This was actually a really small spider that I captured from very close up
Today’s Poem:
Disguise
Angel blond hair
Deep blue eyes
Lost and lonely
A wall between us
I wanted
I wanted to love you
Wall between us
Pain on one side
Look in these eyes
Yes mine
You will see pain
If you can look past the disguise
God in heaven
I am lonely
This is how I ask
You to reach out to me
This is how I tell the world
I’m the one truly hurting
I keep silent and show only
Only rage only silence
But I have to lie
Not just to you; to everyone
I have to keep up the pain
It feeds me
The pain; the disguise
I’m just a hollow shell inside
Leif Gregersen, April 30/2016
Good day to one and all. I had a pretty cool Friday, I met with my mentor and good friend Richard Van Camp, who I met a few years back at the U of A when I approached him to help me with a Novel I was writing. I have known Richard for some time and I still have yet to put out a full-length novel. I have written a number of books and done a lot of articles but no blockbuster. I think I have it in me, I just need to get a few life details in order. Maybe I should set that as my goal for 2016, to write a complete adult novel. There are so many different topics one could cover when it comes to novels, though. When I was a teen I loved spy thrillers, historical thrillers, and military thrillers. Now that I am grown more I don’t see those types of works as anything I can either have an authoritative voice in writing or really enjoy doing. It is kind of a joke among my family members and I that from a young age I wanted to do some impossible act and get a million or more dollars so I could sit cozy and live off the interest of my windfall. But here I am 44 and I haven’t made my first million yet. I can honestly say, though, living with a mental illness has put a lot of roadblocks in my way. One of the problems is that I don’t deal with stress in the same way that most people do. In fact, I think the longest I have held a full-time job in my life has been about three weeks. It is a scary statistic though I have had part-time jobs that lasted for years, I was with the IATSE union for 7 years, but there is something about me that just wants to shut down and go back to living with nothing rather than continue on in a job I don’t like. I really liked the most recent job I had, which was being editor of two online magazines, but at the moment, it is hard to say if there is a future in it.
On the lighter side, I am going to be going to my hometown library in two days to give a presentation about mental health and have a chance to sell some books. I think that one of the bigger opportunities I have at the moment is to continue further up the scale with public speaking. I have even sent a resume to a public speaker’s agent company.
I really want to talk a bit about mental health at least a little today. One of the things I have been having problems with is time and sleeping. I seem to have hard-wired my brain to only be able to enjoy myself when I am working or studying if you can count reading books related to my own writing as studying when they are fiction stories. There really seems to be nothing that I love more than reading, the heavier the better. When I was first discharged from the hospital fifteen years ago, I had the time and ability to read just about every work that Steinbeck had written and it was a wonderful experience. Lately, I have been interested in the short stories of Alice Munro. I feel I am learning a lot and really enjoying myself by taking time to delve deep into these “not real but realistic” stories. My mom, who also suffered from a mental illness, used to go to bed a couple of hours before my dad and in that time she would read and write in her journal. I often wonder why she never tried to be a writer herself, she was extremely intelligent. She once told me that there is no greater pleasure in this world than losing yourself in a book, in reading the really great works of literature. To me, reading has been the education I was never able to pursue.
I have memories though of times when I was younger and living alone when I would spend days at a time not leaving my apartment at all, just reading on and on into the night and through the day. It feels good, but I don’t see how it can be a mentally healthy exercise. I think I have gotten past that now especially since I write my stories, have people read them, read them to people on the phone, participate in story slams, and doing all that. I am a bit worried though that I could lapse back into isolating myself as I am going to be graduating from the group home I now live into my own apartment. It is going to feel odd at first, I have been living here now for 15 years not counting a stint at my own place. My main concern is bed bugs, then the next concern is that the place might at times be like a zoo because there are a lot of people there who are on the fringes. Well, dear readers, that is about all I can manage for today. If you like today’s poem or blog, please let me know. As always, my email is viking3082000@yahoo.com All the best!
Leif Gregersen
Mental Health coping skills blog by leif gregersen 