Tag Archives: anxiety

How Will I Know?

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Once again I slide awkwardly across the seat of an oversized and uncomfortable plastic upholstered chair while it creaks in embarrassing accompaniment to my every twitch.

Whitney Houston blares from the radio, piped in through speakers set into the ceiling somewhere, the disembodied voice an attempt to muffle the coughing and spluttering and miserable receptionists and sound of germs multiplying.

My left foot taps along with the bass line, fuelled more by agitated anxiety than love of the song. Although it is catchy.

How do I know if he really loves me?

Because he says with me during major depressive episodes and brings my child up while I contemplate suicide alone upstairs, that’s how. *

* This may not be the correct lyric, don’t quote me.

Seven weeks ago I quit the meds and in that time I have spoken to three different GPs and my therapist and my mum christened the newly operational 111 service on its very first day because once again she had to mercy dash to mine (it wasn’t snowing this time but it was 1:30am, sorry mum) when the mental took over and once again the drop from my bedroom windowsill looked particularly inviting.

I went back on the meds five days ago by the way – I’m not that much of a glutton for punishment. I know when enough is enough and I’ve battled long and hard enough to want to draw a fast, firm line through such fucked up thoughts.

The thing is, antidepressants take time to kick in.

On the day that I relented made the ‘positive decision’ to start them again every breath was like sucking setting concrete up through a narrow straw. (I don’t like straws as a general rule; someone always swipes my drink for ‘a sip’ and the next thing I know I’ve got the mangled, gnawed end of a bit of plastic someone else has chewed in my mouth).

Breathing shouldn’t hurt, having a brain inside my skull shouldn’t hurt, moving my eyeballs shouldn’t hurt…Everything hurt so much and it was terrifying and I was exhausted and, well, terrified so I pushed the little while pill up through the silver foil and held it between my thumb and my index finger and literally begged it to work

please. Please work, please help me. Please take all of this away. Please work

before washing it down past the lump in my throat with half a glass of Ribena.

The super fun (lie) bit about antidepressants, aside from the total all consuming numbness, is the waiting game while they make everything worse. Sure, taking that tablet did ease things a little but given the following should be the editorial on the leaflet in the box things are still far from awesome.

Suicidal intention? Depression? Anxiety? Hate yourself and your life and feel shitter than shit? In so much physical and mental pain that you literally can’t take another single second of the torture?

Take this magical pill!
We don’t know too much about it or how or why or when but we can tell you that they will numb you enough to plod through your days!
But first!
While they rebuild your broken brain up a little, they will in fact increase your suicidal intension, depression, anxiety, self loathing and pain infinity fold!
Hang on in there, don’t do anything silly, they’ll work in the end! Kinda.

The appointment was not fun (true). For someone so verbal about things when I can articulate through a keyboard from behind a screen I clam up hard and have to stop myself choking on every word that I force out of my mouth in person.

I also get total mind blanks and answer half of the questions I’m asked with a series of single syllable noises and ‘eeeeeeerm’s. The answers always come to me as soon as I close the door behind me afterwards, obviously (thanks again, brain).

It is beyond awkward sitting before a stranger as their gaze burns holes in my hot, sweat slicked flesh while trying to answer questions about Not Very Nice Things.

I’d rather have a smear test. While every boy that I have ever kissed, that blonde girl who bullied me in school and my ex boss (the one I had a bit of a crush on) lined up to watch.

Not because I’m embarrassed about saying how I feel (and not because I’m a big old vagina show off) or because I’m ashamed or because I think that the poor bloke stumbling over the questions that he has to ask, feeling just as awkward as me, probably, has never heard similar before but just because it’s hard.

So hard and so exhausting and it leaves me feeling like I’ve run a hundred thousand miles. Saying things out loud makes them real, it often begs explanation or expansion or explanation or reason and I have none of that.

