Telling my story

Telling my story is the name of the Educational Recovery Course run by the Community Mental Health Team I am attending. I prefer to call it my mad writers club. The focus is on creative writing but other art forms can be explored as well. The first meeting of the course / club was today. Not many people turned up, probably due to the bad weather over the last few days I guess, and the fact that it was bucketing it down this morning. So there were 6 of us although 3 were the facilitators!

Due to confidentiality I can't launch in to a jolly description of us all, I'd be mortified if someone wrote about their impressions of me on a blog! But I can write about what we are doing on the course. We will be keeping a journal each for the next 12 weeks, where we will write about what ever we want. The journals are private and we won't be sharing them. We will be reading stuff other people mental health conditions have written, we will be writing about our own experiences in different ways trying creative writing, biography, what ever we want to and sharing with the group what we want to. This will help us build confidence, deal with issues and be more organised I should imagine.

Anyway everyone was very friendly - it was a lot less traumatic than arriving at my first Japanese lesson in the summer, that felt like entering the big brother house! Everyone today was very nice and supportive which is good.

One very important thing that came out of today was, through considering what was worrying me at the moment and taking to one of the facilitators (she is our "peer support" eg she's mad like us) I realised I was being too ambitious with my plans to return to work, to the same job the only real modification I was planning to make was to reduce my hours by 20%. Instead this afternoon I phoned my boss and discussed working 2.5 days a week and working on a discreet piece of work, not being Head of Equality and Diversity any more. It feels so good to have decided this.
A real burden off my shoulders. Maybe then I can concentrate on getting better.