Emotionally Tired of the fight

I’d give anything to be able to create my artwork more often in peace!

Life is all too much about money! What wouldn’t I give to be able to use a time machine and go back to hit the person who invented money over the head to stop them!

I had a conversation just yesterday about this wish of mine to stop money from being invented, and my husband showed me my error, it’s not money that’s the problem, it’s human greed that’s making me miserable!

No one is open and/or willing to help other people. Everyone is too busy looking out only for themselves. Money has too much value these days, let alone being absolutely necessary for general living. You can’t do anything or go anywhere without it! You virtually can’t eat or drink anything without money and you can hardly get any resources without it.

A lot of unhappiness comes from the lack of money! The main problems I have with our marriage is due to lack of funds and how we could make my life less stressful and easier. If we had enough financial funds to buy extra equipment that would make my house management easier. We would buy a dishwasher, a good strong medium weight vacuum, we would more easily afford to buy food for the home as I am a really lousy cook.

My lack of cooking skills adds a lot of extra emotional stress and trouble between me and my husband. The more I try to become a better housewife and cook, the more I stress over it the more mistakes I make and the more problems we have in getting along. I have panic attacks and other anxiety issues more often and at worse levels and it all starts off more of my Bipolar symptoms. It’s like a never ending cycle of negativity and stress.

I really am desperate to try to look after the house and our son and husband better then I am able to. However my desperate efforts go pretty much unnoticed because of my lack of expertise in some of the main the tasks I have to get done in order to look after them. I get discouraged easily from cooking because it’s so bad and we sometimes can’t even eat it. It makes me feel bad to throw away food and it’s against my husbands culture and against both of our religions. When it’s that bad both my husband and I get upset and we become more irritable with each other. He assumes that I don’t try hard enough and that I get too distracted with my “hobbies” and I get sad and depressed thinking that I am not good enough at anything.

It can become very emotionally draining and tiring to have to keep fighting over the same topics, fight against your emotions and symptoms and fighting with your family members are both hard to cope with sometimes. Sometimes it can be extremely hard to continue motivating yourself to continue working on improving your emotional and mental health when you have a seemingly constant flood of problems that keep churning up more trouble.

I am desperately trying to avoid giving up all together, but what can a person do when they are unable to really learn something important no matter what they do? I have tried almost every idea my husband, I and my mother can think of to get me to learn to cook better. So far nothing has really helped, I even started refusing to answer the phone if I am cooking, but I can’t exactly stop my son from wanting my attention, he needs to be fed etc.

Sometimes, there is no real solution to be found easily…

Peacok Mini Album

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Various works in progress

Ok so now that I am up and around again, I thought I’d just post a few pictures of my newest projects.

The first one is a painting I started just yesterday using one of the exercises from my self art therapy ebook “Creative Happiness”. I chose to try my exercise in painting my emotions out in an image using weather or nature to show emotions. It’s called “Tornado out at sea”…

Somehow it did help to start painting in darker colours for the tornado, it helps to get out some of the inner negative emotions to some extent. It also kind of feel good to be painting something that more accurately reflects my inner emotions, rather then simply painting something to be pretty.

The other two are two girl images, one is a fashion girl image and the other is a ballerina.

Mostly for the last few weeks I have been trying to paint with Acrylic paints and using the images and the painting strokes to try to paint out my negative emotions. It seems to work as long as my symptoms are not at the very worst, once I am too depressed I tend to steer away from painting however as my hands are not very steady when I am too anxious and I seem to tend to muck up the paintings if I force myself to paint.

I have so far enjoyed working on the tornado image and plan to do more artwork based on my own exercises, both to try to get the benefit of the art therapy itself and I found it fun to try to express my emotions with the art. I will continue posting any other art work I create and will try to focus on the ones related to my art therapy book exercises.

Kids Drama’s

I was going to call this post “Potty Training Drama’s” but I didn’t want to scare anyone from reading the post!

Ok, so I am just starting to “properly” try training our three year old son, it’s driving me crazy and it’s only been two and a half days. I had no idea that following a little kid around the house trying to clean up little messes would be so stressful.

So far we have him happy to sit once in a while on the potty or toilet, at least he’s not screaming about sitting on them now. However we can’t get him to actually use them properly, he seems upset with the idea of doing his mess anywhere but in the nappy. I’ve managed to get him to pee in the potty just a few times but he always has very strong reaction and sometimes cries.

We tried to get him used to wearing the underwear as the first day we put them on him he wasn’t too happy it, must miss the feeling of the nappy I suppose. After a while he was ok wearing the underwear but seems to think it should work like nappies and just does his business. Every time I got him siting on the toilet or the potty he’s ok with it for a short time as long as he doesn’t pee.

