Thanks for joining me! Really, I’m creating this as my own kind of personal outlet and I hope to look back on this first post in the future and see some progress, if not, a clear articulation of events and thoughts. Aside from mental health writings, I want to also post about Music and Literature, my two favourite things! If anyone stumbles upon it, I hope I make some sense and maybe even help in a small, tiny way.
I decided recently to start writing this blog as a way to somehow make sense of some things I’m experiencing. Well, these are things I have always experienced, since I was at least 9 or 10 years old…but in the last couple of months, I’ve been finding myself going through a harder period with my mental health than usual.
I guess I see myself as a pretty “open book” (sorry for the terrible pun) for the most part, with no real problem sharing personal things with anyone, or at least saying how I feel. Something started to change near the end of April, (I still can’t quite put my finger on what, but I hope writing these blogs will reveal that to me) I started to worry a lot more than usual, causing me to spend my nights wide awake until at least 1am. Normally, I never have trouble sleeping, usually being the first person to go to bed! So this was definitely one of the first signs that made me a little concerned. The “concern” is just another word for worry, really – I was worrying about my worrying!
The worrying and late nights started to have effects on me during my days as I became more irritable than usual and tired. This caused me to be more on edge and defensive, resulting in a lot of arguments with my mum and step-dad. As this became more frequent in the coming weeks, I kinda just shut down emotionally to people close to me – I’m usually a super chatty person with something to say about almost anything! But as time progressed, I was barely saying anything to anyone and I went into my own world, where I relied on games and terrible youtube videos to escape the mental space I was in. Of course, this started to impact on my general day-to-day life and things like washing my clothes, myself and even just getting out of bed in the morning were becoming the biggest challenges. My dreams were beginning to turn into nightmares at least twice a week and I was starting to not want to go to sleep. These dreams were projections of real fears I have and waking up at 3am sweating and crying was starting to add to the cycle of behaviour. I must add here that these dreams are still happening and I’m trying to piece them together, so prepare for some more posts about that in more depth.
My mum and step dad, being the loving people they are (thankfully, I have that!), shared their concerns with me, especially after the continuous fighting that was occurring and wanted to figure out what was going on. Although I felt like something was very wrong with me, there was such a huge fear behind admitting it and appearing as “weak” or a “victim” to my own mental health that I became defensive again and starting a string of more arguments…in doing this, I said a lot of hurtful things that I didn’t mean and doing that fuelled the “you’re not good enough” thought pattern, with feelings of “run away” or “end it” added in there. “If it all gets too much, you can always….”
Due to the fact my parents have such an awareness of mental illness, both suffering with their own, they understood what was happening and encouraged me to go to the doctors about it. I should add that this isn’t the first time I’ve been about my mental health – I was doing CBT in 2014, which changed my life in so many ways, for the better. However, for some reason, I didn’t maintain the daily well-being routine I had been taught and so things started to slip once I had finished my 6 months worth of therapy. Anyway, I made my way back to the doctor and went through the routine symptoms checklist. The doctor concluded that I still had severe anxiety and have I considered medication? Up until this point, I really tried to steer away from medication as I am stupidly sensitive to chemicals of any kind and anything can absolutely fuck with my head – but, I felt like I was just at a point where I was ready to go to any lengths to get some kind of grip on this thing I live with everyday – I remember thinking at the time, “just make it all stop”. So I was prescribed propranolol (beta blockers) for the increased panic attacks I was experiencing in hopes that would calm me down a little until I was in touch with CBT again.
Propranolol has been great for the panic attacks, I haven’t had one since. The only thing that it doesn’t deal with are the thoughts, only the physical symptoms. However, the dreams have continued, as well as the late nights. I guess I’m just trying to make sense of it all and document my journey as I go. Well, thats it for now – I shall update as much as possible.
I kinda like this picture, so its staying!
Luna Moth 