1066 All Stars

A few months ago I decided to start a new blog series, exploring the roots of my mental health issues. I would work backwards through my life, picking out the key instances and exploring them in more detail. After completing the first part, I moved on, both distracted by other pursuits and having little desire to go over redundancy and parenting again.

With my recent experience of CBT, a desire to explore the underlying causes of my behaviour once again presents itself. This time though I want to start at the beginning. This will be a difficult blog to write, I will be covering areas that I have, deliberately, never covered before. I cannot promise how well it will be written but it will be raw, open and honest. 

But first, let's deal with the present day.

Confide In Me

It can be difficult deciding to confide in another person. Will they understand? Will they laugh? Will they cry? To some extent I have been so open that there is little left to confide. I have suffered from depression and anxiety. I have deep rooted self esteem issues. I spent three months at the Priory Hospital receiving treatment and I am currently seeing a CBT therapist. These things are known.

But no matter how openly I have blogged, there remain details that I omit. I tend towards writing in broad, brush strokes, leaving out the specifics, the mundane, the daily flare ups that no one else sees that drive my thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Often they are internalised, sometimes they involve others.

This week I took the step of confiding in a friend. I was scared and I was nervous. It was both a difficult and embarrassing conversation and after, I felt both relief and guilt; relief that I had shared the burden; guilt that I had found it necessary to do so in the first place. And I felt ashamed too, of how I had acted and what I had thought.

The irony is that, in hindsight, the issues were trivial. There was no shocking revelation, no earth shattering reveal. Instead, it was a step-by-step walkthrough of just how deep my self confidence issues go with some very specific examples of how they cause me to think and act. A fundamental sense of inferiority drives the feeling that I am not good enough. In turn, I often find myself feeling isolated and lonely, despite being surrounded by people. Pinpointing individual events, I explained how I interpreted them, how they became 'evidence' in my quest to prove the theory that I wasn't popular, wasn't needed and wasn't wanted. I had ranked myself and come in last place, competing in a race in which I was the only entrant. 

The question remains, why do I feel this way? Our discussion hit on a sound metaphor, looking at friendships as the pillars of our life. In years past, my pillars consisted of family, friends, work and, bizarrely, Football Manager. Each pillar would grow or shrink depending on circumstances but as I approached my time at the Priory, the work pillar dwarfed them all, unbalancing the whole structure.

Post therapy, I find two of my pillars have changed. The Football Manager pillar was removed by choice whilst the work pillar has reduced to normal size. But in so doing, I have created a gap that needs to be filled.

Work accounted for so much of my time and energy that, Football Manager aside, I had little interest in anything else. It defined me and gave me a sense of purpose. With that crutch removed, a new pillar needed to take its place and so for the first time in many years, I sought to put work on the backburner and focus on inter-personal relationships. But to my surprise, an underlying issue had not been resolved. Work was an unfaithful mistress that I thought was giving me something I needed whilst secretly cheating on me behind my back. And so although I didn't know it at the time, I found myself seeking something that I felt I lacked and needed; validation.

And this is the fundamental root cause of my mental health issues. Validation. The idea that my sense of value and worth comes not from within but from others. Add in underlying anxiety issues and you have a toxic stew. Feeling inadequate in myself, I seek approval from others whilst at the same time anxiety causes a hyper-stimulation so that I become over sensitive to the normal ebb and flow of life. Had a crossed word? That person hates me and therefore I'm no good. A friend laughed at someone else's joke? They're funny, I'm not and they like them more than me which means I am no good. Judgement had already been passed, the case was closed; no matter what evidence I produced, I was guilty as charged.

The ludicrousness of it all is that I have friends, I have family and I have a wife and children. I can't be all that bad. So why is this not enough? Why do I still seek validation when I have surely received it? Partly it is circumstantial. It is a point I have made a few times recenlty but, outside of family (who live miles away, a point not to be dismissed), I have always had a very small circle of close, long-term friends; the best man from home; the multi-time flatmate; the special lady in Wales; and of course my best friend, who I was lucky enough to marry. At last, I am making new friendships, ones that I value as much as the existing circle. Even still, I have made my world extremely small, an island that goes largely unnoticed. And even if seen, I remain doubtful that anyone would want to stay. I want to reach out and extend my circle but I am frightened of being rejected.

Add to this therapy. It was a truly life altering experience but it comes with a price to be paid. I spent years suppressing, ignoring or flat out not feeling emotions. I was arrogant, dismissive and cold before anxiety took over and crippled me. Therapy was, in part, a reprogramming of the mind. Coming out of the other side, I find myself experiencing life in a different way. I feel empathy, compassion and kindness. But I don't always know what to do with these emotions and how to express them. I feel I am a much softer person than I used to be, undoubtedly in part because of the children, but I am also more vulnerable. For the most part the mask stays in place, lest someone discover the real me. I want to let people in but I convince myself they don't want to come.

I find myself at the edge of my known world, the ocean of doubt stretching away in front of me, the distant lands of happiness, fulfilment and inclusion on the horizon. I want to set sail and yet I am afraid in case the boat sinks or I am thrown overboard. These are my first tentative steps into a brave new world, one that I hope to make rather bigger than the old.

Sharing our inner most thoughts and feelings with others can be frightening. I consider myself blessed to have people in my life who want to listen.

