a warped view

This is another post from my old tumblr blog. I am posting it here because the events described within have affected our lives so much and the aftermath has defined who we are as a family, a couple and as people So I posted on twitter a little while ago that it was a scary day at my house as Alan has gone to work today with his resignation in hand but with no new job to go to. A couple of people who are relatively new to our lives have asked me why, what happened? Unfortunately the answer to this question is far too complicated to answer in a 140 character tweet. So I thought I would write a blog about it. The details below have been pieced together by me from personal accounts, police reports and news stories. Just over 4 years ago, about a month and a half after our master 4 was born, my husband Alan was assaulted at his workplace, BWS Maddington. It was an average workday, there was Alan and two staff in the store and a number of authentic customers when some people entered th

This is a post I wrote on my old tumblr blog. I am publishing it here because it is important to me. Throughout my life I have always thought of my depression as a big black hole. At various times I have different perspectives of the hole. Sometimes I am standing at the top looking down into the darkness, other times I feel I am falling through it. Some times I feel I am clingy desperately to the sides and very occasionally I am laying crumpled at the bottom with the darkness all around me, above me, inside me, being breathed in with every breath until it consumes me. Today I am that tiny broken figure at the bottom of the hole. It is strange for me to be writing this on a public blog that I am more than aware will post to my twitter feed once written. I am a very open person, there is not much about myself I won’t share, but there are those tiny scraps of paper where my darkest secrets are written, those scraps of paper are inside tiny boxes tied with ribbon and those tiny boxes d

sadly, for all of you, I find myself being the kind of person who needs to explain myself. Its probably because I don't like the idea of people misunderstanding my actions and motives or disliking me for no good reason. I mean if you have a really good reason for not liking me then I am totally fine with that, but not liking me because you heard something from someone about something I may or may not have said is not cool. I am also a very self aware person, I have intense trust and abandonment issues but I try my hardest to give every one I meet the benefit of the doubt. I try to offer people the most valuable gift I have to offer, trust. That is, of course, until they give me a reason not to. I can be a difficult person to be friends with. I am highly emotional and make most decisions based on gut feeling but I am a loyal and devoted friend. I try not to judge people on stories from others, on whispers and gossip. I am also smart enough to know that sometimes I do things simply

a little over a week ago one of my very best friends, Ben, wrote a blog post about his struggle with depression. For those of you who know me, or have read my blog before, will know that I too have been diagnosed with depression. The responses to his post have ranged from compassionate, empathetic and supportive to accusations of egotism, arrogance and narcissism. So my friendship with Ben and my own circumstances probably skew my opinion on this issue which is why I have delayed writing my own blog post. I have been mulling over what it is that I want to say, what the most important message was that I wanted to share. I have been shocked by the negative responses Ben has received. His depression was not a shock to me, it is something we have spoken about in length over the last few months but I was overwhelmed with pride and admiration when I read his post. It is vastly different from his normal writing, writing that is satirical, comical, acerbic. It is writing that rips off the mas

your favorite song  I'm not really a person who has one favourite anything, I don't even have a favourite colour! I don't have one particular book that is my favourite, or a movie I could say I liked more than all the others I've seen. Picking a favourite song is not something that I feel I could do. I definitely have songs that are my favourite for a given moment or emotion but they change as the years pass and my taste evolves and expands.  When I tried to think what I could possible answer for this question there was one song that jumped into my head, American Pie by Don McLean. It is a song I have heard and sung along to my entire life, I've heard it performed live and I know ALL the words. There are other songs I love as much, whose words I can recite, that I've listened to a hundred times but American Pie holds a special place in my heart. It makes me think of singalongs with my mum and a childhood I loved.  I also have a list of another 50 songs I would c