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0 By Ronelle Prins
For the past few months I’ve been trying to get back into blogging about my stories and past I have yet to share with you all. Instead, I have been working on others stories and books, avoiding the inevitable. Not because I don’t want to, but I finally realized I can’t. Or I couldn’t.
So let me indulge you in on what has been happening and go into detail regarding the Facebook post I had on my page.
The start of my year began on an extremely high note.
Meant to be a good one, but in my case, it was good for the work I do, but not for my mental health. But I pushed through that. Actually, I didn’t push through it; I deliberately ignored all the warning signs and just went about doing what needed to be done. Taking everyone’s’ shit. Just letting it all slide.
And I was okay with that. Or at least I thought I was.
Until the week before my foundations first event for the year.
Everyone thought I was joking. That I was just saying what I said because everything happened so fast and all at once. But thing is I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t just saying anything. And it sure wasn’t because everything was happening all at once and too fast. Everything that happened wasn’t even good for the work I was doing. It wasn’t helping at all. All that exposure, all the meetings and time spent on getting it out there did absolutely nothing to help it grow and actually get it out there. This made what I said even worse, and more so, truthful.
So I kept going on, working, making everyone believe when I was fine. The more I told them, that I feel I need to book myself into a clinic, the more I felt like I was over reacting. It was just stress. It was just too much right?
But it wasn’t. I was being serious. I needed to find a way to get myself into a mental clinic. But the problem was, the one thing that kept me from doing that was not the fact that everyone thought I wasn’t serious, not the fact that maybe it was just the stress, but the mere fact that suffering from a near mental breakdown was not enough to get noticed by our government. This meant I would have needed to pay hundreds or even thousands of rands just to ensure I wasn’t a danger to myself.
So I figured I’ll just take better care of myself as soon as the event is over. That I will take a few days to myself and get the mental rest I needed and so longed for. That I will just switch off from the world.
But that didn’t really help… let alone happen.
Event happened, and as always I was on my crazy busy buzz that lasted for hours. The craziness continued till the Sunday as I had another meeting. Figured I will just start taking that break the Monday. So by the time I got home the Sunday evening, I was pretty much exhausted from the weekend and just ate and got straight to bed. For the first time sleep actually came easy to me.
Nothing prepared me for the way I felt the next morning…
No damn thing in this world could prepare me for the flood of emotions coursing through me; the numbness, the overwhelming feeling of everything just tumbling down. The crippling pain, the inability to breathe and the constant anxiety attacks that ranged from 15 mins at a time to lasting hours on end. I was losing it. Completely going off my rails and there was no one I could call for help. There was nothing I could do but try to let this wave ride out. But the more I did that, the worst it got.
Each waking second became harder and harder to deal with. I can’t say this enough, but I was really losing it. That deep desire I had the week prior about needing to get to a clinic before I have a breakdown was actually happening. It was here, and no one in my family would understand a thing. Frankly they don’t even give a shit.
Here I was, at 3am awakened by one of the worst anxiety attacks I have faced in my life and there was nothing I could do about it.
1in4 UK Book Store:
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Plus, this is fucking Mitchells Plain. You call for an ambulance, not only will they take hours to get to you but once you get to that horrible day hospital where no one gives a shit, no one will actually give a shit and just take it as you over reacting, or looking for attention. I have had to go through this too many times in our hospitals to know that this is exactly what would happen.
So I waited it out. I tried remembering all the therapy methods I was given to get me through it. Nothing helped. So I just let it pass on its own. I swear I felt like I was dying, then again that’s exactly how an attack feels like.
This lasted for 2 whole weeks…
To be continued…
Reproduced with permission, originally posted here: eludingthedarkness.wordpress.com
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