Anxiety

Anxiety 

Hey guys! I'm just going to thank everyone who read my last blog post, I had three times the number of views as I usually do on my random posts and I think it gave me a little bit of closure on what was a really tough time in my life.

As I said before, this next blog post is about anxiety disorders. I have suffered from Generalized Anxiety Disorder since I was preteen. I can't say how long exactly because it was a gradual regression from shyness, though I think I was around 8 or 9 when it hit so badly it started to affect my life. This presented itself alongside panic disorder, agoraphobia (fear of people/crowds) and hypochondria (like health anxiety).

• If you want to learn more, here is the link to the NHS website on Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and some other disorders that you might find helpful. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/generalised-anxiety-disorder/ 
• Here's the one for panic disorder, which will explain what a panic attack feels like. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/panic-disorder/

I want to point out that everyone in their life has a period of anxiety or unease and this is perfectly normal. When it starts to take over and affect your day-to-day life, then it becomes something that needs help.

To try to explain the level of anxiety I had - and if you read my last blog you can probably understand where it stemmed from - I will have to start from quite early on as it's been a long-running thing for me. This could take a while so thank you if you manage to get through it. I'm hoping this will help anyone suffering to narrow down any events that mind have brought on their own anxiety.

The Beginning 

I had always been a shy child around adults. I never really trusted them enough to want to engage in conversation with most of them, but this was normal. Many children are shy; my own daughter is so shy she won't talk to her grandparents sometimes. But as I got a little older, I started feeling nervous at the idea of being in public places with them. I would start playing scenarios in my head and psyching myself up to the point where I would physically throw up. I catastrophized everything in my head before I was even 8 years old.

The next thing that still sticks in my mind now is my fear of random things. I was told that when your heart stops, you die - which is obviously true - but it really got to me. I remember standing in my doorway as a child frantically trying to find my pulse, worrying that if I couldn't feel it I would just drop down dead. This went on for weeks, I lost so much sleep over it.

Being around someone as mentally ill as my birth-mother didn't help, stories of witches and ghosts don't really belong in the mind of a child but it wasn't really her fault. Being as young as I was, I picked up every single thing I heard or saw on the TV. When it was decided our village would move over the road, we got to choose everything about the houses that were being built for us - including what cooker we wanted and if it was to be gas or electric. A few weeks before this, my birth-mother let me watch an episode of a drama where a young woman left her gas stove on, sat down next to it and blew herself up to commit suicide, so when I heard we might be getting a gas cooker I freaked out. We were in the office of the planning building looking at cookers and I screamed the place down in a fit of absolute terror. I'll be honest here, I'm still a little scared of gas ovens now. See what I mean about picking things up?

So that's the beginning. The start of the end for me. What followed would be bed-wetting until just before my teen years and having to take warm baths at 4am because I'm so worried about life I can't sleep. My mum would have to sit at my side before school and try to calm me down.

People always made a lot of comments about my weight because I was a skinny thing (much like my daughter is now) and that didn't go down well with me. Because of the comments, my mother would be constantly trying to feed me and being anxious, I didn't want to eat often. So instead I internalized my feelings and began wearing long-sleeved jumpers all year round to cover my skinny arms to avoid people saying anything. One summer, I sat by the lake all day with my friends in a HUGE fleece jumper, so hot that I was sick the whole of the next day. I was absolutely terrified of judgement. It must have happened quickly though because I can remember wondering why I cared so much this year but I didn't the year before when I happily had my arms out for Sports Day in Year 1. That's how sudden these phobias come on.

The Impact On My Life

I left school at nearly 14 years old because I was being sick every morning before I caught the bus. I didn't realise it at the time but I had worked myself up so much before I went, I couldn't even stand to get out the door. This was a panic attack. I went into a fit of pure fear: shaking, sweating, weak arms and legs, chest pain and struggling to breathe. Then I'd be sick and get irrationally angry at anyone who tried to force me to do it. So I dropped out from school. I had to have family therapy to figure out what was going on but they focused on my physical symptoms more than my emotional ones.

I remember being in this shitty family therapy trying to explain that I was scared and that I wished my family would listen to me. I tried to talk about all the problems in my life: my schizophrenic birth-mother, the family members always coming in the house in fits of drug-induced rage and everyone's constant comments about my weight, but even the 'therapist' didn't listen. They gave me a home tutor and assumed I'd got M.E.! https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-cfs/

The only reason I was so tired was that my body was going through so much from the anxiety attacks happening all the time (and the rare football-sized tumour looming in my womb, but that's a new story altogether) that I just couldn't concentrate.

