International Women’s Day 2020
The theme of International Women’s Day 2020 is #EachforEqual. I was privileged this year to be invited to speak at an IWD event “A Women’s Worth” in Tauranga, Bay of Plenty (the part of the world I am most likely to call ‘home’) with six other inspiring speaks across the afternoon/evening.
I started off sharing about my links to Tauranga – including all four of my children being born in Tauranga Hospital – and providing some background on our adventurous move to the UK in 2014 when the kids were aged between 2-6 years old. I dicussed how it is very easy to paint a picture where everything in our lives looking amazing. And many aspects of it are. But as with everyone’s lives, there is always more to the story.
As a woman one of my superpowers personally and professionally has been my ability to offer emotional support and resilience building strategies to those around me. Looking back I have always been the support person, looking after everyone else, regularly at the detriment of my own well-being. In the last year Craig has been opening up more and more publicly about his struggles with depression and in particular an episode of acute mental distress that occurred during the period directly before we moved to the UK as a family. I am so incredibly proud of the impact Craig is having in this arena, he is so strong, so brave, so authentic and so inspirational. Each time he shares an aspect of his story, we are blown away by the sheer number of people that take the time to reach out and share the ways hearing his story has impacted them.
When I was first asked to come and speak at this event, it was on the back of me having just published an article on my website titled: From the Shadows, a story about my lived experience supporting my husband through mental illness and acute mental distress. In that article I shared – for the first time publicly – the impact that being a silent support person had on me. The pain at realising the depth of his pain, that he felt that suicide was a valid option, the hurt (and anger) that he would consider leaving me with four young children on my own, the niggling fear that he may one day action his well thought-out plans. Craig opening up about his experience has provided the possibility and given me permission, almost a responsibility really, to share my lived experience from the support side. I have been blown away by the impact my post had, with many many people reaching out to let me know I had given a voice to their inexpressible feelings. Collectively, Craig and I grew to realise that together we have something very unique to offer others, in that we represent different perspectives, and Always More to the Story was born.
Many of the women I work with, myself included, often see that one of our superpowers as women is that ability to be the holder of all things: the calendars, the awareness of the emotional needs of those around us, ability to care for our children, our aging parents, our partner’s and our friends while still meeting the demands of our working lives. Sound familiar?
However, this is simply not sustainable. You’ve likely heard the analogy of the bucket and the rocks. We can keep loading rocks in but at some point we either need to remove rocks or get support to hold them longer.
I had originally planned to cover some entirely different content at this event, but in the days leading up to it I felt a calling to be brave and vulnerable, and share a more personal story. I believe that one of the best forms of self care is having the courage to be ourselves. In the age of social media highlight reels, being real and authentic seems even more important – even when that comes with a bit of anxiety and ickyness – and tears.
The story actually started back 19 months ago when I was playing around with the kids in lounge before their bedtime, and a shoulder stand I was demonstrating went horribly wrong. My husband Craig was in the kitchen doing the dishes at the time and I remember hearing him shout “what the f*$k was that – someone has broken a bone” in response to the loud crack he heard. I remember initially not being able to talk at all, then trying really hard some more to get some words out and hearing that I was literally making gobbly-gook sounds that didn’t even resemble words. I remember wanting to console my daughter.
Here I was, prone on the floor very aware that something pretty serious had happened, and my first thought was everyone else. I have always seen myself as being the hero for everyone else, and being that during our years together I had first nursed Craig back to health from an over-training syndrome that left him unable to work for 2.5 years and then walked alongside him through ongoing depressive episodes, the balance in our marriage was tipped towards me being the hero for him much more than the other way around. Within a few minutes I regained the ability to talk, and I managed to convince him somehow not to call an ambulance. I still don’t really know why I did that – actually that’s a lie, I did that because I was worried what impact having me stretchered out of the house to an ambulance would have on the kids, I was worried about who to ask to come and watch the kids while we go to the hospital, and I was in denial about the possibility of anything too serious being wrong. What do they say about ‘help’ being the hardest and bravest word? Why do I find accepting help, let alone asking for it so damn hard? And, I know I am not alone in this!
It turned out I had a stable fracture of my C5 vertebrae, herniated the disc between C5/C6, had likely various other nerve and soft tissue damage. Still the hero, I somehow survived the next few weeks in a hard collar and the months without driving, trying to recover while showing up to be the best I could for everyone around me.
I thought that my superpower was to keep being the hero for everyone else and I’d be alright. That’s where I was wrong.
Over the last 19 months of recovery there have been many challenges. I have not been without a headache ever since the injury. Sometimes it sits at an almost comfortable 3/10, but regularly flares to a 9/10 intensity, and all I can do is go to bed and hope to sleep it off. I have loud tinnitus in both ears, having never suffered with this before. My shoulder aches (referred pain), I have challenges with focus and memory and I am sooooo emotional. I still don’t feel like myself, and having defined myself as that person that can be everything to everybody and that being busy is so linked with my identity, I have really struggled. As pain is invisible to others, very few people understand the reality of my struggles managing day-to-day life.
The more I have ramped up my ‘busyness’, (busy being that badge of honour I have worn with pride) the worse some my symptoms have got. Ultimately this has led to a a recent assessment at a private concussion care clinic, where I ‘failed’ many of the neurological assessments and it is considered that I suffered an undiagnosed mild traumatic brain injury (also known as a concussion) at the time of my injury, and due to me not giving this the time it needed to heal it is now presenting as post-concussion syndrome. It was made very clear to me that if I want to recover, I need to start right back at the beginning with a lot of rest etc. And I need to take a substantial step back from work commitments and busyness, creating the time and possibility for essential healing and reintegration to occur.
Now, this should sound like bliss, and pretty simple to implement right! Three brain breaks (rests with minimal sensory input) a day and substantially less work. It’s like being told to take a holiday. Yet, for some reason, this was very hard to hear – even though Craig and I suspected a concussion from the beginning (that’s a whole other story).
I have been considering why that is – why was this so hard for me to hear, and proving really hard to implement? I think I’ve been very focussed on returning to the way I was, and I define my success as being busy – because, you know, I am the doer of all things. And stripping all that back scares me.
From the sharing of this personal story, I shared with the audience my musings on what the learnings for many of us are from the situation I am currently in, which was met with much emphatic head-nodding, so I know I really am not alone here. One thing that I have realised through this process is that my identity had become so tied up in what I DO, that I had lost touch with who I AM. Confronting. And what a beautiful gift that come from this experience – a stronger sense of self that is more closely linked to who I am rather than what I do, a realigning of life back to my values.
Another big learning is something I have always said and believed, but maybe didn’t fully appreciate: Our health and wellbeing, our hauora, really is our most precious taonga. It really is. And we can’t take it for granted.
Our superpower as women is NOT to be the hero for everyone else, as I once thought mine was, but to be the hero for ourselves. Whatever wellbeing looks like for you, I wanted this to be the key takeaway for the audience, and for you as readers: you are worth everything that you do, and everything you don’t do, in support of your wellbeing.
Thank you to all who were involved in putting on the event, and most of all to the incredible audience who provided the safe space for me to be vulnerable, but never alone. #IWD2020 #eachforequal