And, y’know, that I’m obviously quite British and when asked how I am I’d rather reply a bright and breezy ‘fiiiiiiiiiine, and you?’ than a monotone and spluttered ‘I have all I have ever wanted but I want to jump out of the window and leave it all behind…and I don’t like when people chew the end of my straw’.

On the plus side, I am (finally) being referred to a psychiatrist.

This Shit Just Got Personal

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…because never let it be said that this isn’t a barefaced, no holes barred kinda blog.

 

The internal monologue of anxiety is an exhausting never ending tirade of doom and dread and fear and every single worst case eventuality that you can think of as well as thousands that you never could. It’s constant at times, like an endless buzz and crackle of static set to play on a loop, in surround sound, right in the middle of your brain. With the volume turned up to eleven.

Anxiety makes me tired and on edge, white knuckled, restless. It makes me want to slide between the inviting sheets of my bed, the safest of safe places, to lay quiet and undisturbed with my eyes scrunched shut while I shout internally that EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK in an effort to drown out the fear and the lights and voices and sounds of the world turning and lives being lived that try to penetrate through the cracks.

Only going to bed and burrowing hamster like under the covers isn’t an option. Because I am rational enough to know that the cotton soft, feathery fortress that I drape over myself means that I am giving in. And as much as I want to, need to sometimes, I simply can’t.

No. Giving. In.

The exhaustion and desperation and sheer tooth gritting agony of anxiety leaves me spent after it has built up and up and up and up and OH MY GOD SOMETHING AWFUL IS GOING TO HAPPEN ANY SECOND AND I JUST CAN’T BREATHE AND… over hours days and weeks until I burn out.

I burn out and I sleep a sweaty and restless sleep plagued by vivid dreams and even more vivid nightmares until waking at dawn feeling physically and emotionally ruined, turning back over and slipping into the sleep coma of intense malaise. And it lasts for days.

Oh hi depression. It lurks in the molecules of my own shadow, always there, always following, waiting.

When I’m OK – OK as far as the anxiety is there but quelled, pushed down as deeply as I can manage, the depression is there, chipping away at my spirit with its crushing opinions of self and worth and apathy, this is my OK – I can live and I can function and sometimes I can even have a really nice time but its all there, waiting to creep back to the forefront of my everything.

So when the depression does hit good and proper it knows that I am a captive audience. It knows that it’s done all of the groundwork of slowly pealing away layer after layer of my confidence and my belief and my defences to enable it to jump straight over the crumbling walls and paralyse me with emptiness.

The endless crackle and fuzz of anxiety is replaced by nothing. Funny really when all I want when I’m super anxious is for EVERYTHING TO JUST GO AWAY AND BE QUIET that the quiet that follows is so unwelcome.

It’s not a peaceful silence. It’s not the silence that surrounds you on a summer evening, floating in on a sweet breeze and enveloping you, leaving you invigorated and relaxed and rested, bright eyed and smiling lazily. It’s an all consuming empty silence. So heavy that it sucks the life out of every cell resulting in heavy limbs that simply don’t move, a brain that is rendered completely incapable of thought either trivial or profound. Empty empty empty. I can’t even be bothered to see, to hear, speak, swallow. Blink.

And there’s nothing I can do.

I know that as my anxiety has built over the last few days, even as the breath catches half way up my throat as I try to breathe, while my palms are slick with the cold sweat of fear and my mind races to pinpoint exactly what that fear is for, I know that it’s not real. There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing. But my god, I am. And it’s just going to build and build until my body and my mind cannot take another second and slumps with an almighty thud into darkness and despair.

And then I’ll likely be OK again for a few days, maybe even a week.

Before the cycle starts all over again.

And I have my period.

C7: Where The Mentals Are

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My old psychology lecture room. I walked the same floors as I did ten years ago, to the same room that I sat in doodling while studies and theories seeped out of the tutor’s mouth and bounced off the walls. The hot afternoon sun beat in through the open windows casting long shadows as the marker squeaked across the whiteboard and I planned my weekend. It was also the room that housed my exam results one August a decade ago. I was scared to go in and then scared to look and then ohmygoodnessIdidok!

