Stress #7 ~ Anxiety and Depression
if you’re going through hell, keep going
Severe anxiety and depression will blight your life, make you incapable of doing even the simplest things, alter your personality for the worse, give you panic attacks, headaches, breathing problems, digestive problems, heart problems, extreme fatigue, and fill you with a foreboding of doom. Oh, and most likely your blood pressure will go through the roof.
Go to see your doctor and most likely they will tell you that you are suffering from a mild to moderate state of anxiety and depression, and medicate you with something like Xanax or Prozac, amd maybe Zyprexa. All of these drugs directly affect the chemistry in your brain ~ when you take them you are not you. All of these drugs have serious side effects, up to and including making you want to commit suicide. Unless body, mind, and spirit are all nurtured, full recovery can never take place. Taking an antidepressant / anti-anxiety drug is just painting over the problem, you need to find the proximate cause of your severe mental illness and find a way of dealing with it.
The potential causes of your anxiety and depression are many and mostly a part of what should be a normal life ~ but even normality can be taken to extremes. You will probably have recently experienced, or still be suffering, one or more of these shattering events; death of a loved one, or someone you felt you should have loved, a failed relationship, a toxic and dysfunctional relationship, separation, leaving home, divorce, physical illness, a very shitty job, loss of your job, poverty, bullying, fear, taking care of the sick and elderly, worry about getting old and your looks, lack of good sex, spiritual issues….. and you are most likely addicted to booze, medication, or something like pot and cocaine. Also, anything and everything bad in your past means you are suffering from stored pain.
Nobody is even remotely interested in your pain. Your family and friends will proffer fatuous and useless advice. You must be willing to take full responsibility for your own physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Especially you must stop hurting yourself with booze, too much medication, drugs, cigarettes, bad food, not eating, and not getting enough sunshine, fresh air, and exercise. If you don’t take care of yourself you will get sicker, you might die.
Most importantly stop trying to please other people all the time. You cannot ever change other people, you can only distance yourself from them so they stop hurting you. You must be the real and true you, and not someone that those around you think you should be.
Some say that you cause all your own problems. And that you just spend all your time feeling sorry for yourself. All I know is that you will get much better if you stop listening to all those unhelpful toxic people.
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
you can get used to almost anything
except death, but by then nothing matters
Down and Troubled
the trouble with introspection is that is has no end
my mood today
Still in hospital ~ I’m pretty down, depressed, and very troubled. Nothing seems to be going right for me ~ excepting I’m not dead and I haven’t had to have major surgery. I have some good and caring friends on this site, and who I met through this site, but I’m certain all of them think I’m crazy. Nothing much I can do about that other than every single day try to be a better man than I was yesterday. I hope my friends try to understand.
Now I’m free of the catheter I was able to take a bath this morning ~ you might have no idea just how good a soak in a hot bath feels if all you’ve had in about 10 days is a bed bath. My skin doesn’t feel madly itchy, and my hair doesn’t feel greasy and lousy anymore ~ and I had a proper wet shave. They won’t let me wear aftershave; why is that?
I’ve seen the nutritionist, who was nice, even though she gave me a good talking-to about my previous eating habits, and especially about my getting very drunk every few weeks. I have to completely change my lifestyle, and eat a modified Paleo diet;
- No Alcohol at all, ever
- lots of fruits and vegetables
- high fibre plants and whole grains, but not legumes
- nuts and seeds, but not peanuts
- low fat meats and oily fish
- very little added sugar, salt ~ and no trans fats, saturated fats, refined carbohydrates (flour)
- no processed foods at all
But I can have black coffee and green tea.
Why do I think my whole life up ’till now has been a total failure? But dreams can come true, if you have your dreams and you’re strong enough.
The most introspective of souls are often those that have been hurt the most. ~ Shannon Alder
Other things on my agenda today are an ultrasound on my carotid arteries and a PET scan ~ they keep testing me for possible precancerous signs. Thus far I’ve been lucky, apart from early-stage alcoholic fatty liver.
