not going to get any better.

I’m glad I was wrong but when I get down, having people to help me see what is blatantly obvious to everyone else is really helpful. I find it interesting how my attitude has changed and how my beliefs about my happiness and my ability to overcome have gradually improved too but it’s been hard going.

Although outwardly it doesn’t really look like things have changed much, there is a certain amount of resilience that I didn’t have. It’s not much but it’s a start.

As a therapist used to say to me, ‘it’s three steps forward two steps back’. For a long time all I could ever remember where the two steps back. I perpetually felt I was going further away from where I wanted to be and never saw what was improving.

In many ways I blame the people around me who didn’t quite get that I needed to hear about what had changed. But in reality I could easily have told myself what had changed. I could have looked and reviewed what was going on but I didn’t and this I do blame others for occasionally. Why did they not help me to do this?

I’ve not quite worked out how I missed that when things go badly, it doesn’t mean that everything will, but I did. Feeling I had achieved something, was hampered by always looking to what else I had to do instead of what I had done too.

The thing is that there are some things that really help and we don’t do them because it doesn’t occur to us to.

 So much of emotional handling is about what occurs to you to do and without ideas you run into the same brick walls that you always have and people can help but if you don’t listen to them then you losing out. That’s not to say that every idea that they have will help but it’s a start and that’s where the patience comes in.

To move forward you really need to try new things and these can be really scary and they might not work either. So try something new and see and if it doesn’t work then give yourself a break and try something else and at some point you’ll find something that will. It can just take a little time. No one gets the right answer straight away, failing is all part of it and once you’ve tried something give yourself a pat on the back for trying, commiserate and then try and think of something else you could try. And if you’re not feeling it don’t worry about it.

And if you feel like you’re going nowhere then why not ask someone else what they think or at least consider what has really been happening in your life over the last five years. It can be very illuminating just to remember.

For me it’s always important for me to remember I don’t have to achieve all that I want the first time I try, there’s always tomorrow.

 So if I want a break, I try and find a way to do that because burn out is so much harder to come back from than a break and everyone needs breaks. It’s part of the process. You work hard, you try and achieve your goals, and whether you succeed or not, you then rest up, evaluate what you want to try next and then you take on the next challenge…