Everything is the same but different as I walk in after all this time. The chairs all face the opposite wall, the whiteboard has been moved but cobwebs still cling to high corners and sway gently in the breeze, the sun still pours in through the windows. No longer a room where I would study psychologists and daydream about seeing friends and boys and boyfriends on Saturday, it had become what I desperately needed to be a glimmer of hope, of help, and a way to access treatment.

I jumped through all the compulsory hoops (again); I filled in the forms, scored my mood out of eight and ticked the relevant boxes to get here. The next step. The place where I would decide what treatment would be right for me to help me to recover. It struck me as odd that the best way to do this would be to assemble the mentals sufferers of anxiety, depression, panic disorders, phobias and similar in an enclosed space, close proximity, away from home and extremely publicly.

I feel far from comfortable about being in a room full of people with various mental illnesses of varying degrees of severity. In no other aspect of my life would I ever smile at someone I had never met before and, holding out my hand in greeting, divulge that I have a mental illness before I have introduced myself.

A PowerPoint presentation begins; every cliché, stereotype and misnomer about depression and anxiety presented in 72 point comic sans as each slide is read aloud for emphasis.

Stress.

Low mood.

Stress.

Common.

Change.

We all have to deal with stress, the projected slides tell the room, sometimes we don’t deal with it correctly and it becomes a vicious cycle. You, yes you, can learn to change that vicious cycle. We will give you workbooks and homework and group meetings where we will explain to you in fine detail all of the mistakes that you are making in life and how to put them right. And then if you work really hard you won’t be stressed anymore.

Shit, I’m in the wrong room. Did my feet carry me here because it’s a path that they were so used to treading? I should really put my hand up or something. Or just leave…A quick glance at the sign stuck with blu-tac at a jaunty angle on the inside of the door tells me that I am in the right room. Oh.

And then I want to leave. Are you telling me that this is a choice that I have consciously made for myself? I have been living this for nearly eighteen months, if I could have changed it I would, it’s taken everything from me. It’s taken me.

Break flashes up onto the wall, projected in looming letters (I hate comic sans) and bends and distorts around the woman who moves forward to tell those who want to stretch their legs to be sure to return in five minutes. I want to go. I want to sulk and flounce and close the door behind me on my way out. This isn’t what I need to hear or anything close to what could help me. I soak in my own private pity party on my chair in my old psychology room in my old college missing my old life. The last thirty minutes told me that I can choose not to be this way, but they also told me that depression makes you cry all the time. Over nothing. I want to cry; nothing.

The slides start up again. Not one person left the room. More animated bullet points about stress and its vicious cycle. The pity drains away and leaves anger in its wake. Slide after slide after slide of information about workbooks and healthy eating and exercise and homework and courses and spider diagrams and flow charts.

A person who feels a little low may put things off, for example, they may keep putting off washing their hair because of lack of motivation.

What about looking after a newborn baby? What if I can’t even look after my own child? I didn’t choose this. Fuck washing my hair. I want help. I want to be a mum.

My inner voice screams.

I have just ticked a box to say that I think about self-harm, that I think things would be better for everyone if I wasn’t around. How is any of this relevant and why should I give a shit?

Ten minutes later we are dismissed. I float out of the room, outwardly blank but internally screeching.

Sold

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The husband and I grew up mere miles from each other across the border of a counties so it’s odd in a way that we didn’t cross paths until we were over 100 miles away at university. When we moved in together I went to his home town because, frankly, he had the better job and I was able to transfer mine – decision made. Over the years I would hint not so subtly at how I missed home and would love to maybe go back one day but the husband resisted and resisted.

When I got pregnant push came to shove because neither of us wanted to bring up a baby where we were living, but still the husband wouldn’t relent to my wishes so we somewhat blindly began a hunt for somewhere nice to grow up. And we managed to find it. Directly in the middle of both sides of the family, beautiful old town, gorgeous parks, plenty to do while still being quiet, good schools…

We moved into our rented house when I was around eight months pregnant and I hung wallpaper and put photographs in frames. We had lived in three other houses in our time together but this was the first that really felt like home.

