Must. Get. Better.

Stopping my ‘must get better’ self-punishment regime

I haven’t written on Substack for nearly three months. I read articles weekly, sometimes daily from the various accounts I’m subscribed to, but my own writing has fizzled out.

Partly, I’m unsure what my Substack space is for – it’s not a newsletter, and I’m not really sure if I have an audience in mind for it or not. I jot down ideas of things I want to write about and they can be so wide-ranging and scattergun that I’m not sure if they would have a universal appeal.

I’ve also had a really tough twelve months, and a lot of my writing prompts are coming from a place of traumatic experience and subsequent complex PTSD and rollercoaster of mental health. Not only is this something I have little experience of writing about, I also have concerns that it is an alienating subject area that people might not want to read about. I’m also unsure about whether it should be on the internet.

With so much uncertainty, I’ve hidden behind this and kept myself to myself. I’ve found it difficult to will myself into writing. I have had an open word document on my laptop for months, that is all around the theme of home, and what home means to me. I have kept it open in the hopes that it would make me get down to writing, but so far it hasn’t.

The anniversary of my traumatic experience came and went towards the end of May. In April I was still experiencing vivid, visceral nightmares, conscious and unconscious body scratching, broken sleep and frightening mental and emotional highs and lows. I told my boyfriend I didn’t know who I was anymore. I forced myself to meet a friend at 9.30pm in a quiet pub that evening and cried. How has it gotten to this? I would think. How am I still here in this awful place? And it’s possible that despite the early days of my shocking experience, when I felt that my world had collapsed, when I couldn’t eat and had to photograph my weight on the scales every day and send it to my friend so we could monitor my safety, it was actually this point here, eleven months on, that I had found my rock bottom.

I had been trying in those months to ‘find my way back to myself’ and make myself feel and be ‘better’. I tried to read and review books, tried to write on Substack, tried scrapbooking, journaling, drawing, exercise, all sorts of things I have previously done and enjoyed. I just couldn’t stick at any of them and I felt so useless because of it.

I finally decided that I had to stop trying and let myself be. I was trying to force myself to be the person I was before the trauma, and that version of me is not really here anymore. And so, I deleted the bookish Instagram account I was trying to force into being, to attempt to show that I could still be that person that had a life around books. I put the pen down, and put the scrap books away. I closed the open word document.

The only thing I have done is enjoy being in the garden – something that has no part of my former self and which I can place very low expectations around being any good at. It’s refreshing to be a novice, to not know the names of plants or the type of soil we have, or which direction anything should be facing in order to grow well.

This image is all our bedding plants ready to go out in the garden in May.

In that final month leading up to the anniversary, I finally began to see some chinks of light. The bad dreams stopped and the scratches on my back and torso disappeared. I started to track my time properly on the work projects I have, and it has increased my productivity but also given me a lot of clarity and a true insight into the time I have available.

I believe it is these two factors – stopping my ‘must get better’ self-punishment regime and getting some mental clarity and space away from the ‘old me’ that have finally enabled me to write this Substack today. I finally felt ‘ready’ and it hasn’t been forced. Perhaps in time, my previous hobbies and interests will come back to me, but I’ve given up chasing and pursuing them and am similarly going to wait to be ready.

With the twelve month anniversary gone, it does feel like an accomplishment that I made it through. I’m mentally and physically quite battered and bruised from it all, and my mental health support will continue for a long time. However I can tell in my quiet, introspective moments, that I feel much calmer and a growing sense of peace with myself, and I hope that this is the truly fertile ground for regaining creativity in whatever form it presents itself.