Mental Health Awareness Week

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week which, to some, may feel like an excuse for Twitter to adopt yet another hashtag. But, for me, and may other people around the world, it’s time a time to reflect, to share experiences and stories, and, more importantly, be understood and heard.

I’ve been a mental health sufferer for a number of years now, stemming from a yet undermined section of my life. The term is thrown around quite a lot in this day and age and has many different meanings. For me, it means anxiety, stress, loneliness and mild depression. 

These feelings come and go. Some days I feel fine, while others it’s as if suddenly everything is on top of me, like a fog has dropped that lingers, refusing to lift for hours, days, or even weeks. It’s not like I don’t have a support network around me, but often these bouts of low haziness cloud these things.

The anxiety is perhaps the worst. I live my life well, but always have niggling feelings at the back of my head, making me question certain attributes of myself, whether it’s my social skills, ability to handle myself at work or turn out decent copy when I’ve been asked to write a review.

It’s a strong barrier that often turns me against certain things, makes me doubt whether I should bother in the first place. Recently, my writing has suffered as a result of this. I haven’t, in fact, done much writing in a long while, though I crave it and I’m still constantly looking for new commissions and challenges.

I, too, have a lot of monsters in my closet, things I’ve done in my past that I’m far from proud of, relating to money problems and people I’ve hurt unintentionally. These come back to haunt me from time to time, and I’ll probably never be over them completely. 

It’s hard for me to accept these things as mistakes, however. The wonderful thing that is my mind will always find a way back to them, usually in the early hours of the morning when I can’t sleep. But that’s life. Everyone has monsters, but we can’t let them take control of us.

The other one that’s affecting me quite a lot lately is loneliness. Again, I don’t doubt that I have a solid support network around me of friends, loved ones and colleagues. But, apart from one or two people, I don’t feel particularly close to any of them. We talk online, at work, or elsewhere, but I feel withdrawn still.

I’m someone who loves attention, which makes these feelings seem worse. The likes of social media doesn’t make it worse. Seeing, for example, people having a Eurovision party while I’m at home watching by myself with a drink, accentuates these feelings of solitude.

I use Twitter and other tools to stay connected, to promote the writing work I do and to keep up to date with the world. But at times I wish I wasn’t as attached to them, could walk away and not care to come back. But anytime I do, I crave the return, to feel that connection even if it’s actually setting me back further.

It’s a hard nut to crack making friends when you’re a year away from 30. It’s always been a struggle of mine, but somehow feels worse now. To find the middle ground between trying too hard and not trying too much is a minefield that presents me with one of the worst headaches ever.

With all that said, the thing about mental heath is that, however bad it may feel at the time, there’s always hope. And talking, or in fact writing about it, somehow acts as a relief. It’s not the easiest thing to do, I’ll be the first to admit that, but it does help.

So, in light of Mental Health Awareness Week, I write this post and also link to something else I wrote last year around the same time (http://jamieneish.blogspot.com/2017/10/mental-health.html). Things haven’t changed much in that year in regards to my mental health, but perhaps the way I cope with these low bouts has changed in that they don’t feel as suffocating.