I gave birth in the middle of the living room for gawdsakes.

Home was somewhere that we had gone into with our eyes closed but that blossomed into something awesome. Neither of us had ever set foot into the town before we looked at houses there, slowly we found our feet and our way around and we settled. It became about something more than just where we lived – it was the place we had discovered and the environment that we had created together – and it was about Beans, where we would bring up our baby, where she would go to school and the parks that she would run around.

And then it all went wrong.

With PND and panic attacks and everything that came with it home became a negative place. Coupled with the terrible timing of the news that our landlord was selling the house I didn’t feel safe there any more. I don’t really live there, not any more, and nor does Beans really now that she is with me for most of the time.

The life that we had created shattered.

Our actual (old) house

We have decided that we are definitely all moving to the city that I grew up in, the very place that I have said that I wanted to move back to all along. But it feels like a failure. I feel like I have let everyone down, failed at living the life of a grown up, failed at carving out the beginnings of a life for Beans.

As with most home towns, mine has remained the same since the day that I left it in 2004. The same people still have the same friends and go to the same places. The same streets and shops are still either achingly trending or painfully uncool. I feel like I am coming sloping back after messing up setting up a real life on my own.

The huge bonus of moving back is of course that my family are here. Close family support is something that should never be underestimated or overlooked when you have a baby, let alone when you go through any struggles whatever they are related to. And that support is something that I am hoping will have a huge impact on my happiness and my confidence as I continue putting one foot in front of the other, taking baby steps towards getting myself back.

But my heart breaks at how badly I feel I have let the husband and Beans down now I know for sure that we have to leave that life behind.

Is This It?

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The beginning of March found me in a hole. I had been home for a matter of days after some time staying with my parents when things sunk lower than they ever had before. I’m looking back with the benefit of hindsight to help me unravel what happened and the giant, saucer like pupils and foggy memory that a hefty dose of antidepressants bring.

I remember laying in bed feeling my anxiety spiral and spiral until it took on a life of its own, bigger and stronger and more powerful than me. It swamped me, swallowed me whole and suffocated me. I couldn’t move. I shook so hard that I fell out of bed.

I shook and I shook and I shook and I gasped and I gasped and I gasped.

My mum drove over and we cried as she held my hand and told me she didn’t know what to do, how she hated seeing me like that and wanted to take it all away for me.

For over 24 hours I shook and gasped and cried and panicked. I kept asking if I was dying. I genuinely thought I was. I wanted to. I wanted it to stop.

Mum called the crisis team who said if I didn’t improve to call the emergency doctor out. They would likely prescribe Valium to calm me down and let me sleep. To cut a long story short the doctor never came because he didn’t understand.

I needed to run away but I was rooted to the spot. I was practically carried to the car and taken away again. The guilt at abandoning the husband and Beans ate away at me as the fields and cars and roads and houses passed by in a blur outside the window.

Back again, back in my old room in my old bed. I stayed there for a week. I didn’t eat, I barely drank more than a sip of water a day. I didn’t get up to use the toilet, to wash or to see daylight. I didn’t speak to the husband. I only spoke to my parents to ask them to promise me that I wasn’t dying.

My bones were heavy with it all, lifting my finger off the mattress was too much for me to manage. I couldn’t open my eyes. For the first time I experienced how it truly feels to not want to exist anymore.

I am nothing. There is nothing. I want nothing.

Slowly, as if my internal dimmer switch was being turned one millimetre a day, the weight lifted and things became brighter. I had been on my new meds for a few weeks and they were finally taking hold.

I could read for short bursts, the next day I drank a whole glass of juice. The next day, like a baby, my mum bathed me.

