Dear reader,

I’ve been so privileged to have met wonderful people on my journey. People who have inspired me, people who have been silly with my, people who have laughed and cried with me. Today I am giving you Chris. He is a Registered Mental Health Nurse, employed as a Wellbeing Advisor at a university. Most of his time is spent talking with students about how they may overcome any difficulties and achieve their aspirations. Chris once told me he wants to make a wider impact by spreading joy. I think it joy one of the highest purposes of life, so I suggested he writes something for us. Here it goes, hope you’ll enjoy it ❤

How do you know when you are at your best? What do you do in those moments? What might it look like to other people? What might you still be doing, and what might other people see if you still somehow manage to experience a moment in which you are at your best even when everything is going wrong? When nothing in your life in that moment is the way you’d prefer it to be?

In between the moments when you experience that, even during lengthy spells when you experience a major setback and don’t recognise yourself as that person any more, but instead find everything about how you’re behaving, thinking and feeling distasteful, yet maybe also strangely compelling, when you can’t remember how to be any other way… What are the different things you do during those spells that somehow deliver you back to the next moment, even if it’s only a fleeting moment, in which you are again at your best? The things you’re doing differently in that moment, compared to how you were doing them in the previous moment, when everything was wrong and nothing was working?

Whatever those things are, they are your things, hard earnt things, and they clearly work.

What might happen if you do more of them?

Your instinct is probably at least partly trustworthy, you probably will be ok if… you do the things that work for you. Not necessarily the things you feel compelled to do at first, out of habit or some notion of what you probably should do, but the things that genuinely work for you, as proven by subsequently resulting in you, and the other people in your life, recognising that you are a step closer to being you at your best. Rather handily, whether you do these things or not in any given moment, you’ve seen the pattern, you know how this goes; eventually you’ll be ok again. Then you wont. Then you will. Then you wont. Then you will. When you’re not ok, sooner or later you’ll do something different that works for you, then you’ll be ok. If you’re not sure what it’ll be, wait and see, and whilst you’re waiting, ask yourself how you’ll know when you’re ok again, or even better, when you’re at your best.

Chris Ward for Biba’s blog