I prescribe comfort reading.

Hello my dear readers. How I love and adore you all. Thank you for reading this blog. I haven't been posting much recently, I haven't been feeling like it.

I've alluded to feeling bad several times. I don't want to seem like I am "vagueblogging", a term I learnt recently that refers to people who drop vague hints about dramatic life events or personal torment to titillate their readership without going into too many details, in a sort of attention seeking and irritating fashion.

I also don't like being all earnest and issues-y. Look there's a time and a place and other blogging peeps rock the earnest genre but I'm not good at it, I come off moany and sort of emo, or like I'm hamming it up.

I thought I'd quickly be honest about things, in a way that suits me.  I want to quickly chat about stuff and then move on, and hope that it won't define me. I think it's probably good to mention things like this as part of a person but not to obsess about them. If we want to normalise being a bit crazy in the brain then we probably should treat it like any other chronic illness, like diabetes, and touch on it occasionally in a sort of matter of fact way without getting dramatic.  Sorry if I've offended anyone by saying that, and I hope nobody is getting too eye rolly about the whole thing.

Anyway the thing is I have rather a bad and sometimes debilitating problem with anxiety - in fact, I have GAD (Gad-zooks!) which stands for Generalised Anxiety Disorder.  I am sure I have had it my whole life but it is only in recent years that it has been formally identified.

At the moment, it is quite bad.

It doesn't really sound like a particularly debilitating thing, anxiety. It sort of sounds like you worry a bit about things, that you dwell on stuff, that if you tried hard enough to be POSITIVE you might be able to get on with it and just shut up.

It's not like that.  For me, over the years it has taken slightly different forms.

It's been with me as a sort of constant worrying and obsessive thought patterns, that when really bad caused me constant breathlessness and a never ending feeling of nervous butterflies in my tummy.

When P was a baby it developed into major depression. I took antidepressants and it was utterly life changing because I realised what it must feel like to be normal, there was an absence of something that had permanently dogged me.

At the moment I have sort of taken to thinking of my brain as a separate sort of spiteful entity that likes to torment me at random moments with heinous and frightening thoughts.

 I imagine my brain as the Samuel L Jackson character from Pulp Fiction, sort of torturing me and taunting me with ghastly thought patterns.

Suffice to say being regularly forced to relive stressful memories or walk through unbearable scenarios regularly and relentlessly is farking exhausting and leaves me at a low ebb, and it is quite tough getting simple things done, let alone commute to work and look after a family. I also get really run down and am constantly getting colds. The constant adrenalin running through my body renders me weak and depleted.

People with a genuine anxiety disorder can't just stop worrying, or keep calm, or whatever. They aren't "negative" or "whingers". If you are lucky enough not to know what it is like, then good for you, but you aren't more "positive" or "organised" or whatever, you just don't have this particular problem to deal with.

Props to you.

They have a brain that malfunctions. They have obsessive thought patterns that have worn a groove in the neural connections so deep it could be the doorsill at Westminster Abbey.

You can't tell them that other people have it better, it could be worse, first world problems, stop being so negative, think positive - because they know all that already. It's their arsehole psycho obsessive brains that don't get the message.

You can't change that overnight. 

 

There's plenty of things I can do to help myself and also people who I can and will engage to help me, I can't be bothered going into details but it's the old fish oil, exercise, psych, comfort reading Ladies Detective Agency novels blah blah.

Anyway, hey ho, this is me at the moment. I was toying with chucking the blog in completely because I am so tired all the time but I love it so I will just be a bit more relaxed and ad hoc about it, as suggested by my lovely Lounge Lizard colleagues.

I mean, when you feel like poo you just want to be miserable and talk about boo hoo topics and get all introspective and MOODY and frankly who wants to read that shizz - NOT ME AND NOT YOU I AM SURE!

It truly is a first world problem - I mean, obviously. I guess if I was living in sub-Saharan Africa I wouldn't have any time to be a mental I'd just be, you know, struggling to survive and avoid death from famine or war. But as it is I am a first world girl, living in a first world world, not getting enough exercise, running a busy stressful life and having a good old Celtic genetic tendency to be a mental.

At least I'm not an alcoholic. BONUS POINTS TO ME!

If you ever want to talk about this sort of thing feel free to email me about it.

Anyway, I feel better having said something about it, like I've unblocked myself again (and I don't mean digestively speaking, boom tish!).

Thank you for reading. When I get home this evening I will have a hot shower and do some comfort reading of the Ladies Detective Agency -  Mma Ramotswe and her endless talk of boiled pumpkin and Bush Tea are good for the soul.

Ahhhhhhhh.....


Yours in mentalness

Sarah