Challenges

Another positive of anxiety (if you scroll back through these blogs then you might find some others!!) is that it allows you to not take certain things for granted.  When I say 'things,' I mean people, possessions, but also situations.  Many people, for example, would organise a lunch out in the pub with work colleagues, eat the lunch, have a chat and a laugh and not think about it any more.  Because eating out has been such a challenge to me in the past, when a lunch goes well, then I can celebrate it and reflect on it, both during and afterwards.  It allows me to focus on the conversations and laughs that were had, rather than let them get absorbed in the morass of pain and difficulty that eating out would often generate.



Only another 34 years to go

By and large, this positive step happened yesterday.  I organised a lunch at a pub in Stafford for my 26th birthday.  I invited 17 people and 16 actually came, which was to my surprise (I expected a turn out of about 6 or 7, given work pressures these days).  But of course, this put the pressure onto me.  One strand of CBT I learnt was that, at meals, bear in mind that the focus isn't on me.  It's often on someone else, i.e., whoever organised the meal.  But I couldn't use this excuse, or technique, this time.
The first question you may ask is why did I organise it if I knew that it could go horribly wrong?  After all, for my 23rd three years ago, a meal at Nando's in Birmingham resulted in me struggling to eat so badly that I nearly choked myself into oblivion; so bad was the situation that one of my friends had to bring fluids to the toilet where I had to go to attempt to unchoke myself.  Unfortunately he brought me a half-drunk pint of beer rather than water, which didn't really help the problem...

So why did I organise this lunch? 

• Well, mainly, because I'm fed up hiding.  I'm fed up of using an excuse for not doing something, for example 'I'm at work.'  I wanted to be a 26 year old who could do something normal, and not have to worry about the consequences. 
• I wanted to test myself and how far, or not, I've come. 
• I thought that maybe being with work colleagues meant that the expectation on me was lower.  If it's with close friends or parents, say, then the expectation is greater on me to be the focal point.  This adds to the pressure and results in a greater likelihood of difficulties.
• It was only a lunch, not a big 3 course meal, meaning again the pressure was less intense.

To set the context.  The day before, I attended a work meeting in London and got the train there and back (I didn't do a live blog after the """""success""""" of the last one; see 2,3 and 4 blogs ago...).  All was going fine; I was using my tablet to check work emails (Virgin trains' wireless Internet = bloody extortionate by the way), and I was ok until about halfway through the journey.  At this point, physically, I started to feel really poor; whether it was the 'looking down' at the tablet for too long (or maybe the conference's chocolate cake I ate not long before the end?) I don't know.  But unfortunately the health anxiety kicked in, and the rest of the journey was me trying to keep it together.  Putting music on to distract myself, breathing, trying to focus on anything but my feeling like crap.  Luckily it subsided after the journey ended, but even still, this heightened my vulnerability and made me more anxious yesterday morning, with these feelings still in mind.

I said to one of my colleagues, "I feel a bit rubbish today, not sure I'll eat much!"  That's always my 'get the excuses in early lest I screw up' line that I recycle before almost any meal out. 

But overall, the lunch was a success.  I ate 90% of it, and didn't encounter any major problems.  It wasn't easy I wouldn't say, because it was playing on the mind all morning (ruminating), and I kept over-analysing how I was feeling, which is the opposite of what one should do in such circumstances, I've learnt.  But the bullet points above and, hopefully, a more 'common sense' thought process compared to the chaotic and irrational one I used to have helped me through it.  It meant that my birthday was more challenging that I would have liked it to be - I can't relax before such an event -  but I was able to appreciate it more because of the relative success of it.  And go all warm and fuzzy at the fact that 16 people turned up!

I suppose a piece of advice that I could give to anyone reading this who has anxiety, is that don't be ashamed if you find certain events difficult that other people find easy.  For a start, there's help out there to make such events easier for you, and moreover you will begin to appreciate them more than your fellow attendees over time when one of them goes well. 

The final thing I've got to do now is stop saying to myself "I'm 26 now, and I still haven't...." or "I still do..." In other words, over analyse the success or otherwise of my life and then blaming anxiety for it. 

I'm the only one who can change that.

Best wishes
Al