I also have to go for a walk today. That should be fun, so far everywhere I needed to go in here a porter took me in a wheelchair. If I’m going home tomorrow I’ve got to get up and get back on my own two feet again. That’s not just walking, that’s my whole life ~ because at the moment large parts of my life are down the toilet.
Some say that if you have just one good friend then you can do anything. And that if you truly love someone you can conquer the world. Too bad that love is blind.
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
my life is merely a darkling reflection in a winter mirror
Keto Diet Myths
Jack Spratt could eat no fat
his wife could eat no lean
apple, butter, and sage pork chops
Some confuse the Keto diet with the Paleo diet, and while there are some similarities, in reality they are radically different, and you will be on one or the other for completely different reasons. The Paleo diet is all about a healthy way of eating that should normalise your weight. Other benefits of the Paleo diet are improved heart and circulatory health, less inflammation, and it also helps people with type 2 diabetes, and / or staves off diabetes.
The Ketogenic Diet is something else all together. It’s also a low / zero carb way of eating, (less than 50 grams of carbs per day), but the key thing is that it’s a very, very high fat diet. Among the principal benefits claimed for the Keto Diet are that it helps with diabetes, polycystic ovaries, and it also staves of cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, drug-resistant epilepsy and acne. But mainly, the Keto diet is about weight loss.
I have read that one should not begin a proper Ketogenic Diet unless you have proper medical supervision, because the whole point of the keto diet is to completely change the metabolism of your body, especially the way the liver works. Instead of turning carbohydrates into glucose, your liver must turn fat into ketones. Thereby your body will become incredibly efficient at burning fat. You will see a massive reduction in blood sugar and insulin levels. Once you start this diet it will take your body 3 to 5 days to reach the point where it switches from using sugar to using ketones.
One danger of the keto diet is ketoacidocis, where excessive ketone bodies accumulate and you will get a dangerously toxic level of acid in your blood.
On the keto diet you don’t eat carbohydrates, (less than 50g a day, say a bagel), and only 10% to 20% of your daily food intake should be protein. The rest of what you consume is fat.
Eat; high fat meat like bacon and a good steak, cocoa butter, lard, goose fat, olive oil, palm oil, coconut oil, almond oil, avocado, coconut meat, fat-rich nuts and seeds, green low-carb vegetables, butter, hard cheeses, wild caught oily fish, liver, eggs, dark chocolate, hard liquor without a sweetened mixer…..
Do not eat; any grains or anything made from flour, like bread, refined sugars, mayonnaise and the like, starchy root vegetables like potatoes and sweet potatoes, corn, squash, fruits, fruit juices, peas, beans, peanuts, anything marked ‘low fat’, beer, wine, flavoured and sweet booze….
The keto diet can be dangerous causing; low blood pressure, kidney stones, constipation, nutrient deficiencies, Beri Beri, heart and circulatory disease, dizziness, low energy, mood swings, upset stomach. The keto diet is very antisocial. The keto diet is utterly unsafe for anyone who has problems with their pancreas, liver, thyroid, or gallbladder.
Some say the keto diet is a great way to lose weight fast. And that it helped with their diabetes. All I know is I wouldn’t try this without consulting my doctor and a dietitian.
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
you can drink this with a little spring water
Why I’m Still Alive
when all that’s left are the empty promises
the sun was going down on my life
Christmas had come and gone. I couldn’t remember the New Years’s at all, time had slipped from 2019 to 2020 completely unnoticed by me. It was January 7th 2020 and I had been smashed and broken to another low rock bottom. My life was a slow-motion freight train wreck at the end of the line in a place called Hell. My mind was numb and empty, my soul was tortured by demons of my own making, my body was suffering from a lack of food and too much booze. Part of me wanted to die, part of me hoped I would die, and a small part of me entertained dark thoughts of painless suicide. Walking into the cold North Sea would kill me, but that would mean I had to get out of bed, leave the garret, and walk the hundred or so yards to the beach. That was never going to happen.
