Remember remember…..yey it’s November! Breast Cancer
Awareness month is over for another year and we can take a deep breath again,
can’t we? Well, in reality no, but at least we’re not being bombarded quite as
much now, rather than getting upset by all the SU2C adverts my grumpiness is
aimed instead at all the Christmas adverts that are out waaaaaaaaay too early!
Bah Humbug!!!!!
So, I know it’s not long since my last post and it may seem
that I’ve just given up on trying to find imaginative titles for my blogs, but
I have a lot to write about this month, and most of what I have to write about
follows on from my October post so it seemed appropriate….. but I promise my
next post won’t be entitled December! 😉
I am always interested to see which of my blog posts strike
a chord with people and which ones seem to draw the most feedback. It was interesting
last month after my little rant about October and the talk of the mental health
issues that can accompany a diagnosis such as cancer, that the only people to
comment were people who had been through some sort of cancer themselves. I guess
it’s hard to comment on some of the things I discussed if you haven’t been through
something similar yourself. Obviously mental health encompasses a lot and is
not a unique problem to those dealing with cancer, but I suppose it’s not
necessarily something the outside world considers when they think about a
person’s recovery from cancer. As much as The Big C is talked about and
understood a lot more than it used to be, it is still an incredibly difficult
subject for people to deal with. We get our heads round it by putting people
into boxes….mainly ‘sick’ and ‘not sick’. You are treated one way when you are
deemed sick and once treatment is over, if you are ‘lucky’ enough to be Cancer
free, you are put into the ‘not sick’ box and expected to get on with your
life. People are happy you are now well, and they can stop worrying about you
now and go back to worrying about Brexit or who’s sleeping with who on Strictly.
Clearly it’s not always that simple.
My way of dealing with some of the issues
cancer brought up in me, lack of confidence, low self-esteem, poor body image,
fatigue to name a few, was to throw myself head first into all these
challenges. My purpose was to raise money and awareness for Maggie’s Centres
because I honestly and truly don’t know what I would have done without them and
am so unbelievably grateful for them. The challenges have really given me
something to focus on and most definitely helped me to improve my fitness and
given me a reason to get out of bed on days that I really didn’t feel like it.
Seeing the money go up and up has been a huge boost too and I hope it will
continue to do so, but as the months went on I started to find myself getting
quite stressed out by some of the challenges, mainly the organisation and timings
of things, as my life became more and more hectic fitting these challenges (and
the training leading up to them) into my life was becoming harder and harder. I
started to get anxious about the amount of money I was spending on various
challenges versus the amount that would be raised. I was often becoming
overwhelmed and a little obsessed if I’m honest. A few of my friends over the
past few months have been telling me it’s time for me to take a break from
these challenges, that I was doing too much. But I’ve said it before and I’ll
say it again, I’m way too stubborn for that! That being said as November came
closer and closer I started to get more and more anxious, I hadn’t got a
challenge organised for November, I wanted it to involve other people so that I
could raise as much money and awareness as possible, but in November my life is
changing a lot and trying to organise anything was really stressing me out. My
contract is coming to an end this month and I’m finishing work and leaving Inverness,
a pretty huge step for me given what I’ve been through here and the amazing
support network I’ve built up. In and amongst all this I have a new
relationship and a romantic holiday to fit in (poor me, your hearts are bleeding,
right?! 😉 ). All logic was telling me to take a break
from the challenges but my stubborn (determined?) side could not accept this. I’d
made a commitment, one challenge a month for a year. I can’t stop yet. I talked
all this through with my Maggie’s therapist, quite sure she was going to tell
me to stop the challenges, but she’s way too clever for that, instead she challenged
me to a month of Self-Care and asked that instead of focusing on the money I
was raising that this month I could focus on raising awareness for the work that
the Maggie’s Centres do. She was right of course (the woman always is! LOL), in
trying to raise money for Maggie’s I’d started to forget all the lessons I’d
learned from the centre. It can be very hard to find the line between pushing
yourself a healthy amount and pushing yourself too far. The main message I’ve
heard from all the staff in Maggie’s at one time or another is learning self-care.
Are you rolling your eyes yet? I probably would’ve been a
few years ago. All this hippy-dippy self-care nonsense, just get on with things
and stop complaining! The way many of us were brought up the idea of self-care
seems to equate to being selfish, but that couldn’t be furthest from the truth.
I have often heard the explanation of self-care to be this: when you’re on an
aeroplane they always tell you to fit your own oxygen mask first before helping
others, you’re no use to anyone if you can’t breathe! Self-care isn’t just going
for a massage or pamper day (although it can be!) it can encompass so many
things and will depend on the way your life is at the moment. If you are very
sick or depressed, self-care could just be getting up and getting dressed or
going for a walk. It could be asking someone for help. If you are more active
or able self-care can be less obvious things, like not being so hard on
yourself about things, self-compassion, finding the time to do the small things
you like or making small steps to improve your health and well being such as
drinking less alcohol or eating healthier. It could be turning off social media and trying
to stop comparing yourself to others. The list can go on and on and it will be
different for everyone because we all have different needs. So, my challenge
this month is a month of self-care and I challenge you all to do the same! I originally
intended to write this blog on the 1st November and post an update
every day on what I was doing to show myself a bit of self-care………but then I
decided as my first act of kindness to myself that I would have a relaxing few
days at home without the pressure to write something and post pictures on
social media. I’m still struggling with the concept of this one a little bit, I
will try my best to keep you updated but it is definitely a work in progress
for me, I’m still learning what exactly self-care really means and how I
can try and adjust my lifestyle and expectations accordingly, I’ve even bought
myself a couple of books to help me along the way, what I do hope is that I won’t
be doing this challenge alone, that everyone who has joined me in a challenge,
or donated or simply enjoyed following my crazy antics online will take some
time to think about how they can incorporate a little bit of self-care into
their lives. Go on, I challenge you!!!!
After all this talk of being kind to myself and not pushing
myself too much it seems slightly ridiculous to announce this next thing, but
here goes. Although my challenges were supposed to be for 12 months starting in
February '18 and ending January '19 there has been a slight extension to the
end date as I have been lucky enough to secure a place with Maggie’s in the
London Marathon next April! I am both incredibly excited and unbelievably scared
at the same time and I hope this may also explain to you why trying to fit in
another physical challenge this month was such a stressful thought for me. I
will be continuing to train throughout the winter and fingers crossed by April
I might just be ready. I’m sure there’ll be many more blog posts on this subject
to come! Agh!!!
If you’d like to learn more about self-care I will try and
post anything interesting I find along the way, for now here is how the mental
health charity Mind explain self-care:
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