I must have had a year of tuition before they gave up, I wasn't able to get my mind straight enough to concentrate on my work, especially after my operations to remove a tumour and my ovary. Depression had kicked in at this point and I'd pretty much given up on having any hope of a successful future. I remember asking myself what I thought I'd be doing at 16 (two years from this point) and I genuinely couldn't see anything. It was black. I didn't think I'd survive that long. Sad, huh?

Home life was bad, my mum suffered from anxiety too and so held onto me really tightly in hopes that I wouldn't go out, get pregnant and live the same life my birth-mother did. My social life consisted of a few friends that I was only allowed to spend time with if my female friends were in the group and I didn't wander off for too long. It had once been amazing but as my mum's worries got worse, I soon became so afraid to speak to people that I didn't want to spend that much time with them. My friends eventually went off and did their own thing. I had a few boyfriends, and along with some of my so-called friends, did some pretty shitty things to me like throw dead animals in bags in my garden, sleep with my boyfriends, shoot my window with air rifles, take my pet ferret out of her hutch and post her through my aunt's letterbox in hopes the cat would kill it, throw rocks at my windows etc. You know, really nice stuff like that. That did wonders for my confidence as you can imagine.

Bigger Picture 

Anyway, I've rambled on a lot here, though I think it all makes for a bigger picture that needs to be explained. Eventually, mum took me to the doctors and he threw some citalopram at me and left me to it. The next few years went by in sort of a numb blur. I had no therapy whatsoever or was even told what was happening to me. The medication on its own did nothing at all and I switched a few times to different ones. Nothing happened. At this point, I was having up to 16 panic attacks in a single day and my life consisted of gaming in the kitchen for 8 hours at a time - it was my only release from my mind.

My mother struggled too so she hated it when I left the house without her. We were stuck together at this point and it was only after her death in 2012 that I had to put on my big-girl pants and do things alone. (After a year or two of overwhelming grief and loss. She was after all my best and only friend.) But before my recovery, the years went by with me in this same cage. I had a few boyfriends who all eventually left - it's not that fun dating the socially-inept - and I had zero friends that weren't online. Real friends seemed like a chore at that point, I didn't want to go through what I went through as a teen again, having to wonder what my friends were saying or doing behind my back.

What If?

I had gained from my mum what I like to call 'What If Syndrome' which is probably the biggest factor in my anxiety to this day. Have you ever had to make a big decision in your life and you find that little area of your brain that questions it? For example, let's say I've got to go on a plane to the US to meet some friends. My brain would say 'What if the plane crashes? What if you lose all your money and can't get home? What if you get mugged or ill and you're all alone?' Most people would have this train of thought to an extent as it's usually present as common sense but in someone with anxiety, it is ALL THE TIME and we don't shrug it off. There's just something in our brains that accept the idea that something could go wrong as proof that it will. As if just thinking about the possibility - however remote - of something happening can physically summon it into existence as if it were a demon. Sometimes I do refer to it as the 'What If Demon' for posterity.

It didn't help that the What If Demon also affected my mother and instead of just having the voice in my head telling me that the world would break down around me if I left the house, I had her telling me it too. The joys of anxiety! This demon's favourite time to come and play is usually as you're laying down to bed, he loves to put the most stupid worries in the world in your head right when you need some good rest. It's how he plays it. So you're panicking all night which leads to an over-tired person the next day - a perfect time for the what-ifs to reappear.

As you can imagine, generalized anxiety disorder means that you're pretty much nervous about shit all the time. Your brain is in constant overdrive, everything upsets you or makes you irritable, you can't eat and you most likely at this point either have acid-reflux, irritable bowel syndrome or both of them (the hormones released during anxiety don't really do great things for the stomach) so you can't even get pleasure from eating any more!

It's not uncommon for people at this stage of anxiety to look for a release with either alcohol, smoking or drugs and I'm not going to sit here and tell you how to live your life. All I will say is that there is help out there that you might find more useful than just drowning those sorrows. Trust me, I know. I'd been a fan of the drink since I was 14 and it didn't help me. Drink, sure, just make sure you're not relying on it to live. That's just as bad as the What If Demon.