Ok, so today I thought I’d try keeping the nappy on him but I will try to get him to sit on the potty about one or two times an hour. He’s sitting on it once in a while himself with his pants on. I just gotta catch him and pull the pants and nappy down and see if I can get him used to the idea of just peeing in the potty once in a while first. Maybe if I can get him used to the idea of peeing somewhere else besides the nappy we can get something started and then move slowly to the idea of using less nappies per day and move on from there to not wearing nappies?

The main problem is that he randomly lets little spurts of pee every so often, especially when he eats, why he pees when he puts something in his mouth I have no idea and it’s going to be the hard habit to change.

Any ideas would be lovely at this point as I’m thoroughly confused and stressed out… What to do about teaching him with less stress, I really could do with less extra stress in my life?

 

Why I don’t totally give up on my handcraft activities & my newest project!

Hi, it’s been a while since I posted consistently. As usual my mental health, family activities and family issues keep getting in the way, but health and family always comes first for me!

I completed a new junk journal for my etsy store, and yes I still do have a small store, even though it has less then 20 items listed! I don’t allow myself to completely give up on it, even though I only get one sale for every five or so months it’s up there!

It’s helps so much for uplifting and keeping my mental health in control to know that I am at least trying to give it a go. It helps to have at least one activity that I actually don’t give up on totally… Almost everything else I’ve ever tried in life I always give up on or have been asked to move on from other people. There is just something about knowing that I am still trying to find a way to make the etsy store work that helps keeps me grounded mentally. It helps to know that I have at least one thing in life that I have not yet run away from. Even though the store is not exactly very popular, even just those one or two sales every once in a while help to make me extremely happy and I feel as though I am at least achieving a little of something.

That in a life with mental health, is actually quite a big thing, to have something that helps to make a person feel useful even if only sometimes, those days when you do get a positive outcome even if it’s spaced out, help to make you feel good.

Decluttering really does soothe the soul…

Suddenly we found out that we have no choice, we have to move to a new house within only approximately two months…

I had no choice but to get my self into gear and really get to decluttering my craft room. There is no way I will be having a whole room to keep them in once we move house and it was getting way too full of hoarded “stuff” I thought I would use for making craft items.

I started the only way I knew how, to slowly go through every pile of papers etc and see exactly what I had been keeping. I sorted them into two easy piles to try to stop myself keeping things I was unsure about. I had one pile for definitely necessary things to keep and only one pile for things to throw out.

It’s taken me almost two and a half weeks, as I was only working on it slowly about 1-3 hours at the most per day, a lot of those days I only got an hour to work on it so it took a while. Now I’m down to about 9 boxes for the whole room and I am still working it to reduce it even more. Two boxes are for the books/novels I read that are my absolute favourites, two boxes are of journals and mini albums that I have made, and I’m down to about  five boxes for actual craft supplies (including paper for journals I am making).

I have to say that already I feel a huge amount of accomplishment and a lifting of emotions etc. I feel a lot lighter and only have some small level of stress from trying to reduce the craft supplies even more without compromising my craft work too much.

What tips or ideas do you use when you have to declutter and reduce things you own?

 

How to figure it all out…?

I signed in to my Etsy store just a few days ago to take a look to consider whether I should shut it down as I wasn’t getting any sales. I was about to do what my husband suggested and give up on my crafting as it was taking too much of my time and energy that I aught to concentrate on making my son and husband happy and well cared for.

When I logged in with the idea that I aught to close it down and get rid of my craft supplies, I saw that I a had a sale, and it was one of my better priced items. It was a few days late already but I tried to message the buyer that I had been offline due to family and health reasons and I asked if they still wanted the item. They didn’t try to cancel the order or didn’t ask for their money back which had already been paid for the item so I went ahead and posted it.

So now I am deliberating on whether to continue making my junk journals as only a part time hobby, I can just list the items as I complete them and see how it goes?

What is the best way to decide such things? When and how can we know whether to give up? If anyone has any insight as to how to make such decisions please leave comments.

 

 

I can’t seem to win…

I’ve never been good at getting along with people, it seems that my whole life I struggled to get people to like me. I’ve never seemed to know the right way to behave, how much and when to talk etc, or never known the right things to say.

It seems I still don’t know what to say and when, which topics are ok to discuss and I don’t seem to know enough about the outside world to be able to have enough different topics to discuss with anyone. I deliberately stopped watching news on tv a few years ago as I found all the reports about crime and accidents depressing.

There was too much news about how badly people were behaving against one another and too much blood and death going on in the world. Not watching enough tv can also be a bad thing also though as you also miss out on all the general and good news. It can then be hard to know what to talk about with people, as you then dont know the general world news.