I’m two weeks on from those days now and I never, ever want to go back. Like recalling labour with enough distance, the sheer extent and intensity of the pain has misted over somewhat. But I know it nearly broke me.

A week after I found myself at rock bottom I managed to see the husband and Beans. It was the best four days I think we have ever had together.

I’m still not myself. I am still at my parents, I still find myself unable to function and I am still adjusting my medication and trying to cope with it. But if I have ten minutes of lucidity a day I grasp it with both hands; desperately drinking it in and appreciating how it feels. I snatch these moments and I phone the husband or sort out as much as I can for our impending house move.

Things are far from alright but I’m clawing my way back, one tiny step at a time.

[Shameless plea: The MAD (mum and dad) blog awards are open for nominations and if you want to make me squeal with delight it will only take a minute. You can nominate your favorite blogs here.]

Irresponsible

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I’ve been away, again, for a week now. The week started with me being literally pinned to the bed, unable to move or blink because of the crippling weight of my depression. Tremors or panic attacks would break up the endless hours.

I couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, couldn’t go on.

Now I am managing to force a slice of toast into my dry mouth once a day. I can’t stand for the time it takes the kettle to boil because I feel so weak and dizzy. My heart constantly pounds and is exacerbated by too much movement, making catching my breath hard work.

At the beginning of the week I couldn’t even speak to the husband on the phone. It made me too anxious. I have been trying to work out why, what it is that makes me want to hide. Total lack of self worth? Probably. Fear of responsibility? Definitely.

Coming away has relinquished me of all responsibility. I don’t need to worry about what to make for dinner or whether the washing needs doing. I don’t have to put on a happy face for Beans or reassure the husband that I’m ok. Frankly I’m too weak to deal with any responsibility right now.

The husband and Beans might come to see me tomorrow. I miss them both desperately. I so want the husband to wrap his arms around me and tell me it’s all going to be ok. I so want to scoop Beans up and cover her in kisses.

But I’m terrified.

Will I be able to cope? Will it be too much for me and leave me sprawled in bed, shaking and pinned to the mattress?

I keep trying to tell myself that I am doing the right thing by being away. That I need to concentrate on me, to get to a level where I can function again before I am any use to anyone, let alone an extremely active toddler.

But my head swims with thoughts; what kind of person ever thinks that they don’t want to see their baby? How can I even think things like that?

I wish there was an easy answer. I wish I knew what to do.

Thump

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THUMP THUMP THUMP.

My heart pounds hard and fast as I gasp for breath, my body shakes violently causing all of my muscles to cramp and ache.

Maybe I had it wrong, all this time I have said that the medication isn’t working, was my depression just getting worse and worse all along? Now I have to start all over again.

I can’t calm down. For the first time the last strand of reality that I have held onto finally snapped under the strain.

THUMP THUMP THUMP.

I’m dying. This is it.

THUMP THUMP THUMP.

For all of this time I’ve wanted to escape myself. For all of this time home has kept me safe, my comfort blanket when everything heightened my anxiety.

Home is gone, I don’t feel safe there anymore. This has come at the worst possible time and I can’t cope.

THUMP THUMP THUMP.

We call the emergency doctor after being told by my therapist that if I don’t calm down they will be able to prescribe me something. Anything. I can’t do this anymore.

THUMP THUMP THUMP.

The doctor tells me to do some online CBT to learn how to control my panic. I breathlessly try to explain that I can’t, I can’t move, I can’t breathe. I’ve gone beyond deep breaths and calming thoughts.

THUMP THUMP THUMP.

Once again I am half carried half bundled into the car to be taken away, back to my parents, back where I can calm down.

THUMP THUMP THUMP.

Day four of new medication and it’s messing with my head. I’m not rational anymore. I’m panicked and paranoid and detached.

The husband is going to leave me, Beans won’t remember me. Worst of all, I don’t even care. I can’t even bring myself to call home, the guilt and the paranoia and the fear of everything has made me mute.

THUMP THUMP THUMP.

