Well hello there! How are you? How have you been? I feel like I should apologise for (yes, again, I know) dropping off the face of the earth there for a while. And I am sorry. I’ve missed having the chats and processing my thoughts and brain dumping on you. I have. But let me fill you in.
As you may know, I have mental health issues. Not a bundle of fun, but they are what they are. And that’s why I’m not apologising. They are what they are, and sometimes what they are is something that engulfs me, takes me unawares just when I think I’m doing fine, and reduces me to a wobbly mess that struggles to feed and wash herself, never mind operate as a functional adult in the real world. And I’m learning that when that happens, it’s not my fault. It’s not something to which one can really attribute blame or rail against (although lads, if that would fix it, I’d be blaming and railing like you wouldn’t believe).
And that’s where I am. I feel both depressed and anxious a lot at the moment. There is no particular reason – lots of things have been going really well, nothing has really gone badly. But that’s the thing – there doesn’t need to be a reason. So I can’t answer the ‘what’s wrong?’ question that some lovely people ask. My mental health is wrong, I guess, but that doesn’t really clarify things.
Feeling both anxious and depressed at the same time is WEIRD. Like you don’t care at all and over-care about everything at the same time. I oscillate between feeling nothing and feeling too much, in a moment-to-moment kind of timeframe. It’s exhausting. Life is exhausting.
But I’m here, and I’m fighting. I have a lot of things I kind of want to talk about but talking (with words at volume out of my mouth to real people in front of me) is exceedingly difficult a lot at the moment. So I hope, presuming I feel up to it, to be on here a lot more than I have been. Some of what I write may be pure tripe that looks like I’ve lost my grasp on the English language and logical as a whole (not an entirely unlikely possibility). Some of it may never get beyond draft stage.
I am a champion of mental health and wellbeing, and a person who struggles massively with both of those things. A contradiction in terms. But I think that while absolutely everyone’s mental health journey is unique and individual, it’s important for me to talk about my mental health. To professionals, to my family, to those close to me in my life. But also here, because stigma is real. Stigma is why I will sometimes allude to generally being ‘not well’ when I bow out of things, because explaining how I had a panic attack on the train and had to get off and go home just sometimes feels like it opens to a more difficult conversation. Stigma is why sometimes I have trouble accepting myself, and why even I sometimes get mad at myself for not being able to simply ‘get over it’.
The challenge for me is to find that sweet spot between being brave and sharing my experience, but not doing so to an extent that I feel unsafe in myself and my experience. And sometimes that means just not sharing for a while, while I wobble and fall and hide from life. So yeah, sometimes I don’t share because general life busyness gets in the way. Sometimes I don’t share because I’ve nothing really to share (or I’m percolating on something and it isn’t quite ready yet). And sometimes I don’t share because life is too hard right now. And that makes me feel sorry because I miss it, but I can’t and won’t apologise for doing what I need to do to get through the day.
However, I am very very grateful to all of you who (online and offline) have stuck with me and supported me, and continue to do so. It all helps, even the tiny things you think don’t mean anything. You’re all deadly, and I’ll get there because of it!
