Pencil Thoughts

BLOGMAS – IS The Grinch A Mean One?

Hey everyone

How is everyone doing? I hope you all are feeling ok and if you are not remember it is ok not to be ok. The second day of blogmas and before I start I would love to point out how much I love how advent variety of advent calendars there is these days. It is now acceptable to be an adult with an advent calendar, I have a Yankee candle one, which is brilliant fit since I have such a love for candles no strike that obsession.

Anyway, here we are, ladies and gentleman, gather round for blogmas post 2 (I promise to stop saying that, at some point!).

Let’s take a quick look at the tale of the Grinch, he wasn’t a bad guy he was just a person who had a traumatic Christmas that caused flashbacks, which made him lash out. Doesn’t that sound familiar! The Grinch was misunderstood and shunned for being different, doesn’t that sound familiar?

Christmas is not as joyful for people with mental illness there is so much more pressure on us to just stick on a smile and a silly Christmas jumper and pretend. Well fuck that, if I have a mood cycle of a manic or a low it is not like I can just tell it to go away and come back when it is not Christmas, mental illness does not work like that. Sorry crippling anxiety I need to go say Merry Christmas to this person can you come back in the new year, if only it is was that easy. Christmas is just a day, I hate saying that but it is. Christmas is not magical and doesn’t wave a magic wand and all our problems are temporary gone.
So if you need to embrace your inner Grinch this year do it as it is ok not to be ok at Christmas.

Take care all

Vixxy rose

xxx

BLOGMAS – The Shiny Baubles

Hey everyone

How is everyone doing? I hope you all are feeling ok and if you are not remember it is ok not to be ok. So here we are 1st of December 24 days until Christmas, I am so excited. A lot of bloggers out there do blogmas so I thought I would try it this year since I am new to this blogging world. I am really looking forward to checking out all the blogmas post and to gain some great ideas for Christmas. I have actually been organized and got a few posts up my sleeve for you all to enjoy…

BLOGMAS

So my blogmas posts are going to be Christmas mixed with mental health can I say mentalhealthmas??? Erm no, forget I tried to make that a word. So ladies and gentlemen gather round my first blogmas post is about to begin.

The Shiny Baubles

Christmas is a magical time of the year whether you are religious or not, it is ever so easy to get caught up in the festivities. So imagine your sitting there in your lounge with your feet up eating some mince pies, watching Home Alone on the TV with the Christmas tree lights twinkling away in the background. Even the Christmas baubles shining away are just too hard for you to resist to keep looking over at. Doesn’t that all sound just magical. Then there is a knock at the door and you shuffle over in your Rudolph Onesie, and it is carolers who start to entertain you with a beautiful version of silent night. Well as how amazing as all that sounds, you are so caught up in the festive cheer your Christmas dinner is burning away in the kitchen. The alarm is going off but you don’t notice.
I am not just trying to tell you a twisted fairytale tale I do have a point to all this, I promise. Christmas is just full of many distractions it is easy to get carried away and then mental health care can slip. So instead of ignoring the alarms going off in your head and trying to drown them out with Last Christmas by Wham! Don’t feel like you have to pretend your ok just because it is Christmas, your mental health is still as just as important, no even more important. So if your alarms are going off in your mind step away from the shiny baubles and focus on what is setting off the alarm.

Take care,

Vixxy Rose
xx

Let The Sometimes Roll

Hey everyone

How is everyone doing? I hope you all are feeling ok and if you are not remember it is ok not to be ok. Things have been so stressful at the moment, I am so happy that I am going to be a homeowner and finally move from my small 1 bedroom apartment to a 3 bedroom house. But it has sent me through a loop and back and I will be so happy when everything is completely done so I can spend Christmas in my new house. Even though it has been a very stressful time, my mental health hasn’t really dipped. I think that is because I have such a better handle on things at the moment, I know when to step away from something when it is too much.

Because I am doing blogmas I am going to keep this short and sweet as they say.

My tip of the day is – sometimes we need a moment.

Sometimes I need to cry
Sometimes I need to hide
Sometimes I need to stay strong
Sometimes I need sometimes

Every day is full of moments
Nothing lasts for forever
There is day and there is night
No matter how different the pieces fit together

Sometimes I need to smile
Sometimes I need to laugh
Sometimes I need to fall apart
Sometimes I need sometimes

I think I have learned with my journey with mental health is nothing lasts, no matter how lost at times I have felt I have eventually found my way. Sometimes I have moments of joy and sometimes I have pain, but these moments have come and go. Sometimes we learn and grow from these moments but sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we need to focus on ourselves and sometimes on the people around us. Let the sometimes roll.