I can’t eat. I force myself to drink. My parents drift in and out begging me to have some food, their faces contorted with worry.

I can’t move.

How The Rug Was Pulled From Under My Feet

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Home after nearly two weeks away and trying to feel positive after my appointment with the mental health team I find myself desperately wondering how to deal with this.

Back home again and I make myself a much deserved cup of tea. As hard as it is to be here I try to keep myself positive with the good feelings of coming back. Home is my comfort blanket, where I feel most secure.

In the five years that we have been together me and the husband have lived in four different places across two different counties, this is the first house that has truly become home. I wallpapered the front room with indulgent Cath Kidston wallpaper when I was eight months pregnant, a treat with some money we had after getting married the previous summer.

I gave birth here, this will always be the house where I had my baby.

I’ve spent months framing and hanging pictures and photos, decorating Beans room to make it nice for her – I do love this place and reminding myself makes me feel a bit better about being back.

I sat on the sofa with the husband and filled him in on all that was said at my appointment. Once I had been over everything and explained things as best as I could he looked up and said ‘I’m sorry’.

‘No, I’m sorry. This is all so horrible and it’s all because of me.’

He couldn’t meet my eye. ‘No, it’s ok. None of this is your fault. I’m sorry because of something else.’

My head falls into my hands as I ask ‘what’s happened?’

Our landlord is selling the house. Not in weeks or months, our first viewing is on Saturday.

Evenings are now filled with frantic what are we going to do discussions. Do we urgently try to get a mortgage, speak to our landlord and ask him to wait while we sort it out on the promise that we will buy this house from him in a couple of months? Do we get tied up in renting again, rendering us unable to save and run the risk of the situation repeating itself?

The likelihood is that come the end of May we will have nowhere to go, no savings, no security.

Right now this is the last thing that I can cope with. On top of everything else, what do I do?

Eight Weeks

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I’m back home now, back with Beans and the husband after nearly two weeks away. You can read about how I got there here.

The morning after my first night back at home I had an appointment with the local mental health team.

The main focus of the meeting was to assess my medication and get me off the awful tablets that had caused such a bad reaction.

Sat on an uncomfortable chair feeling just as uncomfortable in a tiny, windowless room I had to relay everything to the two women opposite me. I had to explain everything that has happened over the last year, everything I feel, everything I’ve done.

When the hour is finally up and all the notes are scrawled I am given a new prescription. The fourth different kind of medication in the last year. Medication that I am not allowed to start for the next few days until the last is out of my system. Then I will increase the dose slowly, building up to 150mg over the next month. Only when I make it to that dose will it start to treat my PND, within four to six weeks anyway.

Treatment and recovery will all take so much longer now I have remained untreated for over a year. They apologised for that. I wasn’t sure whether to be happy that I was finally being helped or devastated at all the wasted time.

All I could think was I have to live at least another two months like this. No effective medication, days wasted. This is all just so hard, I can’t keep surviving like this. For eight whole weeks.

But at least I am home.

Home

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I was overcome but just how cruel PND can be on Tuesday. I was finally coming home.

Desperate to be back with my family in our own home, desperate for cuddle and kisses and having my hand eagerly taken as Beans takes me for a walk around the house.

Desperate to be back in the routine I was missing, cups of tea lovingly made by the husband and to sit on my sofa in my front room.

I collected up all the bits I had randomly packed in a haze of anxiety; one jumper, three pairs of socks, the husbands pyjama bottoms, Beans teddy.

I so wanted to be back home but I was terrified of going back. I didn’t really want to. I didn’t want to go back to living the same miserable existence day in, day out.

I didn’t want to go home to the pressure, the feeling of absolute failure and the emptiness of days spent in bed, too scared to integrate myself into my own family.

And then came the guilt. The all consuming, tear spilling guilt of feeling that way. What kind of person doesn’t want to go back to her baby who she hasn’t seen for a week and a half?

I got out of the car and opened the front door. Beans stood in the middle of the room and beamed at me.