Day 11 lockdown diaries Corona KZN RSA

Stats today … France breaks its own 24 hour death rate 😦 833 deaths reported today. Total so far in France: 8911 have passed away.

UK has passed the 5000 dead mark too; with 5373 passings. Italy stands at 16523 deaths and Spain 13055. USA 10369. (News24 & Wikipedia)

India – Mumbai – 26 nurses and 3 doctors tested positive with Corona. Hospital was shut to new patients.

Both France (@ 33%) and India have also seen a steep and scary increase in the reports of domestic violence since they went into lock down. My heart breaks for those families / houses that function in that horrendous traumatic fear that stays in the space where that violence happened; marking a spot where hell truly was on earth.

More than 50 doctors in Pakistan are also protesting their lack of safety equipment, as here is South Africa a local Durban hospital is not able to admit anyone due to infectious staff who treated 3 of our deceased cases.

An Australian cruise ship has confirmed that over 80 passengers and crew are infected.

All as per News24 this evening.

South Africa has 1655 confirmed cases (still bearing in mind that test results take about 10 days in some cases), 45 recovery cases and 11 deaths. (Wikipedia).

And in amidst all this I had my day.

2nd expletive neighbours smoking as I type – vomit! Humans… survival of the fittest people! Smoking makes you one of the weakest and Corona – the new pneumonia – loves the weakest! Seriously! Ugh!

Anyway – venting when self-isolating, is a necessity.

Yes, so, my day… hard one. I woke up. Checked the DB and the smell was still there… this unhappiness piled on the previous evening when thinking about past rejections and how in hindsight the rejections became blessings … but just getting stuck on the rejections part – it cycles in and around me… or maybe the whole energy of the anxiety and chaos around the world at the moment has been absorbed into me… but it was a super hard, super anxiety overload morning. Once again my quiet journaling time brought up that we all have a connected humanness, but our bodies are separate. As humans we need to understand that as much as we are separate bodies, our souls, our spirit, our energy is all on the same path: to experience all facets of the yin & yang of life. Just as all are locked down physically now, we are also all locked down in our personal life journeys – we live out our story and no-one else can do that living for us.

Through all the morning anxiety over whatever my physical being is worried about, I get a message from the 1st electrician that he is not coming around as he has a migraine… he then instructs me to experiment and turn off every switch in the DB board – which I do …spray air freshner – which I do… and leave it for a few hours – which I do… three hours later I switch everything back on… cannot really tell about the smell because of the air freshener! Ugh.

Anyway – dear Lord God; Father in heaven – Please bring safety and closure to all this. Please Dear Lord. Thank You, Father.

Thankfully, I have “online teaching” to do… which equates to maybe 8 – 15% of the classes’ learners being on their WatsApp group at the designated time… I have no idea how this is going to work… None of the representative 8 – 15% have finished reading their allocated play and one group has not even finished their play from last term (I teach Dramatic Arts). So “class” has become photos of notes, relevant pictures and my voice notes… heaven help us! And some of the demographic group I teach do not even have a phone or WatsApp… this is an educational disaster scenario indeed. On top of that – Dramatic Arts is not considered important by the State, so there are no scheduled lessons via TV or radio happening either. Heaven help us! If this lockdown extends itself – which seems to be the predicted trend… then the entire year is in jeopardy. Heaven help us!

From the mayhem and energy required for teaching from 10am – 2pm there is not much left. I took the advice of electrician #2 and went to town in search of a fire extinguisher… I drove in the sci-fi empty streets … so weird … So unique … so ONCE in a lifetime! And all the fire extinguisher store options were closed. Clearly a fire extinguisher is not an essential product. Bah humbug!

I returned to my flat.

I spent way too much time on my electronic devices and am sure that the shape of my spine and the effects on my thumbs are not what my body was made for… sigh…

Here is to prayers for a better tomorrow. Amen.

 

 

To take or not to take: anti-depressants?

This has been on my mind a lot lately. Numerous people are on these drugs, and my General Practitioner has decided that the low neutraphils in blood (as they have been for 3 years, usually the result of a bad viral infection, which I have had) and the high liver enzymes (only a “mild vital illness” she tells me) have nothing to do with my body being unwell and everything to do with my mind being unwell.