Help? 

Because this blog is becoming ten-times as long as I had thought it would, I'm going to cut out a long portion of my dreary life-story now. I think you all get the general idea of how anxiety was born in me and move on to how I managed to get to the point where I can leave the house.

The first and biggest factor in how I am today is Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. I was first introduced to this at 19 years old when I really wanted to go on the bus on my own to town (ten minutes away) and I couldn't even do that. My doctor sent me to this new type of therapist and it really did blow my mind. It's not like psychotherapy where you just talk about your feelings, it's more a self-help therapy that actively identifies and combats the behaviours that you are doing to add to your anxiety cycle.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/cognitive-behavioural-therapy-cbt/ Here is a link to explain more.

I will add here that if you choose to try CBT, you will need to go into it completely and utterly prepared to do things that make you anxious and uncomfortable. This isn't a process that is going to be pleasant for you. You're going to have a crazy amount of panic attacks as your therapy goes on but trust me when I tell you that you're going to be able to live a life afterwards.

This therapy taught me about safety behaviours that may feel like they're making it better but are in fact making it worse. For example, do you find that going outside makes you nervous so you just don't go? You avoid. That's actually a safety behaviour that you're using to make you feel safer. You're feeding your anxiety (and the What If Demon) by doing this. Do you find that when you go to a public place, you sit by the door in case you need to escape? Yep, that's one too. You're keeping yourself in a cycle.

I've stolen this from the internet to help explain. No copyright challenge intended.

The way to get out of this is to break the wheel, as Daenerys Stormborn once said. This will involve taking some small, scary steps into doing the things that scare you and changing the way your brain perceives them. For me, this was simply by leaving the house without my mum and letting the anxiety just wash over me. It will come in a huge wave as your brain mistakenly sees a danger, but then it will leave and you'll still be sat there on the bus as you were before. Perfectly safe.

One thing that helped me is to remember that anxiety is just a feeling. You're not psychic, predicting your own doom, you're just having a thought. Give it a moment and that thought/emotion will just pass and you'll still be sat wherever you are at the time and nothing will have changed. That's called grounding.  https://www.confidentlife.com.au/5-quick-ways-to-ground-yourself-when-anxiety-hits/

That's the trick, right there. Training your brain to readjust its flight-or-fight response. It will be so hard. It will push you mentally and physically to the point where you will spend more time looking for excuses to quit than actually doing anything you need to do to get better. But if you do take the easy way out, you will always be in the cycle. The months of being uncomfortable and anxious while you go do the things that scare you will pale in comparison to the life you will lead if you let your fears control you.

I was 25 years old before I started to become a fully-functioning person. I missed out on 25 years of living my life because I let my fears take over it. It's why I'm so immature now, I think. I'm basically starting again. I'm living, not just existing.

I still take courses of medication if things get on top of me, but I don't have a panic attack for the most part. That's pretty great compared to the 16 or so I would have in one day. I go outside and I talk to people, I never say no to a challenge and I'm bringing up a happy, healthy daughter who will never know the struggle I did. I'll make sure of that.

Talk about your problems, go to the therapy, ground yourself, take the medication but whatever you do, don't sink. I know you're tired emotionally and physically but just keep pushing. Don't do one scary thing and then rest for a while, keep it going until you feel like you can't do it anymore. I promise you that eventually you will look back and realise you're not scared of it.

The good thing about anxiety is that you've already gone through every scenario in your head that terrifies you; you've lost sleep, you've cried, you've yelled and you've given up hope multiple times. You've sat on the kitchen floor with your head in your hands and wept until there was nothing left to give. But see? You're still here.

Thanks for reading, guys.

NX

Growing up with a schizophrenic

Why I'm Writing This 

Mental health is being talked about in the media more now than I've ever seen it before and I think this is important as it means that those suffering alone with their illness may have a better chance of finding acceptance and hopefully recovery.

I've mentioned my long-term battle with anxiety and depression often on my social media but one thing I haven't really spoken about is my experience of being around a person with schizophrenia. Most of you already know that my birth mother has suffered from this illness since I was born - maybe even long before that - and it's because of it that I was brought up from being a baby by my grandparents, who I call 'mum' and 'dad'. 