But something happened. Call it sheer bloody mindedness, call it being protected by a guardian angel, call it the universal unconscious helping me, but I did something positive. It took a while.
First I got myself out of bed, went to the kitchen counter and poured a half-full bottle of vodka down the drain. Thought about coffee, but I knew I’d throw up. Drank some water, threw up.
Bathroom and alcoholic constipation hurts. Stood under the shower in my filthy clothes and stripped naked there, soaped up some. No chance of my risking a wet shave.
Got dry and left the wet towels in the middle of the garret, on the floor, discarded at random.
Combed my hair, got dressed in clean clothes, even clean socks. Looked at the clock, it was just on half-past-six, and I didn’t know if it was morning or evening, nor did I know what day it was.
Collapsed into my armchair, exhausted and shaking. Sat there for a long time staring at the wall, my mind empty, my soul in pain. I could see scuttling things out of the corner of my eye I knew weren’t real, weren’t there at all. Electric shave.
After a long long while I made myself a coffee, felt like throwing up but didn’t. I knew that somewhere out there someone or something was sending me all good wishes.
My thoughts and feelings were being led by demons down a dark road that only led to bad things, so I picked up my tablet as a distraction. Tried to play solitaire, not enough concentration. Instead I read some posts by the very special people I follow. I read a post by Rhapsody Boheme about The Wolf Moon, and the special things that could happen then ~ transformation, renewal, rebirth….. And here, The Wolf Moon was at 19:21 hrs on January 10th, 2020. I resolved to stay sober until then. Before then I would clean the garret, only demons will enter a place that looks like a pig-sty.
At around 19:15 on January 10th I darkened the garret, lit some scented candles, and put some soothing music on the record player.
19:21 on Friday January 20th, 2020 a sense of peace I had not known ever before in my tortured existence, the music playing was The Memory Of Trees by Enya; the simple vocal refrain on that instrumental track is Be Yourself. It was a profound message, and I knew exactly what it meant.
My life hasn’t been the same since. My life is different and better, and improving day by day, hour by hour, and something or someone is still guiding me. If you are suffering as I was, I know that you can have that too. Nobody with even an ounce of goodness in their soul is abandoned forever.
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
infinity came for me and lifted me up
Who am I?
change your thoughts and beliefs, change your whole life
After The Wolf Moon I took all the negativity, shame, and inferiority my parents had given me and let it all go into the mists of the past. I took all the hurt of my life, the bullying, the failures, the lost loves, the toxic love affairs and let all that go into the mists of the past. And then I took all of those false versions of myself, all of the chimera I had created to cope with life, all of the players I used to deal with different people in different situations and let all of those vanish into the mists of the past too. And what was left was just myself ~ the person I had never been allowed to be, the man I’d never dared to be.
Unless you are an insane sociopath, then each and everyone of us has a subconscious filled with negative, poisonous, unhelpful memories, thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. We did not create these demons all on our own, we had a lot of help. Before we were seven years of age our parents, older siblings, aunts, uncles and older cousins, teachers, and every other fucking person in authority we came across planted all of these poisons in our innocent minds. Since then, every negative situation we endured, especially when it comes to love and sex, fed and strengthened those demons. And then the demons ruled our lives.
I can look back now, dispassionately, honestly, openly, and fully recognise what my demons did to my life, how they destroyed everything that could have been good and fine, and led me down a darker road. I did my best to walk the warrior’s path with honour and chivalry, but I was doomed to failure as long as the demons of my past ruled my every thought, belief, behaviours, words, and deeds.
And so I tried to escape the pain through some very impulsive and stupid things, especially I retreated into booze. If life got too hard for me to bear I would get drunk, and I don’t mean just a little bit tipsy, I mean lost weekend drunk. You know what? If you drink a lot then your body, brain, mind, heart, and soul come to expect and need alcohol in your bloodstream ~ which is why alcoholics can almost never, ever get sober. I was in severe danger of drinking myself to death, and I didn’t fucking care.