How this connection has been made when I have seen her 3 times in 3 years is BEYOND me. I have shown the GP’s emails (blood test results and recommendations of how to proceed) to a couple of friends and colleagues and ALL of them have told me I need to see another General Practitioner and that the psychologist ‘prescription’ (the GP literally gave me a prescription with the psychologist’s details on) makes no sense in relation to the blood tests. Fair enough. I have a stranger telling me that I have to add chemicals to my brain and make it change, and a few people who know me well telling me that her prescription is illogical.
So who should we trust? ‘Trained’ practitioners or our friends?

I guess it doesn’t really matter which, I could choose either path, but the thing that has knocked me is: The Seed of Doubt. This has been horrendous to deal with and has made me incredibly angry with the ‘doctor’. I told her in the appointment to deal with the fluid (literally) in my ears and the cold and a horrifically itchy rash, that I had already been to see people to ‘investigate’ my brain and they said I was ok. At 16: Psychologist One, to whom my mother sent me to ‘be checked on’, saw my parents as well as myself, and decided I was the ‘most normal one in the family’.

At 31: my mother once again sent me to a counsellor ‘to be fixed’, and the guy told me to stop thinking I was Jesus, go out and be naughty and then use Grace to get back into God’s good books, because that is what Grace is for, as he laughed like a hyena between sentences… The book I was reading at the time was: “What’s So Amazing About Grace”, which had Philip Yancey writing about if he fell in love with a German lady, he would learn the language very quickly and be completely passionate about her and live life loving her. The Grace ‘language’ is not there for abuse, upon marrying her you don’t say on your honeymoon night “Ok my love” (in German, if you’ve learnt it by then 😉 ) “This has been great, but I’m just going to go out and sleep with some other women now, and when I get back you have to forgive me and give me Grace” … this was literally what the ‘counsellor’ was suggesting I do. I passed a photocopy on to the ‘counsellor’ and his only comment at the end of my second and last session with him was, randomly, “That Philip Yancey is a good writer.” Amen! That ‘counsellor’ told me to take a mild sleeping tablet in the evening if I needed to, and/or a calming tablet in the day to help with my anxiety, post-traumatic stress and depression.

At 33: The third psychologist, also connected to my mother, told me I dress like a spinster, and I’m really fine because it’s not like I’m a drunkard or mass murderer or anything. He told his very personal tale about his abusive parents and that he’d had a very difficult childhood. Yet, why is a professional confessing their story to me? Same happened with the homeopath I went to by a suggestion of a massage specialist. The homeopath said there’s nothing wrong with me, not even the gluten-intolerance that I’ve only recently managed to deal with (read “Eish! London” for that story), nor the dairy-intolerance that can still knock me into sinus hell with a teaspoon. Turns out her childhood was worse than Psychologist Three’s, and I got her whole story too, she reckons I’m fine and I must move on and stop hating myself.

Body Talk Therapy, I tried that too, at the advice of a friend who said that the woman had helped her daughter. With nothing to lose and an interest in the process and what people are getting up to, I went along. First session was insightful, second worrying and by the third I passed her my diaries and high-tailed it out of there. No colour on her walls, she was an ex-banker, she continually spoke of ‘other professionals’ and their brilliance, at no point did she uplift herself or show me that she was confident in her own abilities. Her mind was full of other people’s words and experiences, nothing of her… she also told me I hate myself and I need to start loving myself…

So that’s 5 ‘professionals’ and 3 of them (I wasn’t paying attention to the first one) had HECTIC personal journeys and issues that they kept showing me they ‘hadn’t’ recovered from, forgotten or forgiven, even if they ‘told’ me they had. They showed me that they were overflowing with insecurities. How could I assume this? Because I had completed “The Artist’s Way” and spent a few months being up front with my insecurities, seeing where my anger and stress sources were and dealing with my self-hate. Yes, that had all been there, but by the time I got to them I was aware of it and working through it, and way more confident in myself than ever before… yet BAM: “Seed of Doubt”… The second ‘counsellor’ with his “go get drunk and shag guys” approach as he laughed like a hyena about everything, just doesn’t count.

