It’s World Mental Health Day today, and either I’m just noticing it a lot more after an interesting year of battling with my own brain, or something is really shifting and people are becoming more inclined to bravely share their experiences. But either way, I’ve got fear of missing out, so here’s an insight into my experience over the last year.
For anyone that has known me for longer than five minutes, you’ll know that I lost my dad two years ago after he was knocked off his bike in a cycling accident. You’ll have heard that he was a silly dick head that made me laugh a horrific amount, gave me endless confidence in my abilities to do everything and anything and taught me what real empathy, compassion and humility are all about.
Initially after losing dad, I felt a real sense of responsibility to project some of my favourite qualities of his: bravery, strength and resilience. I cracked on with work. I made some big life changes. I found myself recycling lines of dads, “what’s crying going to change? Just got to get on with it”. But I was finding that I wasn’t feeling any better. Every time I woke up in the morning feeling this insufferable pain and inability to breath through the grief, I felt angry at myself for not being able to just plough through. My brain wasn’t cooperating with my regimented grief timeline, and that’s where the spiral began.
I was working too hard (and on climate change, which is a pretty depressing topic at times if we’re honest about it), drinking far too much, spending as little time by myself as I possibly could. I was crushing any opportunity of having time to think to one side. Sleep became a luxury, and exhaustion became the norm. I’d be lying awake at 3am, wracked with anxiety. I knew I needed to slow down, so following the advice of a psychotherapist I’d started seeing, I spent more time at home. It was impossible to focus on anything. I couldn’t read, or watch films, or hold proper conversations without losing my train of thought. I began apologising to friends for becoming so hard to be around, convinced that spending time with me had become a chore. I’d play social scenarios over and over in my mind, punishing myself for not being more fun or making more jokes. The anxiety spiraled.
One day, not so long ago, I went into work. The only way I can try to describe how I felt that morning is like someone over night had wrapped a plastic bag around my brain. I couldn’t focus my eyes. I couldn’t channel my train of thought on one thing. I’d passed the point of anxiety and was lost in a pool of complete apathy. My lovely boss asked if I was OK and led me into a side room because a mysterious liquid started coming from my eyes in public (I think it’s called crying, and apparently it’s allowed). I offloaded that I’d completely lost my zest for life. I knew it was temporary and that I was doing all the right things to try and pull myself out of it, but at that specific moment it felt like there was no way out. I sent an email to Samaritans that weekend. I was in need of a completely impartial voice to just ask me questions and take away the worry that I was burdening the people around me.
I can’t tell you what suddenly changed. I was exercising as much as I could, eating well, drinking less. I took some time off work between jobs. I actually started to tell my friends that I wasn’t feeling OK. I called myself head poorly and acknowledge that I was going through a patch of tricky mental health. and one day, I woke up feeling like I could enjoy the sunshine again. I realised that those things that I adored in my dad – the bravery, strength and resilience – could still exist, but that they had to manifest differently for me before I imploded. Bravery to me has become telling my friends when I’m struggling and letting them help me. Strength is reaching out to professionals for help and sticking to a routine even if it feels like it’s not working. Resilience isn’t blindly “plodding on”, it’s working to understand how your brain is operating and trying new things to help shift your mindset.
I’m spending some time celebrating how well I’m feeling at the moment. I’ll tell anyone that’ll listen and I’ll even crack the odd dead dad joke now and again without feeling like my heart is exploding. But that doesn’t mean I’ll always feel well. I’m sure there’ll be other days, weeks or months where it’ll all feel a little too hard. Main thing to remember is, we all have it at some point or another. No one is exempt. And there’s always a sunny day waiting at the end of the storm for you.
Sky High Diaries 