In case you've never heard of it, here's a link to some more information on schizophrenia from the NHS website. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/schizophrenia/ 

What I wanted to talk about, given recent events I've read about in the news, is how it is perceived and how it affects those around the person who is suffering - family, friends etc because it's one of those topics that even in my own family can sometimes be considered taboo or something to be ashamed of. That way of thinking is not helpful and in our case has led to my birth-mother from being ostracised from people who once were close to her and also made life really difficult for both my younger sister and me, who have both been subject to snide remarks or judgements purely from being in the same gene pool. 

Now I'm a mother myself, I'm hyper-aware of everything that happened to me during my own childhood and how it affected me long-term because I don't want my own child to go through what I went through. 

I will refer to my birth-mother as BM during this to save confusion. When I mention my mum and dad, I mean my grandparents. 

Family History 

Now, I have no memory of ever calling the woman who gave birth to me 'mother' as a child; I'd already adopted 'mum' and 'dad' for my grandparents as it's all I knew, but I do remember my BM being a large part of my life. I think I was a few months old when dad collected me from her flat because she confessed she couldn't take care of me properly so I don't remember the time when she was my sole-carer (my birth-father wasn't around until I was well into my 20's) but I've heard many stories about what I went through. It's because of this that I'm so thankful that my parents raised me as their own and I managed to have a more normal life than what would have come from staying with her or being taken into care. 

So I grew up with my grandparents, who I adored, and my aunt and uncle became my brother and sister in a way. My BM lived down the street back then and even to this day she still leaves close by, so I saw her frequently growing up. I can't remember the conversation where mum and dad tried to explain to me what was wrong with her but I knew something wasn't right and I just accepted it. Kids are great for that. 

Funnily enough, I was never scared of her as a toddler, even when she told me stories of her bed shaking like the scene in the Exorcist or that her ornaments talked to her. I suppose I had been exposed to it so early that my mind just sort of switched off to it. But it was daily. She'd come around to visit and for the most part she was in good spirits about things, she talked to my mum and dad, drank tea and asked me how things were going. There had always been a sadness in her eyes when she looked at my sister and I and it was clear there was still a bit of the woman she was before the illness took over. 

Mum and dad let her spend as much time as she could with me until I was around 8 years old when things took a huge turn for the worst with her mental health. Before that, all she really did in my presence was tell strange stories about ghosts and how they talk to her but she seemed to struggle to do everyday things like pay bills, look after her home, feed herself properly etc as she was always out somewhere with whatever boyfriend she had at the time. 

Then when I got to 8 she met a new man and that's when things just fell apart for me. He'd introduced her to some pretty heavy drugs and she broke entirely. Her delusions got worse every time we saw her, up to the point where I began having nightmares and I stopped wanting to talk to adults, just in case they were like she was. She would have these sort of episodes where she screamed at mum and dad for taking me away from her and this terrified me. She stopped being my birth-mother and became a nightmare for a while. 

Growing Up 

When our village moved over the road (https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/arkwright-town) it could have been an amazing fresh start. The houses were new and modern and bricks didn't fall out of my bedroom wall as they did before. We had a huge new garden and even a garage! I thought it was fantastic, and all it took was methane seeping up through our old village and causing explosions! (This is why I refer to it as Silent Hill.)

But back then, my BM moved in with her new boyfriend and every time I saw them they were either high or drunk. They shouted the strangest things to my friends and I and even though she meant well, I really started to hate leaving the house. She followed me to school to wave at me through the gates, wearing the same clothes she'd had on all week and sometimes high because her boyfriend gave her something at 8.30 in the fucking morning. Anxiety started to kick in. 

Her visits to our house became more frequent and consisted of her telling mum and dad that I was too skinny or I wore tops too revealing and that - and this is the bit that stuck with me all this time - it wasn't safe for a girl to be friends with boys. I won't go into the details but for the next few years, she'd constantly remark on my friendship with my best friend, a boy, until I felt so bad about myself I wanted to stop going outside as often as I had. She'd become fixated on the idea that I'd get pregnant young like she did and end up mentally ill and she wasn't scared to tell me things in detail about how that happened. She'd tell me about drugs and violent movies she'd watched, despite mum's attempts to stop her. I think mum was always a little scared of my BM because she just sort of let BM tell me this stuff. Pretty soon mum too became a little fixated with my relationships with boys as well. 