Take care all,

Vixxy Rose
xxx

Follow The Yellow Brick Road

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Hey everyone

How is everyone doing? I hope you all are feeling ok and if you are not remember it is ok not to be ok. We made it to Sunday, self high five! Overall it has been a good week a few ups and downs but nothing that I can’t handle. Yes, this is what self growth looks like; I think another self five is needed! I have wasted so much time and energy with making mountains out of molehills. I am not referencing to my issues or my mental health, I mean with my lack of patients for my recovery. Now that I am able to allow myself to see the bigger picture even through the negativity fog that can cloud my mind, I still know my direction is forward.

This brings me on to my tip of the day… two steps forward one step back!

Nothing in life is perfect and we all make fuck ups and it is so easy to obsess over those fuck ups, anxiety and depression feed on those fuck ups. I feel like sometimes there is a sign on my head saying “all you can eat buffet!” Well, the closed sign is down for now. Learning to move past my fuck ups and realizing that moving forward in life also means moving backward from time to time.
Just think of the Wizard Of Oz, Dorothy’s journey down the yellow brick road wasn’t a smooth one. There were bumps along the way but with those bumps also came a lot of learning and self-growth and she persevered no matter what was thrown at her path. We can’t just click our heals together and be where we want to be straight away, we have to follow the yellow brick road to get there. If we were able to take a shortcut, what would we learn from that? We would probably end up back at the beginning again. I know it is not an easy path but taking two steps forward and one step back isn’t always a bad thing, as quicker isn’t always better.

Well, we are edging closer and closer to Christmas! Today I have decided to do blogmas this year, as Christmas can be hard for people with mental health issues due to a lot of triggers Christmas can cause. More on that subject to come soon…

Take care all,

Vixxy Rose
xxx

So What You’re A Dickhead

Hey everyone

How is everyone doing? I hope you all are feeling ok and if you are not remember it is ok not to be ok. So here we are we made it to Thursday, that is something to proud of. Why I have not achieved anything have I? I hear you ask. Well, some of you have got up every morning and moved forward with your day, that to me is a fucking tiny victory especially if your mind is telling you to hide from the world. So yeah be fucking proud, sometimes you push through the negative fog to get to the positive.

A song I love has influenced today’s post, as this song has been coming on my playlist a lot recently. The song dickhead by Kate Nash is definitely one of my favorite songs and I will leave a link at the bottom of the post if you want to have a listen. We basically all have those moments in our life where we tell our self what an idiot, twat or dickhead we are; it is one of those magical things that make us human.
Come on, if you are shaking your head right now, go and put your bum in the freezer as your pants are on fire. So you are telling me that you have never gone to make yourself a coffee in the morning and missed your cup by like 10 cm and not called yourself a dickhead. We all do it; I mean you don’t need to have a mental health issue or illness to have those magical moments. My days are full of them. For instance last week I was quite ill and on top of that, I was dealing with a low mood cycle and high anxiety. This concluded in me convincing myself for a good 5 minutes that someone at work was trying to poison me… dickhead. My life isn’t a CSI episode, I am annoying but I know I am not killable annoying. I have lost count how many times I have gone to work with an item of clothing inside out… dickhead. Also, don’t get me started on my daily walking into my coffee table and looking at it shocked as to why it was there… dickhead.

What I am trying to say is that these moments happen to us all but it is so easy to turn a dickhead moment into a high anxiety self-loathing fest. Sometimes we have to just dust our self and tell ourselves to stop being a dickhead!

Take care all,

Vixxy Rose

xxx

Lessons Are Not Just For School

Hey everyone

How is everyone doing? I hope you all are feeling ok and if you are not remember it is ok not to be ok. I know how easy it is to smile your way through shit times but I have learned eventually the mask will slip. Here we are edging close to Christmas and a new year, how are we close to the end of 2017? These last few years the negative aspects have really overshadowed the good, but I know there have been some good things happen to me so every cloud.

Which brings to something I have finally learned this week, after years and years of repeating the same mistake over and over again. Yes, I am high fiving myself right now I deserve it! As this is something i can lose sleep over and send myself into such a dark self hating place, but no more.

