I wanted to share this as it has really helped me come to terms with my diagnosis. ‘It’s ok not to be ok’
From my experience I found myself putting on a brave front all of time and telling everyone ‘I am ok’ when some days I’m just not. Some days are just too much. At first when I was feeling low or overwhelmed I would beat myself up thinking that I didn’t have the right to feel down. I was at home, doing ok and had a lot to be grateful for. This just added to my low mood.
After a while, some time, speaking to my Macmillan nurse who is also a mindfulness practitioner and some research I began to repeat the words ‘it’s ok not to be ok’ give yourself this day to experience these feelings, explore them, don’t feel guilty but try again with tomorrow as a new day. This has helped me no end, its one of the strategies that I have used since finishing treatment. I hope it makes sense.
I’m the one that made a GP’s appointment and when I went into the GP and they said ‘how are you?’ and I would say ‘fine’. I think it stemmed from childhood and I thought it was a quality always being the strong, capable one, it was like power dressing at work, the mask I put on. So what did I do with all the fears, anger, resentments and insecurities I had about my lack of formal qualifications and not being good enough, I now know I shoved them down inside and now I wonder what that did to me healthwise. I now realise that all my feelings are valid and I would have a very boring life if I did not have them all. Yes, it’s OK not to be OK and to be kind to myself.
I sometimes think its a natural human element to tell people that you are okay and we personally forget to say that its actually not okay sometimes. I love that you mentioned that its okay not to be okay all of the time. It shows that we are all human.
Josh and @AnnaMam I have found if I do tell people how I think and feel my true friends will get to know me and often then they will open up to me, If people are not comfortable with it they are off my Christmas card list. Life can be too short. I have a friend who I met when I was 5 yrs old and she is too ill to have a double lung transplant now and we were laughing together recently that actually we never really knew what the other one though or felt, it was the way we were brought up, if people know you are not ‘perfect’ they will not like you. What did we talk about when the 60’s was passing us by? We would not have even discussed our negative marks or comments in our school reports. How times have changed.
@JoshuaBloodwise@Erica I have found it a lot easier to cope since I have come to terms with ‘Its ok not to be ok’ because this way I put a lot less pressure on myself and this lifted a weight off my shoulders because I had been trying to put up a front all of the time.