Then BM's boyfriend got a great idea that they should take back custody and I went through the next year or so in the middle of a gruesome court battle where my parents desperately tried to stop them from taking me away from the only safe place I had in the world. Luckily, when mum and dad were in a lot of debt from court bills and things were starting to look a little like Hell, I wrote quite a strongly-worded letter for a 9-year-old and posted it to BM. It was shown in court and I had to have many interviews with solicitors etc about why I threatened to kill people, so it was decided that was a sign that I probably didn't want to leave my mum and dad. They won. I stayed at home. Of course, the panic of being taken away from my family had left me with panic attacks, bed-wetting and extreme anxiety around any adult that I met. I gained like ten phobias that I am still struggling to shake to this day because of that battle. 

My sister was only a baby at this time and had a much better relationship with our BM than I did. My resentment had run deep by this point and I'm not going to pretend that I didn't wish she just didn't exist at all. My sister was brought up by her own father and they didn't live in the same village, so she really only saw her mother on the weekends, but even that had traumatic moments until finally, those stopped too because of how bad things were getting. My sister struggled with anger as a toddler - unsurprisingly. 

Effects 

Both my sister and I have our own issues with mental health and struggle with periods of high anxiety and depression. I dropped out of school at 14 because the idea of being around so many people terrified me. I completely shut down. My sister and I were bonded in one sense but we even had trouble spending time together because of the confusing life we were brought into and we acted out a lot with each other. Everything was just so different from everyone else's life. I don't think we ever understood why. 

Because I looked so much like my BM, it felt like most people around me were just waiting for that behaviour to show in me. Even a normal kid tantrum would end in my mental health being questioned and I grew up having absolutely no idea what normal was. The angrier I got at people for judging me that way, the worse they got. I was just like my mother. In my teen years, mum kept a really tight grip on me and she stopped letting me hang around with my friends if I was out of her sight and there was a boy in the group. We could watch TV in the garage or go to the park where she could see me. The odd time I slipped away to go hang out somewhere in the fields or woods, she'd go to my friend's house and get his mother to come find us. It got so embarrassing that I eventually just gave up. She was just so scared that I'd do something to trigger schizophrenia or get pregnant or God knows what else and I was put on anti-depressants at 14 years old without a single diagnosis. Been on them on-and-off ever since. 

I still to this day get asked if I have my 'mother's ways' when people who know her see me in the street and if I'm ever arguing with someone it's always brought up. 

Until I was 19, I hadn't left my village alone. I became a scared shut-in who thought everything in the world was terrible and people were all crazy and wanted to hurt me. Both my sister and I struggle with panic attacks still, although things are better now. 

I finally conquered my fears a few years ago when my mum died and I had no choice but to do things by myself and for myself. Though being without her broke my heart and I miss her every single day, it also pushed me towards where I am now. 

My sister and I have a good relationship now and we try to see our BM as often as possible. She's doing better these days than she was when I was in my teens. She still thinks Egyptian gods live inside her walls and she struggles with distinguishing reality and fiction, but she's placid. In the past ten years, her doctors and care team have gradually done more for her than they did my entire childhood and the effects are noticeable. She'll never be cured. Her illness went too far for that and she's consistently stuck in her own head, but she's happier now. Settled. We're old enough now to understand that nothing she did or said was her own fault and we try our hardest to keep any childhood resentments out of the way, though it is hard. I call her mum now, she likes that a lot. It's hard for me but she deserves it. Her entire life has been buried in her illness. I can't imagine what it must have been like for her, not knowing what is real and what is in her mind. Watching her children being brought up by other people. 

My sister and I are the only family members left to visit her. It's been hard on every single member of the family, especially my dad. He has remarried and is trying to live the happiest life he can after all the shit he's been through - before and after mum died. 

Lara has seen her grandmother a few times now and it's gone okay, I am careful as my daughter has issues with shyness and I don't want to scare her. But I want her to have as good a relationship with her grandmother as she can because, despite the dark cloud in her mind, she is still our blood. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her. 

So, if you know someone suffering from this - or any other - illness of the mind, remember that if they could be better, they would and spare a thought for their family. It's hard. Really hard. 

Thanks for reading, if you did. I think all the above is one of the reasons why I am proud to be weird. I earned it. :D 

NX 

P.S. I'm going to write another blog post about anxiety next and the things I found helpful for panic attacks and general anxiety if anyone's interested. I'll publish it on my Facebook when I do! 

P.S.S. I am not going to pretend I proof-read this, so sorry for the scrambled thoughts! xD