Me and My Anxiety Today
I was diagnosed with GAD, Generalised Anxiety Disorder, almost 2 years ago now after experiencing a severe and out of the blue prolonged episode of anxiety, depression and OCD. Getting a diagnosis isn’t helpful for everyone but for me it explained a lot. It explained why I always felt more on edge than my friends when we were in a cab home from a nightclub, it explained why I slept with the hallway light on until I was 16, it explained why I can’t relax until I know a loved one has arrived safely at a destination. Guys I used to be scared of birds, cats, halloween, the dark, even some episodes of Eastenders as a child make my heart beat fast and I’d get a prickly sensation in my arms. It was helpful to understand that it’s not me, but it’s my anxiety that attaches to literally anything and makes it scary and something to fear.
Christmas and New Year can be, for me, a period of heightened anxiety, it marks the the anniversary of when I got unwell, it marks an anniversary of a time when someone really hurt me and it throws up a lot of “stuff”. We always remember what we were doing and who we were with and what are circumstances were at this time of year right. Of course I have so many happy warm and comforting memories of the festive season, my parents literally made Christmas the best day ever in our house but even this heightened level of excitement is very close to a feeling of anxiety. I’d wake up at 4am most Christmas mornings as a child, that’s the same time I woke up when I got an attack of anxiety on Christmas morning 2 years ago too.
I always saw this part of myself as something I’d “get over” or one day be able to “draw a line under” but recently I’ve understood that we can never really draw a line under things that make us who we are, they are always there. Of course I’d prefer my GAD to stay very much in the shadows but it’s always there. It’s just about managing it, allowing heightened episodes to pass, creating coping mechanisms and learning to ebb and flow with every thing that makes up US.
I still get beautiful and sometimes hard to read emails from people who stumble across my blog posts about being unwell. I’ve had moments of thinking I should erase those memories from the blog but one recent email stopped me in my tracks. It was from someone who has been doing my pilates routines during this year and didn’t know me or follow me before. They then found my post and said their reaction was simultaneously compassion and a strange sort of gratitude, relief. They found it a comfort to be taught by someone who had suffered in the same way they do. I’m not sure why but I found that beautiful. Pilates is my life work, that means I am going to have ups and downs just like you who join me on the mat and through my work as your pilates teacher I’m never asking for perfection.
I want you to know that I know what it feels like to feel terrified, to not quite no why or what for but that it’s completely suffocating and all you hope for is a moment of relief. Soon those moments of relief can get longer and go on for days/weeks. Maybe we have years where we really do feel like we have drawn a line under something but it’s okay for “stuff” to come up or to have little set backs. Let’s not ask too much of ourselves hey.
It’s funny because even now that I’ve had a long period of being “okay”, it’s easy to forget how disabling that time was, how uttering desperate I was and I remember people telling that one day it will be a distant memory but those feelings are still so close to the surface that it keeps me, in a way, grateful, grounded and reminds me every day to be gentle with myself, to prioritise my mental health over EVERYTHING. Because ultimately it is everything. Putting your mental health first, ultimately puts other first too. You help others by helping yourself. I don’t want us to just exist, we deserve to live.
Lottie x