Still To Come

Phew, that was a rather longer opening post than I expected so let's end this piece here and I'll break the rest into different posts. Coming up;

• Chunk
• Arrogant
• All By Myself
• University Challenged
• Closer Than Close
• The Other Karen
• Here Come The Girls
• I Do
• Dare To Risk It All

Over the past couple of years, I have used blogs and short stories to explore many facets of my mental health. Anxiety and depression have played a fundamental role in my life but therapy showed me that these were illnesses that could be treated and overcome and so it was important to me to understand them and in turn, understand how I could change.

Where did these illnesses come from? What events, situations or thoughts triggered my mental illness? I have looked back on some of them whilst my awareness of others formed as I wrote. But these are complex conditions, deep rooted and with many layers.

In this blog series I will attempt to trace the path of my mental journey, from present day issues, through years in mental wilderness, right back to childhood and beyond.

Well, no time like the present.

Christmas 2015 and a New Year

I have blogged about Christmas expectations separately and so will not repeat myself here, other than to say that the challenges I envisaged were present and correct.

More generally, I remain wracked by anxiety. Work is very much a means to an end, perhaps more so than at any other point in my life. I am not invested, I simply work the hours required of me and return home. There is no overtime, no working from home, no out of hours socialising. It is just a job, as interchangeable as a light bulb. And yet I find myself consistently stressed, obsessing about the most minor of details, paralysed over posting a simple letter or always assuming an error or omission must be down to me.

At home, life can often be even more complicated. I love my children, I adore my wife, I would not be without any of them and I consider myself blessed to have them. Yet I constantly find myself at my wits end, frazzled and out of energy, losing my temper, snapping constantly. Life almost seems to have become a series of parties that I have no interest in attending yet find myself constantly dragged to.

It becomes a vicious mood cycle; the stress of home left behind means that work, despite the drudgery, almost becomes more enjoyable at a certain level, this thought in turn powering a wind turbine of guilt and shame.

In Hastings, I take a moment to contemplate my life and where I came from. I retain an underlying desire to return to Hastings one day and yet this is no longer the town I left behind. I do not recognise the shops or the streets and yet Sutton has never truly felt like home. I feel out of place, mentally homeless.

Still, I recognise the progress made. That I am aware of these issues and can vocalise them represents a victory.

But my mental illness did not start here. We must go back further.

Parenting

This blog series will likely be a heavy one, filled with ruminations on a number of difficult and hard to voice topics.

So let’s start with some happiness.

Children bring a joy that is unmatched by anything else in life. The sheer wonder with which they approach life is infectious as they discover the world around them, fascinated by what we as adults take for granted as routine.

I was struck recently by how children demonstrate a natural mindfulness. Walking back from the park, one of the girls was thrilled to discover a new bit of pavement that she hadn’t walked on or a small kerb that she could balance on. Such simplicity, such unabated joy.

I find being a parent incredibly difficult. There are times when I wonder if I am really cut out for it. In a sense I am inherently selfish, the root cause of some of my anxiety and mood stemming from a sense of loss at the life I no longer get to lead. The grass, as they say, is always greener.

Being a parent causes stress, worry, anger, resentment and frustration. It makes me doubt myself and feel overwhelmed.

But it’s all worth it.

But my mental illness did not start here. We must go back further.

Return To Work – 2014-15

After the difficulty and uncertainty of redundancy, the security of a permanent job was very much welcomed. Despite my grandiose dreams of finally breaking into a sector that held personal interest to me, reality took over and so I followed the currents of the existing rivers, finding the dry land of employment in almost identical surroundings to those I had left behind.

Whilst this level of familiarity was helpful in one sense, it also served to highlight the differences, which on the face of it appeared to be positives. Shorn of management responsibilities, I could concentrate on myself, free of worries and strains. I had no system knowledge, no legacy roles for colleagues to draw on. I was an unknown, free to carve a new path.

And yet I found this freedom dispiriting. For a long time I could not resist the urge to compare and contrast. As stressful as my old life had been, now that it had been taken away I missed it. Where once I considered my role had a degree of importance, now I was just an anonymous cog in the wheel and I resented the drop in perceived status. I wanted more.

At the same time though, I was scared. Pushing myself had led to my previous collapse. I waged an internal struggle between feeling I should do (be?) more and yet wanting to stop and smell the flowers, just for a bit. When opportunities did present themselves I would outwardly embrace them willingly yet inwardly be a churning vortex of emotions, constantly worried that I was stepping out of my depth and would be found out. After a while, even the most innocuous of incidents or tasks would cause anxiety as I became disproportionately concerned about a potential error or drop in standards.

I recognised some of the ways I could address this behaviour. Part of my anxiety was driven by an absence of knowledge, both systems and people. Clearly these could be solved by being proactive and yet I resisted, unwilling to commit, giving into feelings of tiredness and timidity.

At the same time, I felt displaced. Even after almost 2 years, I do not truly feel a part of the team or the company. I feel like an outsider looking in. It was the little things too; how few people I knew compared to my former life, the unfamiliar roads on my lunchtime walk, washing my hands and instinctively turning left to reach for the dryer as it was at the old company instead of right as it is at the new. Little moments, insignificant in and of themselves yet taken as a whole they represented a life lost.

The irony is that during this time, I gradually increased my responsibilities, carving out a niche for myself in reporting and complex queries. I became a valuable member of the team, my input was pivotal in completing a number of high profile tasks.

But my mental illness did not start here. We must go back further.

Still To Come

In future instalments I venture further into my mental past as I revisit the birth of my son, the death of my dad and redundancy.