Description

Veronica Shaw

ISBN:978-1-78382-7190

Published: 2024
Pages: 64
Key Themes: Mental Health, Depression, Bipolar, Manic Depression

Description

Traditionally a hat is worn to suit a person’s unique personality. Of which I have many. My mood dictates the appropriate hat I would wear for that day.

The Dark Hat is different, it denotes my degree of depression. It comes and goes at its own discretion. Sometimes it hovers in the distance as a reminder of what’s to come.

About the Author

Veronica Anja Nesteruk (Shaw)  was born in Birmingham in 1959 a daughter of a decorated Polish Army Medic with extreme violent PTSD rages and unpredictable schizophrenia. When Piotr Nesteruk, returned from six years on the front fighting for his countries freedom during WW2, including incarceration in Warhuta Wooth in Russia and many years in Africa and the last push on Mone Casino he spent the next 30 years of his life injecting morphine into his right leg for the pain. Caused due to shrapnel wounds floating around in his blood stream. Or so he was told.

He married a German born Polish refugee. Helena who taught in the underground Polish schools where Deaf & Dumb children were hidden and eventually helped evacuate them across the Tatra mountains to safety.

Veronica and her two brothers were born, in quick succession. While their mother suffered through various stages of breast and Lymph cancer. Their Polish Grandmother came to stay to help during her recovery and to enable the children to return home from foster care during their early years.

Regardless of the cruelty inflicted upon the children from a young age leading to them all leaving home before they were sixteen years old with a broken education. Veronica passed her 11+ and got into a grammar school but was socially inept to balance relationships. She managed to overcome her  lack of schooling, (hiding in cupboards and protecting mother), through further education. The family disappeared to three very different corners of the earth after their parents early death. Leaving them all mentally damaged confused teenagers. With no family here for guidance.

Veronica, unaware that she too had PTSD and severe anxiety, retained no childhood memories. Just thoughts of escape and hiding and a promise that no child of hers would live in the same hell she had to. Only in an environment of love and kindness.

Diagnosed with Mental health problems when she was twenty and told she would never work again by a Psychiatrist . She was told there was no help only the tablets she was taking and rest. (1979) A message she heard many times when she relapsed into breakdowns. But she was a driven fighter, she re-educated herself so that she could look after her son and provide them with a good standard of living.

While training as a Change consultant with Royal Mail, and traveling all over the UK Veronica, studied Logistics, Marketing and Programme Management. All of which she got a distinction for while bringing up her son on her own. She rose from a casual to a senior management position. A well thought of union negotiator, who earned an accolade from the union executive.

Studying the world of Human behaviours balanced with her mental health, driven by her necessity to success and be at the top of her game. She was the first Senior manager to save the business £1m in 2007.

Veronica’s illness began to affect her physical health which resulted in her having to retire and go to work part time so that she could spend more time with our grandchildren. In 2009 Veronica climbed to Everest base came for a friends charity. This was achieved by sheer determination. The whole experience changed her whole outlook on the world. She wrote a book about it but never published it.

All she wanted to do was to write and has several books that need editing before she will be happy to share them with the world.

In 2019 she started to write,” The Dark Hat.” She was broken. Completely lost her whole body had shut down. She was no longer able to move her legs nor use her brain to remember or think. She didn’t really want to be here anymore. Her life was spent writing on yellow post it notes. This time there was no hope only rest……..5 long years of rest……