I am about to kill some with kindness, shake it off, let it go and I am sorry, not sorry! I have a deep fear of people walking away from me, which has meant I have left myself open to hurt and being in toxic relationships, basically a bit of a doormat. Which shocks me because I am a strong-minded person. My kryptonite is friends I have always struggled holding on to them and I have been treated appallingly in the past due to my people-pleasing nature.

I have learned the hard way and I realize now I deserve to be treated with respect and dignity as well as love and care. I have said this so many times I overthink everything, I just can’t help myself and it is like second nature to me. I sometimes have to tell my partner what I am thinking to help me understand whether that opinion is valid or just my mind making up shit. It is so refreshing to hear from his point of view as he thinks so different to me.

But there has been one thing we have both agreed on recently and for once I know 100% and he agrees I am not overthinking this situation. I am not going to go into too much detail out of respect, as this has to do with someone in my life now. This person has clearly got a problem with me and refuses to express so but instead has shown petty behavior. Well, I don’t play these mean girl games, and instead of doing everything in my power to smother said person with affection to put myself back in their good graces, I am not sweating the small stuff.

I am just going to let it go I am not even going to bother reaching out and asking what I have apparently done wrong. I do want to say thank you to this person; you have helped me see my inner strength and how much I have grown. I am so proud of myself at times like these I see such a difference in me and I know I on the right path mentally.

Thank you for listening all.

Take care,

Vixxy Rose
xxx

Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chameleon

Hey everyone

I hope everyone is feeling good and enjoying their weekend so far, remember if you not feeling ok that is ok too. I am have not been well hence the little distance from my last post, but I am feeling a little better now. By me feeling under the weather and in a low cycle, it has made me realize the effect it has on a person. That feeling of vulnerability. I feel too exposed to the world and it makes me feel so uneasy knowing my nerves are showing, available for someone to cut at them and play with them. It is quite strange really, considering most low cycles of depression I usually feel very detached from the world. So it just shows you how the butterfly effect can take place in day to day life, one small change can cause a different outcome.

There is a part of me that wants to embrace that feeling and let everyone around me in but then that question puts me back in my place, what if they hurt you? So, for now, I will stick to my rules my control of who gets let in and who doesn’t, yes I know it kills me some people see me as cold or distant but that is the price to pay.
I have had the time these last few days to sort through the negativity fog that fills my mind and I have come to a conclusion (DUM DUM DER!)

My tip of the day… we make our own karma.

I have been obsessing over the wrongdoings I have had in my life and the honestly the shit that has been thrown my way, oops no sorry I mean lemons! Every time I go through flashbacks and crawl through memories I think where the fuck is karma. Why do these people seem to get their happy ever after in the words of Pink. What about us? Has karma forgotten to put these people on the naughty list or is the twist that karma is the bad guy? I know a lot of questions and I don’t have the answer for all of them, but I have an answer, we make our own karma. Instead of feeding the negative space in my mind, the real karma is me moving on with my life till they are just a dot in my rearview mirror. Dwelling on things is not the answer, you are karma, and you have the ability to make things better for yourself. Be the most badass karma you can be. Take back control.

Take care all,

Vixxy Rose
xxx

Train Of Thought

Hey everyone

I hope everyone is doing well and if you are not, remember that is ok because I am not ok and I accept that. This week Monday was just wow, awful, to put it simply. I actually felt like Monday could go walk up some stairs that were covered in Lego, barefooted! Anxiety mixed with the feeling of a low cycle on its way, basically I was like a ticking time bomb and eventually, the bomb blew off. I felt my mind start filling up with the negativity fog and I was struggling to see past it to see the positivity. The warning signs were there and yes I acknowledge them and tried my best to subside them but it was just building up. Unfortunately for my partner he lit the flame and got the brunt of it.

Which brings me on to my tip of the day… shit happens!

Sometimes no matter how much self-care or plans we follow you can’t avoid the inevitable. Yes I cried, screamed, shouted and slammed doors, but I took ownership of my actions after and was able to see my wrong doings. People with mental illness are allowed to melt down like everybody else because everyone does it now and then, only human remember. The difference is when someone like myself with bipolar has a meltdown there are always repercussions, which feeds into the negativity already swirling around.

ALL ABOARD! Train to low cycle is about to leave Vicky’s mind stopping at guilt, self-loathing, paranoia and emptiness. Even if I don’t buy a ticket I can’t seem to get off this fucking train. If only I could let things go? I could then board the train to shit happens which stops at its ok, self-love and acceptance. If I don’t get off this track them I am going to be stuck somewhere I don’t want to be, I have to at least try.

