Time to Move On 2

I refer you to the first blog I wrote about this issue in early June, so getting on for 3 months ago:

http://theanxietytracker.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/time-to-move-on.html

I was musing over moving out of my parents' home for the second time, to a shared house.  At the time of the previous blog, I didn't think that my mate who I lived with before would be moving with me, but circumstances have changed such that this is now the case again, which is great news.

Another high quality image

I have spent the last few months searching for somewhere to live, meeting with landlords at various houses and trying desperately to meet the people who live in them, first on my own then later with my mate.  You wouldn't (or perhaps you would, if you've done this sort of thing before!) believe how difficult it was to get the landlords to get the housemates to be there when I went round.  This, as I've mentioned, is by far the most important thing for me.  If the housemates are not people I feel I could get along with, then I didn't want to live there.  So if I couldn't get to meet them, I had to assume that they came into this category, whether they did or not. 

Finally, at the eighth attempt, I went round to a house to view it, and all of the housemates were there, gathered in the lounge area. What was interesting about this viewing is that it was for three rooms with a total of five other people (I was there on behalf of me and my mate), so we were effectively in competition with each other.  Luckily, we both got two of the rooms.

I'm not going to say too much about the house at this stage, lest things go wrong and I regret it later.  But so far I feel I've been lucky to find somewhere that contains people who were very welcoming and could, could certainly fulfil the criteria that I set out in the first blog about this.  It could increase my social capacity significantly, which is excellent.  Challenging, but excellent.  A challenge that I need and that hopefully, in time, I can accept and enjoy.  

It is likely to be a totally different situation to the last house; my anxiety was tested there but that was more because it was the first time I'd left home.  There was no test from a social capacity because, when my mate wasn't there, the others were hermits in their own rooms.  Which, by all accounts, was for the best.

However this new house seems to have a completely different dynamic.  What sums it up for me is that one of the landlord's main concerns was getting the right people in there, whereas most others just seem concerned about getting the rent money and having done with it.  

So if it does turn out to be the social haven that it could be, then this will test my anxiety.  Bluntly, high amounts of social activity is one thing I've rarely had in my life; even when I was in the final year of Uni, my richest year to date back in 2007-8, I still lived at home and didn't socialise as much as those who lived away.  So to have a sudden increase in social activity with, in the outset, people I don't know, could be interesting to say the least.  

There are numerous niggles of course, some connected to the social side of things, some other more domestic things.  But they all come as a package fear, which is that of how this potential seismic shift in my general day to day life could affect me and my mental health.  It has the real potential to improve it quite quickly and certainly over time, but it also has the potential to cause mass struggle.  Then there is still the prospect that it won't work out, which, given other factors involving my existing friends, could make me very flat indeed.  

But overall I am thinking positively.  One of the biggest successes so far is that I am able to recognise the potential problems from an anxiety perspective, both short and long term, without letting them consume me.  They are there, niggling, but the positivity and excitement of what this experience could be is equally, if not more, overwhelming than the negatives.  This is an achievement for me in itself.

The move is to occur this coming Monday 2nd September.  I will no doubt update you as to how it goes.

Bring it on.

Best wishes
Al

Sharing Experiences II

To continue my sharing experiences as part of Time to Change's big push.

The One Where They Found Out At Work

I have blogged in patches about what happened to me in March 2011, which in many ways was the main defining moment in my life.  If you scroll not too far back in time, you'll see a series of 'live' blogs that I posted (which went well(!), thanks to modern technology and my lack of ability to utilise a tablet correctly) which I wrote as a consequence of that event.  I will probably conclude this Sharing Experiences flurry with this event detailed in full, which won't be a particularly pleasant experience but one that I feel that will be worth doing.

Listen to the birdy

The reason I mention it in line with this blog, is that the following experiences all stemmed from this March 2011 event, albeit occurring a couple of months later in the year.  

I'm very glad to say that my anxiety has rarely affected my work, which I count as a blessing.  I appreciate that this is not the case for many people; indeed, work is often the root cause of anxiety in the first place.  However, because of the impact that March 2011 had, my anxiety was totally consuming me during the spring and summer of that year.  Everything I did was, at best, difficult, to the point where I struggled to leave the house.  Needless to say then, that during this time it did affect work.  Simply being at my desk was hard, and what made it harder was my insistence of keeping my problems quiet, lest I was deemed temporarily unfit to work, which would make me feel like a total failure.  What's more, I was a lot more scared of people's reaction back then and indeed feared for my job if I admitted to my chronic anxiety.

