Hi Currently I have 130 FB friends. For many people that is ONLY 130. I am getting lots of friend requests. Most of my FB friends are women and many are midwives, doulas and mothers. The few blokes are delightfully weird and very interesting! The rest are family and friends. I am reluctant to accept friend requests unless I know something about the requester and not everyone puts enough details on their FB page for me to tell if they are serious, sane and alive people – and I guess I feel I need to take a serious, sane and lively interest in people who take an interest in me … well at least in my work. I love and live for my work. I guess, in spite of being an apparently outgoing person – an experienced actor, singer, dancer, teacher and comic (not always accidentally!) … and I really do love my life, I am still the very shy kid I used to be in the days when, at school in South Africa and England, I could not copy letters of the board, learn from books and was ridiculed by teachers and other kids. I was bullied, No that was NOT the reason why, in my twenties, I earned my green beret as a Royal Marine Reserve Commando. You see, because we travelled so much when I was a child I missed out on becoming a Boy Scout so I did the next best thing! At 18 I went to Millfield School in England for a year where I was told I was ‘Dyslexic’! The word means nothing, but, for whatever reason (WWII trauma as a baby may have contributed), I have always found learning – at least like other ‘normal’ people, difficult. I still do a bit but I have largely got over that. I am stubborn! Since I was a child I have had bouts of depression. Sometimes I have even felt the … I guess they are biochemical, bio-electrical or whatever … changes that flooded through me. But, unlike so many, far too many, others, I have been really lucky. No one has formally diagnosed me as having a mental illness – except, possibly, friends and others who make assumptions that were not based on detailed and accurate knowledge of me – who I am and what I experience in my life. Because I have always had a reason to get up every morning and all my reasons are related to my work, I have never felt unable to cope … in the long run. I sit out the tiredness, the lethargy, the fear of failure in full knowledge that it always passes. Then I get on with it! The deep events are rare! As I have got older, I have coped better. This week in Australia it is Mental Health Week. Everyone who is anyone, it seems, is coming out – especially on radio and television … and it is about time too! I have never felt that I am ‘mentally ill’ but now temporary even debilitating depression is being recognised as a form of mental illness. I chose to live a life that is often at extreme odds with the world I was born into. It cost me my marriage to a marvellous woman and the wealth that, in business, I could have accumulated had my heart been it, and I have often been and felt very alone. This is not necessarily the same as being lonely though I am sometimes lonely. But what else could I expect. I made my own life choices and, in spite of much pain, I have never regretted them – and the blessings always have far outweighed the pain! My ‘Dyslexia’ was my greater gift – but a gift people with learning difficulties have had to face and learn from of they are to reap its rewards. I, like so many apparent ‘outsiders’ have come to realise that we all have another gift – one that dawns upon us slowly as we progress through, and learn from, life. We discover we are not only not really ever alone but surrounded by countless other odd-ball humans who in their own are just as crazy … if, in fact, we are actually crazy! Now tell me, if you’ve got through this so far, are you and I really very different? I am a nut? Well that, I have often said, is my prime qualification (bits of paper notwithstanding) for being the shrink, sorry psychotherapist, I have become. What is your excuse for being who (the spell check keeps saying ‘whom’!) and what you truly are? Whether helping women and the people close to them to birth better, safer, healthier and happier (my PhD – our family business) or sitting with good but lost and deeply hurting people on the edge of suicide in hopes that they might find THEIR OWN way to discovering really exciting reasons for living, I am living totally to help others to live their own lives their own way. This is my ego-trip. I hope you too have your own similar but unique to you, ego-trip whether as a parent, friend, health worker, business person, tradie, teacher or whatever, as a fellow human. Now, if you haven’t defriended me already, thank you for your friend requests. Please understand my reluctance but know that when I do accept, it is because I learn enough about someone to see a sufficient closeness – even if some of our ways of seeing the world our beliefs, are in some ways, very different. If I have recently emailed you ‘ACTION PROPOSALS’, please tell me if it didn’t arrive. I hope you will get back to me if you think we can work together. It is a small world – in no way insignificant, but it is getting much smaller every day! Leigh Dick-Read – eagledreaming.ws - +61 (0) 422 56 1214
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 23:32:02 +0000
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