I have to take back control somewhere along the way, even if it means jumping off the train and walking back and starting the journey all over. Which yes I know is a scary thought because my mind seems to be a one-track mind. Well I just have to build a new track to shit happens using my mental health toolbox and eventually, I will get to the right destination. Even close enough to that destination will do me like things will get better train, which stops at hope, strength and learning along the way.

Take care,

Vixxy Rose
xxx

I Do Not Have Cooties

Hey everyone

We made it everyone, we made it through another working week and we have got to the weekend. So I hope you all feeling good and if you’re not feeling ok remember that is ok too. My week started not so good with a stressful situation that brought on high anxiety, but I have learned from this and I took a self-care day from work. Some people asked me how did I get permission to do this, well I just explained to work if I didn’t take the day then it is highly likely things would snowball and I would end up taking more days off as sick. Fortunately, they listened and understood I wasn’t just trying to get out of work, I love my job and I knew that I wasn’t able to do my job the way I was feeling. I feel so lucky to have a job where they understand this because many people out there don’t have this. It is so easy to get a day off for some physical like a stomach bug or a cold, but to try and get a day off for something mental is incredibly difficult. Why is that?

I wasn’t going to but fuck it RANT WARNING EVERYONE!

So here I am listening to a bit of rock classics a bit of Stevie Nicks to get me through the day, drinking my cup of tea (because that is what English people do). I am having a read through twitter and I do not like what I am reading and it is getting that fire lit in my belly, so many of you out there feeling like you are getting overlooked, treated badly or made fun of because of 2 fucking words mental illness.
It is not like those two words are contagious; you do not need a cooties shot if you come near me. I am not going to start foaming at the mouth within 2 minutes of a conversation. We are just asking to be treated with dignity and humanity, is that so hard? Think about it, if you are unfair or just mean to someone with a mental illness you are not making his or her invisible illness better you are just adding to it, it is that simple.

I don’t need to hear, well we didn’t have it in my day, you are such a drama queen and you obviously don’t care of yourself. Oh ok is that all I need to do then, bloody hell if I knew it was that simple I wouldn’t have wasted time with therapists and different medications, clearly my bad. I feel like it is more acceptable to be an asshole than someone with a mental illness.

It is things like this that add to the list a person have with mental illness that they don’t matter. Things need to change desperately, I am here I have a mental illness I matter, get over it! Wave that flag loud and proud people lets not make the same mistake we have made time and time again, of treating someone who is not in that stupid fucking box “normal” as someone who should be treated as a lesser human being.

Take care all,

Vixxy Rose
xxx

Those Damn Lemons

Hey everyone

WARNING WARNING A RANT IS ON IT’S WAY!

Well I did warn you and you are still reading, that’s a good sign, so before said rant begins, how is everyone I hope you are doing ok and if you’re not well remember that is ok too. I am good a few snippets of anxiety and I took a step back this week and recognized the warning signs going off. I stepped in before my head got fogged up again with negativity, as I said before I may have lost some battles with anxiety and depression but I will win the war.

So rant time then, it’s not a situation or a person that caused this rant, it is something that really fucks me off when I am going through a bad time of anxiety or depression. When life gives you lemons make lemonade, well you know what if I don’t like lemonade, what if I don’t like lemons full stop. Well, can life please stop giving me those damn lemons how about some cake instead, I like cake.
Let’s look at it from a realistic point of view, what if actually lemons were thrown at me every time I felt down or anxious or even when something bad happened, I would be a permanent bruise! I may not be bruised on the outside but on the inside, I am covered. So if life changed lemon to cakes I don’t think I would have so many bruises just lots of snacks!
Don’t get me wrong I like the saying and it is a great way of thinking, turning something bad into a positive and I try to do that all the time. But sometimes it is just so damn tiring and where the fuck is I suppose to put all this damn lemonade because I have a lot of it.
My point is that sometimes I feel there is a lot of pressure put on people who are dealing with some pretty bad things like mental health, to look on the brighter side of life. Well, that is not always possible to be so upbeat under a pile of lemons, why can’t I be bitter? Why can’t I be pissed off? Why can’t I have cake instead?
Well life I am going to start throwing the lemons back you can go make lemonade instead, I am off to go eat some cake!

Take care all,

Vixxy Rose

xxx