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Crossroad

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Last Wednesday I got a phone call from my CPN. I had been waiting for him to call me from the week before. He is notoriously bad for keeping to arrangements to call. He never runs to time in his face to face appointments either. When he finally did call it was a call I wasn’t quite expecting.

Last Wednesday, I was officially discharged from CMHT care.

I was told that I would be discharged after I had completed the STEPPS course, I didn’t really expect that discharge to come less than 48 hours after finishing it. I have mentioned before about being discharged and how I felt it was the right time and the right thing for me to be doing at this time. That being said, I do think that there should have been a more formal process of discharge other than a brief 10 minute phone call saying “See Ya”.

Sanity

Certified Sane? Who Knows

I was put on the spot and I had 101 questions running around my head except not one of them would coalesce into 1 straight forward question I could ask. I asked if I could have a day or two to get some questions together and give him a call back. This went down like a lead balloon. He gave me to the end of the day. I called him back later that day asked my questions and was wished all the best and hope not to see you again. There I was for the first time in almost a decade  out of the care of a specialist team of people who would be able to fix my broken head if things went tits up.

Moving onwards to yesterday… my 39th birthday. I am just about at a place where things are straight in my head. Each day starts with me hoping that it will be as “normal” as yesterday. Yesterday though it suddenly became clear that my story had no where to go at the moment. I am in a flux state.

When I say my story has no where to go, that’s not exactly true. As of right now I am in the process of setting up a project for people in my area with Mental Health issues, I am starting work on writing a one man show based on this blog and other bull I have written and I am doing some work as and when I can with the local chapter of Rethink. My story is going ahead and it is telling it’s own story in it’s own way. It’s just a little different to the way I have been doing it up until this point in time.

What I guess I am saying is that It’s Just A Ride, whilst not the most prolific blog in the Madosphere it’s been something I have always had for the past few years. It’s not going away, as I said the story will be told, just in a different way. I will post here when I have something to say,

For now, in between all I have mentioned above, I am about to start something I call Project 39 which will be a weekly account of things in life that have affected me during that week in my 39th year. This will be happening over on my other blog www.paulhurwood.com. I hope that you will consider coming over and following my trip through the year to come. It won’t always be pretty and I can be pretty much assured that occasionally it won’t be on time, but it should be a bit of a laugh. There will be more news on that later on today (Saturday 11th May).

Thank you for reading so far. I hope that some how you will be able to keep up with all the changes.

Here’s To Round Number 2 *Ding Ding*

Until Next Time?

Photo credit: needoptic / Foter.com / CC BY-ND

A Perfect Representation

It’s not very often, in fact it’s damn near impossible to come anywhere close to representing someone else’s words in a different media and still keep the meaning, feeling and emotion resonance of the original statement, but Gavin Aung has done that with Bill Hick’s It’s Just A Ride speech over on his website Zen Pencils .

I had to repost it over here. I read it through the first time and I was just taken aback totally by how well he had channelled the meaning of the bit. I think you can understand how much this speech means to me as it’s not only the name of this blog but I also have It’s Just A Ride tattooed on my arm (FOR LIFE).

 

Hick Cartoon Excerpt

An except from the cartoon. Click the image to go to Zen Pencils to see the full cartoon

Many Thanks To Zen Pencils for renewing my inspiration.

Until Next Time…

Wants And Needs 2012 – Revisited

At the start of the year I posted a list of “resolutions” that I hoped to achieve through 2012. I thought I would take a few minutes to get back to the point and see how well I did.

You can read the original post here

  • Writing More – Well, my output didn’t increase massively. I did however stretch my reach a little away from my own blogs. I contributed a couple of times to the most excellent This Week In Mentalists strand over at the The World Of Mentalists. I also joined the team over at Scribes of Metal a new Rock and Heavy Metal News and Reviews site. I have given a couple of reviews for albums this year (the new Rob Zombie Remix album and the Led Zeppelin Reunion album Celebration Day I hope to do more with both sites in the following year.
  • Reading More – I have certainly read more in the past year than I have in any year since I left college. Having said that I can’t quite recall if I have read more than 12 books. I do know I have had more than a few very late nights where I have gotten caught up in a book and not been able to put it down. The most memorable would have to be “The Heroin Diaries” by Nikki Sixx. It is a collection of diary entries from one year leading up to his choice to get himself clean. The honesty in that one book alone had a profound effect on me. He was able to show an honesty and a trust in his readership to take his story and run with it and make their lives better and more productive. I am currently half way through his follow up memoir “This Is Gonna Hurt”. Sixx once clean needed a new outlet for his creativity and he used Photography. Again another massive inspiration for me. Briefly, Brendan o’ Carroll (he of Mrs Browns Boys Fame) has had me in stitches at ungodly hours of the morning with his first two novels about Mrs Brown. They were such easy reads that I really wish that they were twice the length so I could have had more to read. I have one more to read in the series and I am saving it for a time when I am a bit down.
  • Website Theme – The website design that is in effect at the moment is the design that I set out to create. I didn’t 98% of the work myself. The other 2% came from my Brother and the guy who designed the base theme. Yes I know I wanted to create a whole theme, but I found a theme I thought looked pretty good out of the box, but I wanted a more personal stamp on it. So, I went down the route of a Child Theme. It’s the best of both worlds and I now have something to work on when I want to move forward.
  • Other Sites – My other website phurwood.co.uk is no more. I don’t know why but I went out and purchased the domain paulhurwood.com. It was a spur of the moment thing and it sat there for quite a while whilst I decided what I wanted to do with the domain. I don’t do much of anything really so it was doomed to another blog. In reality it has taken the content from every site I have ever had through the ages (with the exception of this and Spnak in it’s photographic guise). It is now a website that I plan on focusing more of my time on in 2013.
  • Other Health – I mentioned before about taking better care of myself, health wise. Well that pretty much didn’t happen. I am now eating a lot less than I was this time last year (and it wasn’t much back then). I seem to have developed an aversion to certain random foods. My sense of taste is buggering everything up. Food tastes off or not quite right. If I do manage to eat a regular meal it is a 50/50 chance that it won’t make a reappearance. My GP has no idea what could be causing the problem. The diabetes is still out of control, but I have had my injection medication changed to a once a day kind so I should be able to get the doses I need to help bring it under control.

So that’s how the last year has gone in relation to what I set out to achieve. I am not sure that there will be another resolution based post on IJAR this year. All I do know it that in 2013 I HAVE to focus on getting better and getting my life back to some kind of order. 2012 had a lot of bad points that knocked me back far to much. I am only now just getting back to a semblance of normality after the whole Insomnia and Voices issues. hope you all have a great 2013. Be safe and look out for one another

I hope you all have a great 2013. Be safe and look out for one another.

Until Next Time…

Ideas Springing

It’s not often that I get too many ideas for creative endeavours but I seem to be on somewhat of a roll. These ideas whilst exciting to me right now, I just hope that I can maintain this possible momentum.

In my last post I made mention that I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to get out of the Creative Arts group. I think maybe it was designed to help spur the user into exploring a different avenue that they hadn’t been using before. In my case (I can’t speak for the others on the course) reignite that spark that had been extinguished.

I doubt that it will be as straight forward as it seems right now. At the moment I envisage me sat at the computer rattling off idea after idea and it being received like a brand new Harry Potter novel. I know I have issues to overcome before I can really take full benefit from this latest spurt of creativity.

One thing is for sure though… I am really enjoying the idea of having ideas again, having something to develop and offer back to something.

As they say… WATCH THIS SPACE.

Until Next Time…