Hidden Dragon
Edit: I really want to publish this now because I keep coming back to it and trying to make it more accurate, and eventually I just start confusing myself and the whole thing is so very long already... So here goes, even though it feels incomplete and even though right now it feels really inaccurate to say I'm better, because I have had a lovely little relapse these last couple days. Enjoy?
I've only ever had two dreams that I would call nightmares. In the first, I was being attacked and the only way for me to escape was to slowly and purposefully strangle the leader of the gang attacking me, until he died. I was upset all day after that, until my perceptive mother wheedled the story out of me.
The second came after reading a dystopian story based on Cinderella late into the night. It had that odd feeling of realism, that actually if you try to recreate Cinderella in reality it would be incredibly disturbing, a tale of a very vulnerable girl who didn't really have the choice about what happened between her and the prince. As I fell asleep it was as though I stepped into the story, into the gritty nastiness of it, the dank and dirty feeling. Eventually I began to fight to wake up, but the story had a hold on me and it took everything I could muster to keep my eyes open and anchor my attention back into reality.
I remember lying there in pitch blackness, exhausted and completely disorientated, repeating aloud basic facts about myself. My name. Who my parents are. Where I live. How old I am. Where I'm from. I remember struggling to grasp which things were real and which were part of the dream. I remember wondering vaguely if the things I was saying could really be true, because the feeling of realness was gone from them and the only thing that felt real was the dream I was still half living. Eventually things shifted back into place and I found I could close my eyes again without losing track of reality. I'm not sure I had ever felt so tired.
About this time last year I wrote a blog post describing the state of my mental health. You can read it here if you want to. Writing that post was a milestone because although I had been struggling for a long time, I had found it really difficult to express what was going on and I hadn't really successfully told anyone. I sat late into the night writing that blog post, because I knew that come morning, I wouldn't remember what it was I wanted to say. I'm glad I did; it has proved a really valuable place to send people who want to understand what is going on, and also for myself when I begin to wonder what really happened.
This is going to be a really long, really self-indulgent post. If you feel like reading it, you're welcome to; I'm all for raising awareness about mental health struggles. But be aware I'm writing it mostly for myself, to have my experience in words, so that I don't need to try and remember or try to explain again.
So what did happen?
In shorthand, I tell people that I struggled with anxiety and panic attacks. Things started turning sour from early 2015, and I first got panic attacks in April. December 2015 included some of the worst times of all, but in January 2016 things began to turn. That was when I wrote the blog post. Since then I've been getting gradually better, in a stop-starty sort of way. From January 2017, I am pleased to say I'm not sick anymore; I'm living with a bunch of consequences and issues that aren't yet resolved, and I still have panicky moments and despairing moments, but I am of sound mind.
Life seems so easy now by contrast. It seems like a good moment, maybe, to look back with a bit more perspective at what the heck was going on.
Anxiety and racing thoughts
It started from a place where I was questionning a lot of my core beliefs and at the same time dealing with some completely new challenges. I thought the best approach was to get all the processing out of the way so that I could deal with the challenges, and I pushed myself to figure everything out. Processing turned into overthinking, and overthinking became all-consuming. My mind would travel round the same track of a problem I couldn't seem to get out of, and as the thought process became more familiar my mind sped faster and faster, too fast to have spotted any new solutions even if they had been there.
About 6 months in, I made it a discipline for a week to spend 20 minutes each day not thinking about one particular problem that was eating me up. I couldn't distract myself, so I would sit in my room with my eyes on the clock and focus entirely on pushing away every thought that came to me, because every thought was about this one problem. Once 20 minutes was up I would let my mind race away again, but they were my first steps in learning to discipline my unruly anxious thoughts.
It still took a very long time after that. Once I was mostly better, I had a few days of deep, deep discouragement realising that I had woken up pretty much every day for the past 22 months with that same problem on my mind. I'm glad to say that in the last couple of months it has finally stopped being the first thought to greet me in the morning, but there was a time when I wondered if I was saddled with it for life.
Something rancid and something gone
What I think isn't captured in the word 'anxiety' was a horrid feeling underlying it. I've never been much of a worrier, and that was changing, but alongside the new anxious thoughts something else had shifted. It felt like poison, or a disease. In the way that when you have a tummy bug, any food, whether good or bad, can make you sick, everything around me seemed to pick up an off taste, to be slightly wrong in a way that was indefininable but that made me want to throw up. One source of anxiety was never knowing when this feeling would come up, what would trigger it, and whether I would be able to handle it.
Sometime in September I got this feeling one day, and I realised that it had been a couple of months since I'd last felt it, and despite the rancidness of it I was suddenly really happy knowing that feeling was basically no longer in my life.
