• Addiction - Mental Health

    Decisions

    Given where I have once again landed and the impact I have had on loved ones I really need to consider my next move carefully . I don’t want this cycle to continue and want this to be the last time substances rip my life apart. In some ways I feel I am close to solving the puzzle that is living sober. Minimising stress and building a holistic life that promotes healthy choices whilst tending to my underlying mental health issues is basically what I have come to realise is the core component backed by Faith. But I’m uneasy that…

  • Adventures - Christianity

    Revelation from God

    It’s fair to say that life has not been good for me although I would hesitate to say that death would be better at this stage. There’s so much room to improve and redeem that to check out now would leave a mass of questions that I will never be able to answer to myself or to others . From this vantage point I am blessed to have God in my life. In attendance Mass on Sunday I had an experience which I have come to realise is a Revelation from God. A simple command struck into my heart whilst…

  • Tips and Tricks

    A quote from Aldous Huxley’s Island

    I don’t have a laptop at the moment so it’s just short posts but this quote resonated with me: It’s dark because you are trying too hard.Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.No rhetoric, no tremolos,no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.And of course,…

  • Adventures

    Aboard a Ships Helm – by Walt Whitman

    Aboard at a ship’s helm,A young steersman steering with care. Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing,An ocean bell-O a warning bell, rock’d by the waves. O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place. For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,The bows turn, the frightened ship tacking speeds away under her gray sails,The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds away gayly and safe. But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!

  • Christianity

    Return to Mass and the Feast Day of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez

    I returned to Mass today after a time in the wilderness and it was a wonderful experience . A low key Mass with few people at the local church in Richmond we celebrated the Feast day of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez who wrote the following poem about the war within: Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say; And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field, And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day. On Christ they do and on the martyr may; But be the war within, the brand…

  • Mental Health

    Akathisia and the Torment of Restlessness

    I recently had an injection of a anti psychotic for the purposes of dealing with the paranoia detailed in earlier posts and so far the results are really positive. I no longer feel paranoid; at all. It really feels like i’ve been once and for all cured of the constant fear I felt. But unfortunately all drugs have side effects and it appears that this particular drug causes a state in me known as akathisia which is basically intense restlessness and agitation. I feel comfortable in no positions and need to constantly move. Even when I am doing a physical…