It is the sheer exhaustion mental illness brings that grinds you into the dust. You may be surprised to learn that depression and anxiety is as tiring as anything I have ever known. Both the conditions and the pernicious effects they have on my sleep, which have left, are leaving, me more exhausted than ever. In the absence of NHS treatment, bar some promised “group session”, my main confessional is cyberspace.
Experience of this stuff at least means I can try and self-regulate, to use what energy remains in the right areas. I save most of it for work, what’s left for writing and then I find there is not enough left for exercise, which provides, as science tells us, chemically driven feel good factors. But if the spirit and body is weak, the feel good is over the hills and far away.
I know this latest dip is because of a combination of factors. Primarily, the black dog that lives permanently in my soul, closely followed by a host of other factors, including the bullying and abusive actions of individuals at my last employer, the British Red Cross, which caused me a mental breakdown last year; constant feelings of failure and hopelessness, so much hate and negativity in the world and the impending anniversary of the death of my father and the loss I unexpectedly felt by his passing. And there’s lots more.
You don’t need to tell me my writing has suffered in recent days. I know that. I have spent many hours at the keyboard with my mind seemingly covered by a thick fog, not knowing where the next word my be coming from, or if it will appear in the right order. And without my writing, my life is so much less worthwhile, meaningful.
I stopped my car the other day, wondering briefly where I was and what I was doing there. I had been on autopilot and had covered many miles without thinking about anything at all. It was all I could do to start driving again, to concentrate on people other than me. I made it. That was my achievement of the day.
With NHS mental health treatment so scarce as to be non-existent, I may try to self-medicate by writing about my life to see if that somehow provides some kind of explanation to this chaos. If it’s any good – and I doubt it will be – I’ll self-publish. If it isn’t, I’ll hand make a book myself for just myself. In any event, I have ben writing it myself in bed in the middle of the night, in between wild, crazy, insane dreams.
This journey can’t end yet. Too many people depend on me, don’t want me to fail. I have already managed the latter as life’s not terribly rich pageant gradually unravels but it is the love of, and for, others that sustains.
I never thought the night terrors and panic attacks of puberty would manifest themselves in other ways as I got older. In another form, they never went away and somehow I need to struggle through another huge dip and keep smiling through, as I always do.
