The long and winding road to recovery

I've suffered with my mental health since I was a teenager. When I was 13 I started to wake up in the night and see really scary things, spiders a foot across, etc. By the time I was 15 I would regularly take small overdoses to make myself ill so I could have time out (it didn't occur to me to just fake it, I couldn't lie anyhow). Then when I was 17 I went too far and ended up in hospital, on the cardiac ward, just for a few days (phew!). I don't really remember why I couldn't cope with life, I think I just found everything overwhelming. Life was too much for me, my brain kept crying out - OVERLOAD.

It wasn't until I was about 27 that I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). These are the symptoms from the NHS website:-

• emotional instability – the psychological term for this is "affective dysregulation" (my husband calls this sudden mood swings)
• disturbed patterns of thinking or perception – ("cognitive distortions" or "perceptual distortions") (mainly paranoid thoughts)
• impulsive behaviour (overdoses, self harm and climbing on a tank once, a military one (sorry))
• intense but unstable relationships with others (been married 3 times)

There's a lot more info out there now, when I was diagnosed all I had from my community psychiatric nurse (CPN) was a badly photocopied leaflet with a very scary face on the front (like something out of a horror movie). 

For me, the main problem with BPD is that "I CAN'T RELY ON ME". I never know what the day is gonna bring. It can start out great (I tend to wake up happy) then come crashing down around me because of some seemingly insignificant event (insignificant to others anyhow, quite significant to me). 

My Ballpoint pen drawing - eyes are the window to the soul. I love drawing eyes, weirdly though, I can't make eye contact in real life.

I've just found the spell checker on Blogger, awesome because I have dyslexia. (please don't comment that you can't have it because you can write, it's due to the disparity between my verbal and spacial abilities, I can think a lot more than I can express verbally).


I've also got ADHD (inattentive type) but I'll write about that in another post :-)

The start of my journey to .... ???

Miniature madness 

The miniature madness all started one day when me and my husband had some time to kill in town. We went into the library and, as usual, I browsed the craft books. There was a book on miniature quilts, and I thought I'd love to have a go at that. From there the ideas mushroomed in my head like an atomic bomb... boom.

So I made a quilt and it would have been a real shame for it to be stuck in a drawer or box gathering dust. So I made some little rabbits to snuggle up underneath it. Then they needed a bed and before I knew it I was working on a whole bedroom in minature. My local art group leader asked me to put it in our yearly exhibition. So then it became a diorama/roombox. Along the way I had the idea of depicting the nursery rhyme "There were ten in the bed". So along came more rabbits and a lot of research into the origins of the nursery rhyme. My conclusions were that it was a Victorian warning against the dangers of communal sleeping. So then came research into Victorian bedrooms and what they contained. I ended up making everything in the bedroom apart from the brass door knob!

Adjusting the curtains so the bunnies can have a good nights sleep.










The project was completed all in the space of three months. It's totally unknown for me and my ADHD(innatentive type) and BPD(screw your head up type) to be able to complete something so quickly, usually it takes me forever, feels like it, to finish a picture. The picture of Einstien, that you can see over my right shoulder, took 6 months!

For more photos of this project click here