Gum on My Shoe

“The further in you go, the bigger it gets.” — John Crowley, Little, Big Have you ever felt your life getting smaller and smaller, as though it was closing in on you? Maybe a relationship has come to an end. Maybe you’ve lost a friend, or the opportunity to make a new one. Maybe it’s not about people, but your career, education, finances, health, or some other aspect of your life that’s limiting what you can do. Maybe it feels like you’ll never achieve all you hoped to, or live the life you dreamed. It’s important to note there’s nothing wrong with “life lived small” as such. Everyone has their ideas of what constitutes a meaningful life and if yours satisfies you there’s no issue, no matter how others might view it. I’m talking here about feeling life is or has become too small for comfort. That might be because we’ve outgrown our current situation, or because life has closed in around us. Fran and I have discussed this many times in the course of our friendship, mostly in...

By Janet Coburn There’s nothing funny about bipolar disorder. In fact, one of the ways that I know I’m having a spell of bipolar depression is that my sense of humor flies out the window. Nothing brings a smile or a laugh – not my husband’s awful jokes. Not my friend Tom’s silly songs. Not a funny movie like Arsenic and Old Lace . I have been in a spell of depression for a little while now. As I mentioned last week, part of it may be reactive depression. But here’s the thing. Reactive depression feels the same as bipolar depression. You have the same sense of misery, loneliness, helplessness, hopelessness, anomie. But you know what caused it and that it will end pretty soon, relatively, unless you tip over into a true depressive episode, which can last a lot longer than that. But yesterday I laughed. And that was a good thing. It didn’t pull me completely out of my depression, but it let me know that escape was possible, and maybe even starting. It happened like this: My husban...

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I’d like to share a few thoughts for Time to Talk Day , which this year falls on Thursday 3 February. The event was launched in 2014 by Time to Change, a campaign run in England to end mental health stigma and discrimination. This year’s event is organised by Mind and Rethink Mental Illness in partnership with Co-Op. As described on the event’s website, “Time to Talk Day is the nation’s biggest mental health conversation. It’s the day that friends, families, communities, and workplaces come together to talk, listen and change lives.” I volunteered with Time to Change from February 2016 until the campaign closed in March 2021. I’ve shared my experiences previously, including a look-back piece written in April last year. You can read some of my previous #TimeToTalkDay posts here: What Does Having a Conversation about Mental Health Look Like? Would You Rather? Thank You for Not Assuming I’m OK In a recent intranet post written for Brew Monday , one of the lead Mental Health ...