Current Headspace

Veronike shares her journey through depression. Every word counts.

Daisies and Darkness

So I know I have been conspiciously absent from the writings of Daisies and Darkness the past while. I have not kicked the bucket, albeit I came very, very close to doing so – see, one medication was giving me night terrors that left me having screaming conversations with my dreams. Plus it made me gain weight… My pants no longer fit me, well most of them, and I couldn’t handle that. But then again, I had to weigh in the factors that for the past seven weeks I have been lying in bed all day, eating whatever the hell I craved, like cake and such, and entirely quit exercising. But nonetheless, I asked to reduce the dosage and did so drastically (idiot me). For the following three days I had hell in my head. Every moment of every day my thoughts were busy. Busy catastrophizing about life and what…

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Ode To Autumn

Autumn is here – lovely poem

S C Richmond

Here we are again,  Autumn has rolled around quickly and now the leaves are turning golden red and the temperature is dipping, preparing us for winter.

I wanted to share one of the most beautiful poems ever written about Autumn.

Ode To Autumn  by John Keats

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 5

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease; 10

For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting…

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Author Spotlight: H.M. Jones-Monochrome

Feminine Collective is publishing – book looks good

The Lithium Chronicles

Monochrome has a new publisher! Feminine Collective is re-releasing it as a 3rd edition Sept. 2016, with the above cover as an e-book and Oct. 2016 in paperback.

 Monochrome is an IndieBrag Medallion book, an Honorable Mention at the 2016 Los Angeles Book Festival, and a NIEA Book Award Finalist in the NA category! 

 

Monochrome H.M. Jones: Synopsis

What would you do to save your most precious memories?

That’s the question that Abigail Bennet, a new mother, must answer in this dark fantasy.

The cries of her new baby throw Abigail into rage and desperation. Frightened by foreign anger and overwhelming depression, the first-time mother decides to end her life to spare the life of her only child. But before she acts on her dark intuition, she is overcome by a panic attack and blacks out.

When she awakes, everything is blue: the trees, the grass…

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At First Thought – Matthew D. Eayre

A husband’s real love.

The Lithium Chronicles

The very first time your eyes met mine, there was a promise made, a guarantee given from my mind to yours that there will never be a day that I forget this moment.

There will never be a time when this moment means less because your eyes sing to mine like Etta James on a slow southern night, your eyes are the stars shining in the clearest night. There was a promise made, and I agreed without reservation or consideration, without a moment’s hesitation,

I agreed to live the rest of my life knowing

for an absolute fact

that love is real,

love is meant for me,

that the one person

that I truly need is you.

The promise was made, and I have never felt one second of remorse, not one thought of regret, I promised to always understand what it meant in all those fairytales, when the eyes…

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Nature’s Geometry: An Introduction to Phi Pattern Paradise

Life, spirals, and numbers

Lipstick and Laundry

“I wonder at the starry pattern in the sky
Are they little pieces of moon which want to fly..?”
― Munia Khan

*~*~*~*~*

Calculus, algebra, and trigonometry. In high school, these were the subjects I was told (and believed) I would never master. Though my mind migrated to right-brain dalliances, I took every advanced math class offered because it was a challenge. Even when I quizzed out of college Trig and received a math scholarship, I still believed that I was “terrible at math.”

As I’ve gotten older, I can see that my self-assessment wasn’t entirely true. I am drawn to patterns, numbers, anagrams, repetition, and formulas–especially in nature.

Meet Mr. Phi ^^^

He’s the little dude who inspired this story. Note his (her?) shell ridges and symmetry. Now, look at the white marks scoring her (his?) body. If we were to measure the distance between each terraced ridge or…

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Strength

Real strength

Ruby Pipes

We sit in his car and I wipe tears away with my coat sleeve. I’m reminded of how my Portland therapist taught me the difference between being tough and being strong. The difference between acting like nothing hurts and knowing things will hurt, but doing them anyway.

My best friend tells me my heart is always going in fifty directions. That is must be hard if not impossible to follow something like that.

On the wall in the restaurant two signs hang next to each other. One reads “be strong” while the other “be gentle”. Finally I’m at the place in my life where those two demands do not seem at odds with each other.

