Mandy’s story
06
A bit at a time
W
e all know that life can be tough.
When life is diffi cult, sometimes I
fi nd it relatively easy to work through
the situation. I feel that I have enough resilience
to get through it. It’s not a matter of plain sailing
but I’m not as overwhelmed as I or others thought
I would be. At other times, I fi nd that I can get
through whatever is happening by making sure
that I employ some of the better-known coping
mechanisms that we all use. It is great to have
friends to call on or to be able to get away from
it all for a few days. However, I have experienced
a time when even these didn’t produce the level
of strength that I needed and so I found myself
immobilised by what was going on. During that
moment when nothing seemed to help me cope, I
found that the best thing I could do was to be real
about how I was going to manage the next few
months or weeks. At the start, I didn’t even know
how I was going to get through the next week.
Rather than feeling overwhelmed at the idea of
getting through the next seven days, I broke that
period of time down and set myself the challenge of
getting through one day at a time. When it was too
65
much to even think about getting through the next
24 hours, again, rather than feeling overwhelmed,
I broke that down even further and thought about
getting through the next hour. For me, this simple
task of breaking down this time of diffi culty into
smaller chunks enabled me to move forward, one
manageable step at a time.