And then there was The Wolf Moon, a time of renewal, redemption and rebirth, when the very fortunate may just receive some kind of message, and the message I got from my Goddess was Be Yourself.
And that leaves me with a question, just who am I?
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
my demons are locked away
Card of the Day ~ Death
endings and beginnings, birth and rebirth, change and transformation
~
It’s been a while since I touched the tarot, and yet today I was moved to take out the deck and draw a card ~ my card for today. I was expecting something from the minor arcana. Completely at random, from 78 cards I drew Death.
The Death card heralds the ending of one phase of life to make way for a new one. It represents major change and transformation. The Death card can release me from people, places, things, thoughts, and beliefs that are no longer useful in my life, but which I have been hanging on to because I feared change, I feared the unknown. Another symbol which goes alongside the Death card is The Phoenix.
Given everything that’s happened to me already in 2020, and in years past, I’m now more than ready to be honest, open, sincere, and caring of myself and others. I am looking forward to taking a new path towards a new distant horizon.
I have been given the opportunity for major growth and learning. I intend to grasp that opportunity with both hands, and all of my heart and soul.
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
Dawn, the end of night, a new beginning
My Demons and Darkness
let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in mindfulness
The dawn of a new life
Now that I am recovering from the illness which I suffered over the Holidays my mind is beginning to work again. That is both a good and a bad thing. It’s good because existing in a depressive semi-vegetative state is not living at all. It’s bad because my demons are coming out of the darkness deep inside my mind to torment me again.
I’m not going to let that happen. This the the dawn of a different life for me, not the beginning of another dark night.
I am not going to dwell on the past, nor regret anything that happened there. I am not going to think much about the future, nor be afraid of anything that might happen in that far-off country. Rather I will be mindful of today. I will use today to begin to discover my own inner nature.
A spiritual journey is to uncover my own inner nature. It’s already there. ~ Billy Corgan.
I have realised that I need to discover who I really am, and what I can do to become the better man. The only person I need to measure myself against is who I am today, and then be a better man tomorrow.
It’s a new dawn. Please be optimistic for me.
~
Jack Collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
A new dawn for me
Fucked Up Life
recovery is something you have to work at every hour of every day
recovery from a fucked up life is a long road
As I begin to recover from my disastrous and stupid behaviour over the holidays I have been thinking about my life. In truth I am so ill that I can’t do much else than sit and think. If you’re very sick then everything is either difficult or impossible. Add to that crushing depression and you might understand that it’s an achievement for me to be out of bed, washed, shaved, and wearing clean clothes.
My thoughts are slow and faltering, but I believe they are clear, honest, and unafraid to accept the truth. And the truth is I have fucked up, big time, for years and years. I have done almost everything bad you can think of that wasn’t illegal. I haven’t stolen, taken drugs, been physically violent, gotten arrested, lived on the street…..
I have entered into several unsuitable, dysfunctional, and dishonest relationships, all of which ended very badly. I have destroyed some good and honest relationships, hurting the women involved. I did put my stupid high-flying career before relationships, friendships, and real life. I allowed my ego, my wants, needs, and my expectations to rule my life. And for a lot of the time I was drinking far too much.
How do I come back from that?
All I know is that, one day at a time, one hour at a time, I will be sober, honest, open, and avoid any conflicts. I will not build castles in the clouds dedicated to my own ego.
~
Jack Collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
building this now would only be satisfying my need for instant gratification
How to Live in Harmony
from discord, find harmony
When you are in harmony with yourself, four things are aligned: what you do, what you say, what you think, and what you feel. In those mindful moments, things flow without any sense of stress, tension, or negativity. Your senses, feelings, and emotions fit together and your life has less anxiety, depression, guilt, upset, and stress.
