CELEBRATING 30 YEARS WITH YOU
I’m Peta, and loneliness and isolation have played a big part in my current situation.
Fourteen years ago, I moved to Queensland from South Australia to be with my family … and then they moved back to South Australia and I was left here, very alone and isolated. Being lonely with no one to talk to, allowed me to become confused, my thinking went skewwhiff and I started making wrong decisions.
I thought I was a superwoman, and I channelled my energy into collecting, starting with cookbooks, stuff for my gardening and things for my sewing. It was slow and insidious, but I found myself in a mess … in clutter. I saw stuff building up, but I didn’t know what to do about it. So I just blinded myself to it.
I ended up in a mental ward and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I now have a case manager who is helping me to get my life back together, and through a My Aged Care assessment I was connected to Footprints and Jorge, who is pictured here with me.
Jorge has a passion for what he does, and he cares. He may not really understand how I got into this mess but his caring and assistance is what is helping me get out of the mess.
For me, caring has become an action word, and it has changed my life. Even though the medication I’m on leaves me in a state where I still feel isolated, I now have a purpose, a goal, and a reason to help clean up, which I didn’t have before.
Without Footprints, I’d be stuck here looking at the mess with no idea of what to do. But thanks to the caring I have received from Footprints and Jorge, I now have hope that there is a future without mess.
Download a pdf version of Peta’s story.
