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Pain Disability Index

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After a few months of pain in my back, suspicion of hernia (not present) and nerve damage (not existent), I was referred for Rehabilitation, a multidisciplinary treatment that includes professionals from several areas of medicine and others. In my case it was supposed to help me to deal with the pain in my back, that is now seen as Chronic Pain. On the day I was going to find out if I was accepted for it or not, I showed a report from my Psychotherapist describing my situation. On that same appointment I learned I couldn't receive the Rehabilitation treatment because I was dealing with such important mental disease issues and was already in treatment. It wasn't easy to receive these news. In a certain way, my pain was now being called psychological. I started thinking how I could address this situation. So I decided to use the Pain Disability Index (that I had used to assess my back pain) to measure the impact of living with these conditions. I felt I needed to create
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Living with Mental Illness, and opening up about it

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I have lived with mental illness for about 20 years now. I never opened up about it and never really called it like that. The time is now. A few months ago I went to my doctor to ask if I could have some kind of professional help with my ADHD. I was struggling with getting a job and feeling lost (this blog was one of my attempts at helping myself at the time). A couple of weeks later I was sitting in an intake interview at Indigo , an organisation that gives support for people with psychological problems in the Netherlands. They call it Basic Mental Healthcare. I entered that office to get help for my ADHD and I left with the recommendation to look for specialised help because the psychologist thought I would also have Borderline Personality Disorder . Indigo received me and "offered" me a bundle of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy sessions. These sessions were very useful and they helped me to keep afloat but it soon became obvious that I/we were dealing with someth
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But it is a job!

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I got a job! It ain't a beautiful one, it ain't sophisticated, it ain't a lot of things. But it is a job. And I needed one. There's nothing wrong about it. I actually enjoy working with those machines and because of targets, I end up speeding through the eight hours of my shifts almost without noticing time passing. I work alone, with red buckets and an automatic machine as company, you can see more of it in the first seconds of this video . But I so miss to work with people and making art! At the same time I was struggling with the absence of a job, feeling guilty for not having prepared the transition to Holland so well, dealing with all questions and doubts about my work and my practice, mixing everything in the same bowl: guilt from mistakes in the past, the desire of doing things that I didn't know how to market and sell, etc, etc. This post got messy. I got a job, and I needed to celebrate it.
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Employed or Self-employed

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Still without a job. Still on a career crisis , although in a bit of a different position than I was a month ago. I have started to take Dutch lessons and making an effort to avoid panic . I managed to get some distance from the overwhelmingness of the whole situation, some distance from my thoughts and things seem to start to clarify a tiny little bit. I must hold on to that little bit and feed it. So I decided to put up all the possibilities of work that could come to my mind. On one side there's all the undifferentiated work I can do without speaking Dutch, on the other, the things that I am quite good at and want to do more, some of these things are also possible to do in English. The question now is: where to start? I think it will be to try to get something to pay the bills, even if that means to wash dishes in English, while I feed the right hand side columns.
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Coaching and Foon Foon Foon

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When you arrive in a country and you don't speak the language, you start discovering a few things about yourself and your own practice. I entered a career crisis ... Because of this crisis, two things happened: 1 - I got panic. So I went for just anything I could. I know now that a better use of my time would have been to have intensive language lessons when I arrived, almost instead of looking for a job... 2 - I asked for help. I asked around for contacts of a coach who could help me pull myself back together. Yesterday and today I was working as a cleaner. I was told I didn't need to speak English so I took it. A bit of a tough job. I might write more about it later, but today I want to share an advice I received: "here in Holland, when you work in places like this, look around and do what the others do - if they are slow, be slow; if the are running around like Foon Foon Foon, do it also". I had already been told to slow down and take it easy a couple of t
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Lists, part 2

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Yesterday I published a list of the things done since I'm in Holland . Once the list was in front of my eyes, I noticed how much I had left out of it! I also noticed how much some of the entries weren't written in the best of ways! For example: - " Learn Ducth " - this is misleading, even for myself! I have been learning Dutch since I arrived! Each day I listen to it, I read words, I add words to my vocabulary, I understand a little bit more, even if it's only for Duolingo's sentences or small sentences on flyers ! - Same goes for " Get a Job " - I do have a job next week, I will be working as a cleaner, but that's a job, that's an opportunity to feel useful, to enter the job market and to generate some income. So I am happy I decided to create a second list where I put down even more stuff done in less than 2 months in Holland ! Next list: lay down as many options and steps/tasks to follow the Learning of Dutch and Getting a Job.
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Lists, CBT and moving

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I started this blog when I was feeling stuck in my career and struggling to find a job . I felt the need to share with others what I was dealing with, inside myself. Most of this struggle comes from the fact that I spent many years fighting with myself and only recently I discovered that I have ADHD, and I that there are ways of dealing with it. One of the ways is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy . I won't write much about it. I will just say that I discovered it in the last months in London, so i need had the chance to try it. I was reading a bit about it though. I decided I would give it a try at some of the principles. I always made a big effort to remind myself of what wasn't working in my decisions and actions, after reading about CBT, I decided I would try and show very clearly to myself what WAS working. This is a non extensive list of what I needed to do while moving from London to Arnhem. The list shows a certain obsession to find a job (not so helpful) but it als
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