I can’t get along with my husband much as we just don’t have hardly any interests etc in common, so we don’t have much topics we can discuss with each other. If I mention any of my personal hobbies like art or craft too much he thinks I’m doing too much hobbies and he thinks I’m neglecting the house duties etc. If I talk too much about my parents or other relatives too much he thinks I care too much about them and then he thinks it means that I care more about my other relatives more then him or our son. I can never seem to know the limits of when and how much to do anything in order to make anyone happy with me.

That’s all I know to talk about though, I start talking to him more about the house and what daily tasks I have completed for that day thinking that will make him happier talking to me, but then he says I don’t need to list him all I’ve done that day etc. I try to talk to him about our son more, about what we do during the day etc but then he usually always finds something to tell me off about as I always manage to forget something I should have done with our son etc. So then I tend to always feel that I am better off not to talk too much about our son as I always manage to get myself told off because I manage my time with our son so badly.

If  I talk to my Mum or any of my friends or relatives more then a few times a week and my husband know’s about it he tells me off again that he thinks I care more about my parents then I do about him and our son. If I see anyone more then a few times a month, again my husband blames me for caring more about other’s then I care about him and our son.

Half the time I definitely feel like I just don’t know what I’m doing in my attempts to communicate with people, I just know how to get along with people…

It’s not a nice feeling, I get too lonely if I void communicating with people too much, yet I also end up regretting most of my efforts to try to communicate with people as I just can’t seem to get along with anyone for more then five minutes. Then I end up questioning who I am and whether I’m actually a good person or not, I feel like I must be one of the worst people if I can’t manage to have any good normal conversations with anyone…

I just can’t ever seem able to get along with anyone and it makes me more sad and depressed…

Questions about my role in life…

It can be very hard in the busy schedule of running around trying to manage and manoeuvre your way through hectic schedules and trying to meet high quality standards in everything you do. Some people still think and argue that housewives have an easier time of it compared to working people, but for someone with mental illness even the schedule of a housewife can seem busy, hectic and hard to manage.

Also there is the need to meet quality standards of cleanliness whilst looking after busy kids. You have to keep the house clean while chasing and cleaning after every new dirty area your kids leave in a mess, they can leave toys lying around or even bits of food crumbs or teared up bits of paper everywhere. You could just have finished vacuuming your house, only to find the lounge room full of bits of teared up paper, then you have to tidy and clean up all over again.

Then once any of your children has reached three years old they are expected to start schedules of regular playgroups or three year old kindergarten and you still have to do the shopping, pay bills etc. Cooking can take anywhere from half an hour to a few hours depending on what you make, then there is the almost never ending piles of dishes from meals and snacks.

It can actually be pretty hard to meet any sort of timing or scheduling sheet you might plan up even without a mental illness. When you have a mental illness it can be a pain or maybe impossible to try to stick to any sort of schedule because you also have your emotional or mental symptoms to deal with while you try to juggle all the stress and confusion of how to keep everything clean and under control.

Are you supposed to entertain and keep your children busy so they are learning and not making a mess, cleaning up after the mess and spills they create, doing the general cleaning or cooking for the nights meal? Having so much to do can be almost overwhelming if you do suffer from a mental illness. Then if you try to fulfil your own needs for hobbies or friends, it can be an almost impossible task of getting everything done.

Then there is also the possibility that your feeling needy to be pursuing any sort of hobby or ideas of working from home it can cause even more chaos. Learning how to fulfil your needs of achievement and how to feel as though you have a purpose in life can be tricky. Some people say that just by managing the general tasks of being a housewife and mother should be fulfilling in its own right.

What if it’s simply not enough or you feel like you’re simply not good at it no matter how hard you try? What if the place you’re given by life and the people around you doesn’t match your expectations for life? What if it doesn’t suit your personality type and you struggle to fulfil the role you’ve been given?

I’ve been told by a few people with mental illness that my need to be creative and to try to get myself known somehow and to gain some credit for my creative activities is a symptom of mental illness. My husband is also still trying also to get me to give up my craft hobbies so I can focus solely on my duties as a housewife.

So almost a week ago I started a little experiment to see if how I feel living without undertaking any major creative project and see if I’m able to live happily or not. So far there is a slight decrease in my frustration of trying to find time and ideas on how to get my projects posted online. I find myself able to focus better on most of my daily tasks I try to get done as apart of my role as housewife.

I still look for creative ways I can come up with activities to try with my son to try to give him some home schooling though. This means that I do have a bit of a way to go before I can say I have totally given up on my creative activities 100%. You do tend to use some creative ideas to try to keep children entertained and busy with activities that they can also learn from. If I’m not meant to create art and craft to sell I can at least channel some of my creative ideas and energy into creating activities for my son and have less guilt and less blame for wasting time on useless crafts.