1066 All Stars

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.