Five years ago my life ended… Or at least that was how it felt. I had held down high powered and pressured jobs, travelled all over the UK and a lot of the world, raised two kids, looked after my ageing parents and coped with my hubby being away all week and drunk when he was home. I had handled my mother in laws death and dealt with her will, dealt with my daughter trying to kill herself and been through two redundancies in the space of two years.

Then it all fell apart (strange that!)

For a long time I grieved the loss of my previous life and status, I felt useless, that there was no place for me, but, gradually I have grown.

I went back to college and studied art, something I had always wanted to do as I felt that I had to be "doing" something. It has been a hard 4 years and at times my family and support workers have thrown up their hands and said "just why are you doing this??"

I have started to see the world in a different way. I have become nicer to people, the spell I had in a mental hospital taught me to be more understanding of people. I have time to watch the caterpillars grow on the stinging nettles and rejoice when I see the peacock butterflies around the village knowing I saw them as babies. I can watch the dragonflies in the meadow and find them more interesting than watching the plane flying over head and wishing I was on it.

I still have spells when I hate the world, everyone in it, especially me and despair of where I am going and how I will cope in the future but I am learning that I cannot know where the future will take me and that the best I can hope for is to have today, even if maybe I do have to take each hour at a time as thinking of anything more is exhausting.

I have one more year of college left to finish what has become a BA degree, my life has changed beyond recognition but in many ways I feel that after all these years that maybe I finally do "have a life". Something I could not have seen five years ago.

Penny

A Moodscope member.