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. ~ Gandhi
Being in harmony with yourself and others is all about being authentic, honest, open, kind, trusting, loving, reliable, and at peace with yourself. It is hard to be at peace with the people, places, and creatures around you when you yourself are not at peace. It is impossible to be at one with nature when you are not at one with yourself. Your heart and your brain should be in harmony.
He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe. ~ Marcus Aurelius
Sadly, most people never experience long-lasting harmony in their lives. Most chase after material gain, instant gratification, and transitory relationships.
To be in harmony is to do the simple things right, and to the very best of your ability, energy, and strength;
- If you want to stay sober, then stop drinking booze ~ don’t think you can ever take just one drink once in a while because you can’t.
- If you want to stop smoking, then stop going through the motions and get serious about never, ever, smoking another cigarette.
- If you want to lose weight and be fitter and healthier, then eat and drink well, and get plenty of fresh air and exercise.
- If you promise to help someone, then remember to be there for them and do the things you promised.
- If you think someone is being unkind and toxic, then stop pretending that all is well between the two of you. Share what you truly think and feel, and then do something about that relationship.
- If you feel anxious, depressed, and sad, then recognise and accept the emotions ~ in fact whatever emotions you feel, recognise and accept them. But, if you want to feel better, then start acting as if you are 100%
If you want the grace to live your own life, in your own time, then be strong enough to live in harmony with yourself and others and all of nature. Be authentic, honest, and open. Some toxic and untrustworthy people will pull away from you, but if you do all this you can expect to have more authentic, honest, open, kind, trusting, loving, and peaceful friendships and relationships.
Some say one thing while they are thinking and feeling the opposite. And most people lie, cheat, and steal. All I know is we compose our own harmonies in our lives.
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
to enjoy the scent of a rose
you must first brave the thorns
Taming Expectations
if you expect nothing then you can never be disappointed
the sun doesn’t always shine
Yesterday, once upon a time, my life was complicated. So many things were on my mind and I had so many extreme and conflicted feelings that I struggled to find peace and balance. I was impulsive yet indecisive. I had bursts of intense energy followed by doubt, lethargy, and procrastination. Although I didn’t know it everything was leading to better outcomes for me. It was alien to me, but all I needed was a little patience, and the insight to take a couple of simple steps to get me onto a better life path.
The first step I needed to take was to use my charm and diplomacy as much as possible ~ no matter how bad, negative, and angry I felt inside. No matter how defensive and threatened I felt by people close to me I had to avoid saying and doing things that would come back to haunt me later. I had to learn to compromise my black and white thinking, especially with those closest to me and whom I cared for.
Black and white thinking took me down the path of wanting and needing 100% of my desires and expectations. Yet when if I could but find a way to compromise greater harmony and contentment was there for me. My heart may have strong desires, but oft-times I needed to tame my expectations. I was demanding affection, admiration, love, and respect from people who were resistant to giving it to me ~ because of the way I was.
I also needed to uncover and nurture my deeper internal wisdom, to learn how to face my demons and extreme psychological conflict, to resolve the constant confrontations between the different parts of my psyche. I am not bipolar, but I do suffer from violent, vicious, and fast mood swings. If you’ve ever been there you know how hard that makes even the simplest things in life ~ like holding a normal conversation.
I needed to learn to pause before I reacted to my extreme feelings, and before I acted upon my negative thoughts. I knew I had to always weigh up all the options and come to some sensible next step in my life. I needed always to act coolly and unhurriedly with care and consideration for others.
In my life there have been heartaches and pain, and sometimes I didn’t know if I could face the unfriendly day again. Yet, I have been able to change myself, and in changing myself the rest of the world has changed around me.
Some say that I have to be true to myself. And that I have to learn to love myself before I can possibly love another. All I know is that being a really cool and self-confident guy doesn’t work for me every single damn day.
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
sometimes it even snows in New Mexico
JackCollier7 
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