AUTHENTICITY

It is time for a new post.

I have not been at all with it recently in fact for the last few months I have not been as well as I have been. This has caused a little consternation amongst my Facebook friends and others. Whilst I find this comforting and really surprising that people are that interested in me, I also find that it puts pressure upon me to lie and not tell the truth. And this blog is not about that. It is about telling the truth but it seems that when I do tell the truth a lot of people disappear and no longer read what I write. I would be a liar if I said that this did not upset me because it does. I sometimes think I am a marionette on a string and  they pull me this way and that way. I end up staying away from the computer. There are those too  who have told me that they do not read my "negative posts" and this is a long time dear friend who obviously can't take me as I am.  I guess that comment hurt.

 When I started to write this blog it was away from me to express my hurting,  my pain,  and to my surprise it did indeed begin to make me feel better. I wrote only about the subject of child abuse and its effects. However, it soon became apparent that I had readers and they would write to me and tell me their stories often in the comments section. One day it occurred to me that that remaining anonymous as I was as Knitman,  was not  fair when writing how there is no shame in being abused and here I was hiding who I am. I  I stopped hiding who I was. For some reason this brought in even more mail  from other survivors.

 Slowly, I began to lose myself in all this writing back to people. "But I am learning so much… These people have somewhere they can share their secrets which they have kept fears… I cannot abandon them…) So I stayed with it slowly losing myself along the road.

Then 10 years ago I was diagnosed with four serious diseases in one go: culinary heart disease, fibromyalgia, a neurological disease which the neurologist know about but not enough research has been done into it yet to be able to give a definitive diagnosis which to me means a name I don't want a disease that doesn't have a name: Spondylosis (  
which has a name in front of it but I can never remember what it is)but it is causing my spine to crumble, to fall apart. I can recall an argument I had with the nurse who was doing my annual MOT  and I insisted to her that I was 5'10" tall and had been all of my life once I have matured. I insisted that she measured my height again and she got the same answer. I said then you need to height gauge recalibrated. She was very understanding in that I didn't want to recognise the obvious although it really had not occurred to me that the reason I was losing height was because of what was happening to my spine.

Of course I said about this too and I received some very kind letters and some not so kind letters and some bombastic letters which told me that they knew a sure way of curing me and others who found yet another way of blaming me for my abuse; I was like this because I had not done the mental and spiritual work on myself because if I had I would be fit and healthy.  I do not feel well disposed towards such people and find it amusing that so many  New Age people are as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists they detest!

It became more and more difficult for me to share how I felt every day as I started all of my posts because I felt I was letting people down. I wish I could say it was my imagination but some people on Facebook  has been quite blunt  in saying how they miss the old Colin who was always  "up beat and always had something wise and wonderful to say".

 I am a mixture of all of these things. Through the latter half of 2011 and well into 2012 I suffered a bipolar disorder episode which I kept entirely to myself. I hid it at home from John and even from my doctor and I did this by using large amounts of tranquillisers.  Why did I do this? Because How could I possibly  be having an episode after 15 years of not having one and how could I possibly tell anybody my doctor and John to different reasons but the people on my blog and on Facebook?  So eventually in late 2012 or possibly early 2013 I came out and spoke about my illness and that I had just come out of a relatively bad patch.  I don't think it was received very well. It didn't fit in with the Colin they came to read  and who had lied to them by not telling the truth from the beginning but then if they understood bipolar disorder they would know that for the first six months I had no idea there was anything wrong with me it was only when I came down and was feeling depressed that I began to see what I had been through.

I'm going to go back to writing how I actually am each day and not fake it to make it.  This doesn't represent a change really it just means going back to being the authentic Colin. c