There is Good, Bad, and Even Ugly. But Despite This, Life is Beautiful

Another blog about my day which was kind of awesome

Photo by Onur Binay on Unsplash

Hello Good Readers! Some of you might not recognize this substack message, but I assure you it is Leif Gregersen writing to you and that this experience is going to be even better than what you encountered at www.edmontonwriter.com please keep in mind though that www.edmontonwriter.com will remain my archive and my author website. You will still get the free blogs here, and the free downloadable content, it will just be better.

So, my day today started off well. I have found that if I take a hot shower I get off to sleep much better. The only real trouble is that I can’t take a hot shower every day. I hope it doesn’t sound too gross, but in winter months, due to the cold, dry climate in Edmonton, I can only really shower 2-3 times a week. I try to make up for this by changing clothes right down to underwear as frequently as I can. Also, because of the dry conditions, I need to moisturize my hands and feet.

I don’t know how much I have talked about it, but I have a house guest right now and despite little things, I am really enjoying it. My guest is one of my best friends and it is so nice to have someone to talk to at the end of a long and difficult day. A close friend who is no longer with us used to tell me that was the biggest plus about being married, always having someone to talk to. That recollection brings up a lot of things for me to think about and write about. First of all, I am kind of wondering why I never did get married. I think a lot of it has to do with not being able to hold up my financial end of a marriage and also has to do with personality flaws, both of which I feel I have overcome, but in all honesty I have given up on the marriage question for the most part for quite a while now.

As far as financial issues go, I seem to have found a way to eke out a decent living by working for The Schizophrenia Society, selling books here and there, publishing articles in magazines, and just being much more mindful of where my money goes. One of the things I have learned is that I just can’t go out and consider blowing money on things I don’t really need to be a sport all on its own. A few short years ago, I loved to take $200 or $300 and visit a bunch of pawn shops until I found something cool. All too often I would end up having to pawn these items just to get through the month. Now I can happily say that I have stopped visiting pawn shops altogether. There is the odd time I visit a thrift shop, mostly for books, but I try to limit that type of shopping to how many books I am able to read. I did go a little overboard last year in December. I had no idea I would be shown such kindness, I asked everyone for gift cards to a new book store and ended up getting $275 in credit for Chapters/Indigo. Sadly all this credit didn’t last long, but I feel that since it all went to books it wasn’t all bad.

But that is all just a side issue. I was talking about marriage and my personality flaws. There are quite a few of them, as I am sure there are with most people my age (53) I don’t think this is a good forum to list all these troubles, but they do include things such as immaturity and selfishness, a big ego and a few others. I have seen a lot of friends rush into bad marriages, and then end up much worse off when they end. One couple I am so proud to call friends is a pastor and his wife who live in Vancouver. Their relationship was an amazing thing to witness. They approached things with such patience and maturity. They dated for quite a while before making a commitment to marry, and they really got to know each other. They even took a whole year where the female in the relationship went far away to work with missionaries, perhaps (and I am just assuming) to really decide if what they wanted was the best thing. Now, many years later they have four amazing children and what appears to me to be a very strong and loving relationship with each other. One of the things that I thought was kind of neat is that they weren’t hung up on defining or bragging about being together. While I knew them, early in their relationship, they were always together, but if asked would say they were just friends.

I have always thought that a good relationship should be based on a good friendship. I have been wrong about this a few times, but I have also managed to make some wonderful friends with people whose company I truly enjoy. Having a few of these types of friendships has kept me from getting lonely and given me that essential ‘person to talk to’ for years now.

There is another thing that I feel I should mention, which I hope doesn’t scare anyone off this blog or make them wonder if they should talk to me or be my friend. I have symptoms of an illness known as erotomania. Not all the time, but when I become ill (and I have never been ill on the medications I now have been taking for years) my mind invents a relationship with people from my past that never really existed. It is a very troubling situation, and the odd thing is that often what happens is I have these fixed, false beliefs, and auditory hallucinations and I actually end up feeling tormented by the person I fixate over. Thankfully this didn’t happen during my last hospital stay when I had a medication change that left me in psychosis, but the underlying thought was there. I think this condition, despite that for most of my life it isn’t an issue, could easily contribute towards the fact that I never married. It can be very troubling when I get into a relationship and the person finds out that I can’t let go of a false idea of a relationship that literally never existed.

But I did want to say that despite all of my difficulties, life is beautiful. As a kid, I always thought getting older would be hard, and that I would do everything in my power to stay in good shape when I got older, and to defy the years my body logged. In truth, I have been loving my 50s. I finally have the ability to save and invest and I am on my way towards having something to one day travel or at least have options in my life. I have learned to make good friends, and it even seems my mental illness has lessened. There were a few sketchy times in the past few months. For a while, I fell into the idea that I could get away with using THC which would help me sleep. Shortly after starting this new habit, I experienced such severe cognitive decline that I went to my doctor asking to be referred to a neurologist thinking I had the early stages of dementia. Then I quit the THC pills and a few other habits, and slowly I have been getting back what I lost.

I will end with a short paragraph or two about my day today. I did an 8-hour training session for a new part-time job I have been hired for, which is teaching poetry on psychiatric wards. It was so cool to have guest lecturers come to our class and teach us about diversity and inclusion, and take us through bonding exercises. Tomorrow will include more information about instructing, and I honestly feel incredibly blessed to be a part of this project that will see me go to psychiatric wards where the front lines are in mental health care. I have worked a very similar job before, but this one seems much better. My previous job had little training and much lower expectations. I was even told that I could get away with just keeping the patients engaged. Instead of doing this though, I took it upon myself to befriend and help as many of the patients as I could. I loved my job, but ended up having what adds up to a contract dispute and leaving the people I was helping in the lurch.

This new assignment ties into something I have been doing for a while, which is telephone peer support for The Schizophrenia Society. I have a list of people who I call and I talk to them about how they are doing, encourage them to get treatment, and even give them advice on how to overcome any difficulties they wish to discuss with me. These are skills I want to take with me to the new job, though I have to learn to set boundaries better with this one. It is great to help someone, but it won’t help them if I work hard to establish a friendship with them and have to tell them that I can’t keep in touch with them when the class ends for imporant reasons.

Well, that is about everything I have to say. I want to thank everyone who signed up. I am going to write blogs as much as I can, I have been getting some awesome feedback from many people. I do want my readers to consider switching to a paid subscription. After a month or two if things keep going well, I may have to make it so anyone who subscribes gets preferrential treatment. Nothing too huge, maybe I will say that if you get a paid subscription you can join the chat with me there to answer your questions or concerns for a few hours a couple of times a week, or perhaps that paid subscribers will get an early look at blogs. If a few people volunteer now, I may be able to put off any restrictions indefinitely. So basically, I ask if you can afford it, think about pledging a small amount each month and lets see where all this takes us!