The two worst moments during this 6-ish month period were as follows.  The first was me requiring to take a 1hr 15min bus journey to Lichfield from Stafford, undertake a meeting with someone I didn't know which would take a similar amount of time and then get the bus back.  I was very anxious before I even started the bus journey, such was the nature of this particular period of time, and so the bus journey there was awful.  I remember planning to eat my packed lunch on the bus there, but could barely force anything down me, which of course never helps.  Me and food have had many arguments like this in the past; knowing I should eat something but not have the breath or physical calmness to even consider it.  So this heightened my anxiety even more.

I arrived in Lichfield and I remember sitting in reception.  What didn't help is that the reception area had totally changed from last time I saw it, which, although sounding trivial, just made things even more unfamiliar and thus put me more on edge.  I was sitting there shivering and feeling very ill, physically.  Of course, this is what anxiety does, but I also have health anxiety which means I took all of these physical feelings out of all proportion too.  Which, of course, increases the anxiety even more.

The meeting itself was a nightmare.  To this day, I don't know how I managed to get out of there without having a full blown panic attack.  I think some sort of divine intervention took hold that knew that this would have been a horrendous place to have a panic attack.  I remember nearly losing it at one point, and found myself staring at the person (who wasn't overly receptive either, which didn't help), or rather, staring past them.  It took something unknown to pull me through that meeting.

The bus journey back?  I felt perfectly fine; relaxed, even.  A meeting and trip, which from a work perspective wasn't tasking in the slightest by the way, caused so much pain and exhaustion during that time that I made so many excuses thereafter so I didn't have to go to any other meetings for a fair while after.

It wasn't long after that, though, that the second main incident occurred.  I'd been to the doctor's in the morning and was put back on my beta blockers (which I'm still on now well over 2 years on, albeit a weak dosage).  In my wisdom, I decided to take the first one at lunchtime, whilst sitting at my desk at work.  Not a good idea.

Within minutes, I felt very hot and very faint.  I don't think the medication did anything to me (although I've no proof of this), but rather I was thinking of what physical effects the meds could have on me, and for some reason my brain was recounting the mechanics of what beta blockers do.  As part of my health anxiety, I am terrified of the thought of "non-natural" substances entering my body and changing things "unnaturally."  So consequently, what happens?  The thoughts about this make you feel hot and faint.  This exacerbates the health anxiety, which then in turns makes it all worse.  The problem with this situation is that it was at my desk at work, with all of my colleagues sitting at their desks around me.  Then, just as I was close to passing out, my boss comes round to my desk to ask me something.  I remember, in reply to her question, saying something like this:

"Yes ok, but first I'm going to pass out if I don't get out of here."

Which I appreciate after the event sounds quite funny...

I was only able to wheel my chair to a separate manager's office close by, who luckily wasn't there, so it meant I could shut the door and shut out the main office.  It was at this point that I blurted out to my manager that I suffered from anxiety and explained the situation with the medication.  I was very incoherent at the time so I'm not exactly sure what I said, but I told her more than I ever intended to.  Luckily (as is often the case - #TimetoTalk - ), her reaction was generally a positive one, and she said she'd had to take beta blockers in the past too as a result of anxiety.  I didn't take in the significance of this at the time, but what it meant was that at least I wasn't seen as some sort of alien.

I was then driven home by another colleague, but again felt fine not too long after.  Well, fine isn't necessarily the right word but you get the idea.

The day after, my boss's boss (at the time) took me in to a meeting room for a chat, and he also shared some of his stress experiences.  OK, not quite chronic anxiety, but again I was getting support in the best way they knew how, so I could only be grateful for that.  I was told that I would get any support that I needed, which was nice.  Don't get me wrong, they didn't (and still don't) know the full extent of my anxiety.  To them, it was limited to those few weeks (if not that one incident), but their reaction combined with my increased confidence since then would now make me less scared to open up about it at work, if required.

But at the time, this period of my life was hell, because I thought that my job was at stake.  I even remember saying to my boss(es) that "I thought I'd be told to take some time off."  Moreover, my anxiety across my whole life was plaguing me, dictating me and making me so low and upset.  It took a huge hand from my therapist and simply the course of time to get out of this, my darkest year.  Much of which I have written about in previous blogs... so feel free to take a gander!

It's #TimetoTalk.

Best wishes
Al

Sharing Experiences I

It's about time I shared some more personal experiences around anxiety and panic.  This blog covers a wide range of issues around anxiety and mental health, but as blogs are there often with the purpose of sharing personal experiences, I thought I'd boost that element of things by writing about a few of mine; some of the defining moments if you like.

