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0 By Kate Carre
I was going to write a stunning first blog post for Mental Health Awareness Week. It was going to be well researched and timed to perfection, finely crafted, with just the right balance of humour and reliable information. I planned to share a little but ground my post in theory, sharing enough to illustrate and engage without being self indulgent. After all, who wants to read a blog about me?
Then life happened. I wrote an epic post that was far too wordy, with too many topics involved. My plan was to break it down into a series of posts. But instead…
Anxiety got the Better of me
I struggled to stay on top of some day-to-day tasks, mainly having my children at the right place at the right time wearing the right kit and carrying the right equipment. It made me feel a failure. The mornings I shouted, I berated myself for being a failure as a parent. I worried about what teachers and group leaders thought. Was I that parent who never listens and who always forgets? Did they think my children weren’t looked after? And I doubted, myself, whether I was doing a good enough job of looking after them.
This built up and up until today, when social anxiety got the better of me. A meeting I was supposed to attend loomed. Should I go or not? Which was worse? To let people down and appear flaky and disorganised yet again? To have people think I didn’t want to help? Or to go along and feel anxious, knowing that afterwards my anxiety would skyrocket, as I analysed every word that was said, playing it on a loop like a video tape, looking for signs in body language, facial expression or words, that people generally thought I was a bumbling idiot and wished I had stayed at home.
Mental Health Awareness Week made me do something different. The conversations we have (or don’t have) about mental health have been preying on my mind. Inspired by the Walking out of Darkness event I took part in last weekend, and the people who do speak out about mental illness so eloquently and bravely, I had resolved to tell my own story and play my own small part in opening up and shattering stigma.
So as I was about to make an excuse, I told a friend.
We ALL Have Mental Health
The outcome was unexpected. An open conversation about mental health and the reassurance that I’m not the only one.
All of us have mental health. It’s a vast umbrella term. We can’t divide the population into categories of “mentally ill” and “normal”. Just as though we tried to divide people into “ill” and “not ill”…well, I’ve got flu but the guy over there has cancer… well, I’ve got cancer but it’s in remission…I have epilepsy but I’m not ill as such….which category do I belong to? It’s all nonsense.
We have physical health and we have mental health. Sometimes our health is better than others. We have the equivalent of a cold, where we feel a bit down in the dumps or a bit anxious but manage it. We have an isolated incidence of a more severe illness. Then we have chronic conditions that are managed but flare at times. And we have severe, intractable illness that disables. And we have terminal, fatal mental illness. But what we all have is mental health, nobody is unaffected.
My mental health is a lot better than it was twenty years ago. But I’m fairly sure nobody else felt at one point that it might be a blessing if they died so they wouldn’t have to attend that meeting. That is different from feeling actively suicidal, which I’m not, or experiencing psychosis. It isn’t that far removed from what the majority experience in terms of anxiety about social events or public speaking. But it was enough to impact my life significantly today. For my thoughts to escalate in intellectual hyperbole. For me to read humiliation into the smallest change of facial expression or choice of word that nobody else gave a thought to.
Reaching Out For Help
Tonight my anxiety felt like a tight band around my lungs. It felt like an uncontrollable process I wished I could switch off. And like wanting to do something, anything just to feel differently. It felt like confirmation that I am stupid, clumsy, embarrassing…and no wonder other people think I’m ridiculous because so do I.
Reaching out helped. I was supported, I was asked interested questions about what it is like for me, and there was empathy. Distracting myself helped, a walk in the fresh air. Chatting to a friend about nothing in particular helped. Writing helped to make the nebulous toxicity into something tangible and manageable.
And it is gone, as quickly as it came. I didn’t need to engage in destructive behaviours to make it vanish, behaviours that only perpetuate a vicious cycle – self harm, restricting food intake, drinking, binge eating. Once upon a time I might have.
Whatever it is, this too shall pass.
Not acutely ill, but I do have mental health that needs to be managed, safeguarded and talked about without shame. You have it too and so does Joe Bloggs on the street. So do your boss and your milkman and your hairdresser and your bank manager.
That is the message for Mental Health Awareness Week. Not the one I planned, but one that is authentic and important, slightly nerve wracking to make public, but essential.
Reproduced with permission, originally posted on onmymindblogging
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