“Seed of Doubt”. This world around us just fills us all with Doubt. The General Practitioner (the second one to tell me to take anti-depressants) had originally told me she was Christian and she prayed with me and told me to keep my faith and pray through it, all prayers are answered. From that she moved to it’s been a few years now, go take anti-depressants…

I sit back and ask: Where is the line between faith that God knit me in the womb, He has a plan for me and I must live that plan, no matter how challenging, on faith and trust in HIM and that HE will heal me… and God now wants me to trust man and take drugs so that may or may not be targeting the right chemical set-up in my brain as directed by human guess-work? When do I stop trusting that God gives me the strength to cope with anything, and say: “Ok God, Your strength must be in man-made chemicals now.”? It’s easy to argue that. God made man with brains to make chemicals to ‘fix’ us… but isn’t that then saying that God made us incorrectly in the first place? Would God make a plan where He created us in a way where chemicals were needed because He “didn’t get the brain waves quite right”? Or the ‘devil’ has so much control that we need chemicals to undo what the ‘devil’ has done?

I have journaled and prayed over this… and what has resulted is this (NB – This ONLY refers to me and IS NOT written as an ‘answer’ for anyone else): People want you to join them, because they take the drugs and they don’t want to be alone in their dependency. The more people taking them, the more it can rationalise that they/drugs are “ok”, when their Souls know that it is not “ok”. Their Souls know that the anti-depressants are merely blocking out their Truth and their Strength, for they do not believe in their strength, or Mine. What one believes becomes one’s mental truth, but it cannot be the Soul-Truth, because the Soul’s Truth is that you are all loved beyond comprehension, you are all stronger than you could ever know and that you are all connected through the beautiful energy of humanity. Yet this energy entails responsibility to love, to give, to forgive, to be honest, to be open, to share, to be quiet, to feed the Soul on good things and show kindness, tolerance and live peacefully.

Sadly, this is a broken world, and in this broken world people have decided to be led by their Ego’s and their bodily desires to ‘be healthy’, without knowing what ‘healthy’ is. To “be happy” without knowing what “happy” is. To be “normal”, without knowing what “normal” is. To “love”, without knowing what “love” is… In not knowing that old Chinese Truth of Yin and Yang, the Ego wants only ‘the good’ and it will fight with chemicals, drugs, distractions and everything else to extinguish ‘the bad’, yet this is not ‘natural’ or ‘normal’, even if media and other lost ‘powers’ and people portray it as such.

It is not ‘right’ to have ‘dark without light’, it is not ‘normal’ to have ‘birth without death’. You can’t have hope, if you have had no tragedy, you can’t know ‘strength’ if you have not known ‘weakness’. You cannot know ‘happy’ if you have not known ‘sad’. People of the world have not been educated or advised to know this Truth of the Yin and the Yang, they do not accept that the intensity of their experiences on earth will be matched on both levels of the spectrum of “Life”, and not only on one side. To only experience “one” “Happy” side of life is imbalanced.

The chemicals placed in the brain will switch off the life experiences, will dull the passion for living, will ‘calm’ you to a point where the intensity of your experience of life will be limited in both the glory and the depression. The two must be together, until the Soul reaches the point where it knows and has lived through it all and thus realises that it has all only been experience. At the end of each and every experience you were still again and knew that GOD WAS THERE. Live it all, and then be still and know…

Anti-depressants take away the roller-coaster emotions and experiences and make them easy kiddie’s-train experiences. This is the gift of choice at work. You may choose the raging river and waterfalls, or the paddling pool as your place to be. Ideally, you should experience both the rapids and the paddling pool, but you should not stop or stay at one point. Taking the anti-depressants is an option, and so is not taking them. It is your choice as to what you believe in and what you want to experience. BUT, if you choose Me, God, Love, Knowing and PEACE in My presence every day, then you do not need any chemicals, for I have an INCREDIBLE PLAN for you, I did knit you in your mother’s womb, I created you for this time, with the skills you need, connected to the people to see you through, with the experiences you need, with My Love and Grace in bountiful measures. Choose Me, and you choose LIFE. Choose Me and you choose STRENGTH. Choose Me and you choose LOVE. Choose Me and you choose HOPE.

Choose man, choose chemicals, choose to use and follow what is offered by a broken world, full of broken people who have not chosen Me, and you too will have to be broken and hurting and lost. This is no grand thought, or difficult equation, it is the most logical outcome and consequence possible.
Choose God and Love and you choose LIFE and LOVE. Choose the world and you choose broken and hurting.
It all depends on your questions: how you phrase them and how answer them… Is ‘easier’ what you want on your gravestone?
Is a deadened mind what you want? Is a faithless life what you want? Is a drugged up Soul what you want? Is ruling by your body what you want? Is trust in a broken world what you want to choose?
It’s freedom of choice. It’s up to you… but, really, think about it… really think about it… before you decide.