In his apartment I wrap my arms around his waist and hold him as close to me as I can. One part pride, one part relief, two parts heartbreak. I cling tightly to the idea…

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Clusters – This world is a cruel place

Nicole captures what it is – follow the link

The Lithium Chronicles

Thank you to Feminine Collective for publishing this piece about how bipolar disorder often feels.

Clusters

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What To Do If All Your Comments Are Ending Up In The WordPress Spam Folder

The title says it – check your SPAM Folder

Hugh's Views & News

This happened to me and I wrote about it here.

All my comments were ending up in the WordPress spam folders of the blogs I was leaving comments on. Unless the blogger checked their WordPress spam folder, they had no idea my comment was there.

Those that did check their WordPress spam folder, and un-spammed me, were my heroes. However, because WordPress deemed my comment to be spam, I got no email notification that my comment had been un-spammed and replied to. The only way I knew was by checking my notifications (that’s the little bell symbol in the top right-hand corner of your blog).

It didn’t help that WordPress had no Happiness Engineers available last week. I headed to the WordPress forums where I left a cry for help. I heard nothing!

Yesterday, I received an email from WordPress saying that my cry for help had been marked as spam…

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A Family Plan for Depression

Having a plan for dealing with depression as a family is way better than not having one. Nicole knows whereof she speaks – listen.

The Lithium Chronicles

The first time I posted this was in 2014 but I have no idea where it is, so here we go again, because it’s that time of year and I know what could happen. My fingers are crossed that it won’t, but this ain’t my first rodeo, better safe than sorry.

Being a Mom is tough, wonderful, but tough. Being a mom who sometimes becomes overwhelmed with depression and anxiety is exceptionally tough. Most moms that I know personally struggle with thoughts of “how bad am I screwing up my kids?” These are common questions that the most loving and caring mothers think, usually on daily basis. The funny thing is that we know we are amazing moms. Throw depression into the mix and pack your bags because we are going on a guilt trip.

Back in October I was thrown into a pretty intense state of depression. It was a…

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FAILURE TO COMPLY – A CAPITAL CRIME? NO!

There is a theme that runs through some of the recent deaths of Americans at the hands of police. That theme is the failure of the citizen in question to comply with an order or demand by a police officer. Repeatedly, we hear that somehow that noncompliance was regarded by one or more officers as a mortal and immanent threat to their safety. Some significant proportion of those killed (Accurate and complete statistics are not being kept.) have been Black. Another group that seems to be disproportionately involved is the mentally ill. Whatever the race, ethnicity, social-economic status, religion, or mental state of the victim, this is wrong. Noncompliance with a police officer’s order is not supposed to be a capital crime. It is wrong for it to resutl in summary, extra-judicial execution.

Very often in these situations we hear that the citizen killed had a gun, or something that appeared to be a gun, or was believed to be reaching for a gun. I one recent case, the dead man had informed the officer that he was the holder of a permit to carry his gun and was killed anyway. *[I’ll come back to another aspect of this.]

I’m going to do a small thought experiment with a possible rule about when police would be allowed to shoot someone. I do not expect the rule ever to be adopted. It is a fantasy. I know also that if it were used it would increase danger to police officers, so don’t hammer at me that I’m trying to get cops killed. This is a “what if” experiment.

The rule would be that the police could not, no doubt with some exceptions, shoot unless the subject shot first. Simply having a gun, or brandishing a gun, or having what appeared to be a gun, even pointing or appearing to point a gun at the police would not be enough. If such a rule had been in effect, it is likely that the gentleman killed on Tuesday in Charlotte, NC would still be alive. Tamir Rice would be alive. The 13 year old with the BB gun would be alive. That man in Baton Rouge would likely be alive. Even that fellow involved in the occupation of the wildlife refuge in Oregon would possibly be alive. I don’t know how many others, or at what price to our police.

*Returning to the matter of people being killed because they have a gun, there is a generally very vocal faction I would expect to be quite concerned with that, but from whom I am not hearing about these incidents. I speak of the defenders of the interpretation of The Second Amendment as enshrining an individual right to be armed. I should think that the idea of American Citizens being killed for having a firearm in their possession would be anathema to that community, that they would see that as the most egregious possible violation of a sacred Constitutional Right. Maybe I’m not tuned into the right channels, but I do not hear their outrage. I hope it is not because of who is dying being more important than why they are dying.