The blog of D Kai Wilson-Viola

Author, advocate, designer, mental health advocate and parent. 

R is for Run girl Run #recovery #MondayBlogs

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  1. Yup. I had... Other stuff also happen that I try not to talk about- mostly I like to be clear…

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R is for Run girl Run #recovery #MondayBlogs

Apr 23, 2023 | A to Z Challenges, Blogging Challenges, #mondayblogs, AtoZ 2023 - The AtoZ of me, About D Kai Wilson-Viola | 0 comments

Kind of a crosspost day today. A couple of days ago, I talked about Psychosis. I’ve also talked about LudoSport and the impact it’s made on my mental health.

This time last year, I was approached by a publisher to write a book about my mental health recovery. We’d talked about doing it before the pandemic, because I’d started learning to walk, then run again after a neck injury, that was to me, life altering. And I say ‘to me’ because I only needed a zimmer for a bit, and by our trip a month later to London, I only needed a cane. I needed that cane for nearly a year, on and off, especially when we went to Disney, but I was lucky. No one can tell I had to learn to walk without feeling part of my leg any more (yes, you can do it, no I don’t recommend it, 0/10, do not like).

Recovery for anyone is complex

One of the reasons I’ve refused to talk about recovery, really, is because everyone recovers differently. In my case, I’ve recovered…in a way that sort of worked out fine, but wasn’t optimal. But, as you can probably see, I’d already gained quite a bit of weight before the accident, so, I was trying to find my way back to ‘fitter’.
I don’t ‘get’ the endorphin thing that people talk about when they exercise. Or at least, the discomfort I feel has always mostly overrode the instinct to do it, other than, for a while, running. Something that’s obvious from photos of me, I think, is that I have quite long legs. To put it in perspective, as it were, I’ve got 36 inch legs, and I’m 5’4″. Were I the “correct” proportions, I’d be a bit taller, but I’ve got a short body, and long legs, which really confuses people when they actually look at me properly. (no it’s not the jeans I choose, I really have stupidly proportioned legs. Shorts that should look fine on me look indecent, because my legs are too long. I can make gym shorts look like hotpants, and you’d think that’d be a super power. It’s really not).
So…with all that in mind, I pitched a book about using running to settle the mind, meditate, and still be mindful of surroundings, and at the time (pre-pandemic), the book was accepted.
Then, my son’s kidney stuff happened, and literally the day he got his stent out (I’m deliberately playing it down), the UK was locked down. No running for me, but, by that point I’d already discovered the fatal flaw in my pitch – I didn’t like going as far from the house any more, so I couldn’t talk about running.

Kai finds her bliss, so the book was revisited

In case it’s not clear to everyone how much LudoSport has changed my life, it has. Years of therapy has left me a bit twitchy, sure, but at the same time, it’s also left me with an exquisitely precise knowledge of where my limits are. So when I started geeking out about LudoSport, we revisited the book pitch.
I did however resist changing the title to Rin, Girl, Rin. (A rin, and a nir are two types of moves with lightsabers, one in one direction, one in the other). It’s not just about LudoSport, though, now that we’ve started the edits, it does feature quite a bit.

So…that’s the story of Run Girl Run. This will basically be the same post on BooksbyKai.

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P is for Psychosis #realmentalhealth #mondayblogs #nomorestigma

This is one of my harder blog posts to write, because though I talk – a lot – about the impact my mental health has on my day to day life, and has done for a while, I’m pretty sure that this is the bit no one really understands, causes the most…misunderstanding and I hope, because I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, they can’t relate to. If you didn’t know that psychosis was a feature of my mental health diagnosis, or didn’t understand if you’d heard it mentioned before now, please…don’t start changing your opinion of me. That’s the biggest reason those of us with serious mental health issues aren’t as open as society needs. Because we lose people.