Anxiety Redux
It was recently mental health awareness Day. I posted the following on Facebook because I felt compelled to say something, I have cleaned it up a little.
Ah, the joys of national (or is it world) mental health day, as someone who has experienced such issues I am more interested in the fact it would have been Kirsty McColl’s 60th birthday. ‘Tropical Brainstorm’ is a fantastic piece of work, which has accompanied me on holiday numerous times.
A nice bit of deflection there, a trick for changing the subject to avoid talking about how you feel from other people. It is so easy to hide how you feel and what you think and not want to have anyone making a fuss when you aren’t right because it can feel like drawing attention to yourself in a way you aren’t comfortable with. Other times it can something you feel you have to ride out and focus on just getting through it. Often just talking about it makes a massive difference and sometimes it feels so difficult to get into that head space. Sometimes you need someone to listen without comment. Sometimes it is enough to hear the words spoken aloud.
My anxiety has controlled me the past in just want to hide from things, by making me feel like I can’t be arsed, and in more unpleasant incidents caused obsessions some seem serious some not so much.
Often I would feel need to collect sets of things (usually music), the strongest one resulted me collecting a near full set of KLF/JAMs records over a couple of years, which doesn’t seem bad. However imagine when that consumes your thoughts and waiting for pay day so you can order another record, it doesn’t matter if you have a high quality mp3 of the tunes from that record, the need to have a physical copy was not fun when it spent so much time occupying my thoughts.
In a more serious case being able to to sleep or eat properly for a couple of months or a year or two ago someone at work had been an unreasonable arsehole on several occasions, so much so that the thought of having to talk to them or deal with them had me regularly having unpleasant intrusive thoughts as my self worth eroded. My wife witnessed such a conversation once and was shocked by how they talked to me.
These days things are much better, pills got me back on even keel enough for a year or two so I was to not bothered by things and be able to properly switch off and relax, before eventually coming off them because they were having adverse affects on my behaviour.
Speaking to a psychologist was the key for me, for getting to the root of issues and working for the best ways to deal with various situations. Nowadays picking up on when something is amiss is much easier.
Occasionally I have the odd bad day, on those days I behave in a manner which I think clearly highlights to everyone that I am not having a good day, when it does not come across like this.
In my head it is, “Look, I’m clearly not right, how can you not see it???” It is similar to when I say something ridiculous or a bit ‘out there’ on the basis that it so silly or what I think is obviously tongue in cheek, yet other people don’t pick up on this and I can’t see how they dont. I wonder if anyone else out there does this. Maybe other people out there think like this and makes it seems like some people are masking their issues when they’re not?
As Bob Hoskins used to say in the BT adverts, “It’s good to talk.” What he didn’t say is that sometimes it easier to speak to people who know very little about you, and that’s ok.