#TimetoTalk

To make things even more interesting (!), I will present them in the form of a Friends episode, e.g., 'The One Where...'  

This series of blogs will hopefully add to my personal #TimetoTalk campaign about speaking out about mental health.

The One On Holiday With My First Known Panic Attack

I didn't say the titles would be catchy.

I will start with the first time I recalled that I truly was different to everyone else that I knew.  This was in 1996, when I was only 10 years old.  As we did every year, I went on holiday with my parents for a week over the summer holidays.  The location this particular year was Kingsbridge, Devon, and we stayed in an apartment literally a stone's throw from the sea.  On the day we arrived, we'd unpacked and I was sitting in my bedroom 'wondering what that noise was,' but not thinking anything of it.  I don't know what I was doing but it probably centred around reading a comic or making up a game for us to play lest it rain later in the holiday.

What happened next was ironic on all sorts of levels.  My mum popped her head round the door and said 'can you hear the thunder?'  That noise I'd been wondering about was actually thunder, and back in those days I was terrified of thunder.  Weather was one of the few subjects I knew a fair bit about and I knew that a thunderstorm could cause fire, death and destruction if it was in the mood.  Even though it was 'just God moving his furniture.'  I believed such fallacies for most things at that age, but my early interest in weather meant that I knew what thunder and lightning was, and what it did.

The irony?  Well, for a start, these days I seek out storms when they come so I can watch them.  Secondly, my job centres around preparing for severe weather.  Thirdly, that game I may have been making for a rainy day... I didn't finish it quickly enough.

Because it wasn't until my mum told me that it suddenly dawned on me that 'that noise' was thunder, the feeling of dread and fear came over me very quickly.  At least had I immediately twigged that thunder was approaching, I could have mentally prepared myself, sought out my parents and probably cried to let out the emotions so that I could cope with it if it came overhead.

Of course, not only did this suddenness cause problems, but so did the location.  I was somewhere unfamiliar; not only were we in a place I didn't know, we'd only been there a couple of hours so I'd barely had chance to breathe before the thunder came.  And boy, did it come, from what I remember.

And so a panic attack ensued.  At the time I didn't know that it was a panic attack, of course, and to my parents I probably just came across like a blubbering wimp.  But it was only after this that we probably all realised something was wrong.  I could barely function for the rest of the holiday.  I couldn't eat and was sick a couple of times.  I kept crying and feeling nervous, and not knowing why.  I think I put it down to 'what if there's another thunderstorm,' but I reality I was feeling nervous and ill because I didn't know why I was feeling nervous and ill.  I was basically fluctuating in and out of a panic state for 48 hours...

...after which we had to go home early.  The most vivid memory of mine, though, is of what happened when we arrived back to our then home.  My dad went out to buy fish and chips a couple of hours after we got back because of course no food was in the house.  I, again, struggled to eat anything, even though we were back home.  Clear as day, I remember my dad saying to my mum (thinking I was out of earshot I assume) "what's wrong with him now? We came back home didn't we?"

My first counselling took place early-ish the following year, in 1997, during my final year of primary school.  Whether this holiday was the start or the onset of requiring counselling I can't be certain, but this was definitely the first time I remember having periods of utter panic and anxiety.  And so it began.

I'm sure you're all wondering what caused this to happen?  OK so I was scared of thunderstorms, especially ones that came about suddenly in a strange location, but surely this wouldn't have caused days and possibly a lifetime of anxious suffering?  No, I don't buy that either.  Am I just unfortunate?  Am I prone?  Had a significant event, like a family death, happened not long before that was fresh in the memory?  Was I being bullied in school at that time and/or was I (without knowing it at such a young age) suffering from loneliness?  Possibly a combination thereof?  Have I mentally blocked out something horrific?  For anyone able to turn into me and go back 17 years, please let me know what you find out.  

All I do know is that this represents two things:

1) This event may have started it all off... everything that I've been through may have started from this one thunderstorm.  

2) Anxiety and panic can happen at a young age.  As this proves, I've been there.  It can also become chronic from a young age, as this also proves.  I'm 26 now and only in the last year or two have I learnt about anxiety and panic in terms of exactly what it involves and how it affects your wider mental health, and your life.  How on earth, as a 10 year old, was I to know what to do and what may happen in future?

Food for thought.  More sharing experiences to come over the next few weeks.

#TimetoTalk

Best wishes
Al

Doing my bit...

The #timetochange campaign has suddenly sprung to life, so here goes my first contribution:

Click here