The second thing underlying my anxiety was that suddenly I wasn't able to handle challenges anymore. Usually when an unexpected difficulty arises, you can grit your teeth and just stagger on anyway, but suddenly I couldn't do that. In a few months I lost the best part of my confidence, not because I ever doubted the skills or abilities I had always had. Rather, something inside me that I could depend on was gone and if something went wrong I simply didn't have the capacity to deal with it, to put it right. I stopped making promises when that happened; I still don't commit to anything without the caveat 'assuming I'm well'.
Taking myself seriously
A lot of the feelings I was dealing with when I was unwell just didn't make much sense. I would look at my life and think, there's nothing wrong; or at least, nothing that is any more difficult or confusing than what I'd lived with up to that point. So I couldn't see where the things I was dealing with were coming from, and that made it feel as though I had made it all up.
One thing that often happens when people struggle with mental health issues is that others tell them it's only feelings and to get over it. No-one ever said those things to me; no-one ever questioned that if I said I was struggling, then I really was. The only person, in fact, who I found it hard to convince, was myself. There's nothing wrong, I would think bewilderedly, striking round for something that might explain the fact that I was crying, or panicking. There's nothing wrong here, you can't be reacting that way, you must be making it up. Imaginary scenes played in my head where I would run to friends or strangers desperately pleading for help, and I'd laugh at myself and call myself a drama queen. Then sometimes I would think that actually, there has to be something wrong for real if you're crying every time you're on your own, like on the way to work and all the way through your lunchbreak and often in the toilets in between times.
But there was nothing I could put my finger on, nothing I could explain or even describe, and nothing I could see to do about it, and even now I look back at the facts and find I'm caught between wondering whether I made it all up or whether it was actually much, much more serious than I thought and I have had a rather narrow escape.
Other people
Another thing that didn't help me take it seriously was that for a really long time I really only struggled when I was on my own. It's probably linked to being an extrovert. I could have the worst day on my own at home, and then one of my housemates would walk in the door, ask how I was and I would say 'great', and it would be completely true - even though it wasn't true just before they walked in. This meant that when I tried to explain to people what was going on, I felt like I was making it up and often I couldn't even remember what I was trying to describe. It wasn't just that the bad stuff had receded into the background, but that it wasn't there at all and I'm tempted to say, didn't even exist at that point.
That was a main reason that writing the other post I mentioned above about what I was experiencing was so important. Suddenly if I wasn't sure what was going on I had something written to point myself to, like a witness statement confirming that I wasn't making it up.
Over time things evened out a bit; things aren't as bad when I'm on my own, but the things that are there don't disappear when someone else appears. The weird consequence of this is that people around me starting to clock something was up right about when I started getting better.
Self-harm
I never properly self harmed. I don't understand what produces the temptation, but it was definitely there and often still is when I'm upset. It was something to do with knowing that the pain I dealt with was coming from inside me, so somehow to get rid of it meant destroying something within me. I would slap myself sometimes, or bang my head against a wall, but it always made things worse and I am too rational by nature to keep doing something that actively makes things worse. I bite my hands sometimes; that does help a little bit. I've never been suicidal, but I get now why some people are; I know the feeling that there is absolutely no way out of the place you're in.
The good thing about writing this rather than saying it aloud to someone is that I can pretend I'm just writing it to myself, and then I can be much more honest.
Disconnection
I've been reading a brilliant book over the past couple of days, Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey, which I will be reviewing soon. The book is from the perspective of an elderly woman with dementia and her state of mind is beautifully captured, but the sense of vague confusion that pervades the book felt disconcertingly familiar.
The reason I brought up that nightmare at the start of the post was the feeling of disconnection from reality it brought. At no point in my illness have I not known which things were factually real, had actually happened, and which were not. But like in that nightmare, the sense of reality had a tendency to detach itself from real events and attach itself to other things instead; a book I was reading, or a daydream, or just some feeling or other.
Too many stories
The amount of fiction around made it worse. I've always run to stories for a little 'time out' from real life, but suddenly needing a lot more time out means that I was getting through a lot more fiction. Flitting between different stories on TV, in books, on the news and in very different contexts of real life made all of them feel sort of made up.
I still find it hard to get my head around the fact that the conflict in Syria, for instance, is as dreadful as it has become, or that Donald Trump is president of the USA; both those things seem way too far-fetched.
Shaky foundations
It didn't help that an awful lot of my basic beliefs about the world were up for questionning, and had been for a while. My world fluctuated between one where God was in complete control and one where He was just a figment of my imagination, and the chats I had about Him with other Christians were really just pretty stories we had all agreed to pretend were true.
Lying to yourself
When you're dealing with mental health stuff a lot of the advice that you are given is to remind yourself what is true and what isn't. (That's the idea, for instance, behind CBT, which is recommended as a treatment for both anxiety and depression. The theory is that you have unhealthy thought patterns which sustain the negative thoughts. The role of the CBT therapist is to help you unpick those thought patterns and pick out where you've gone wrong, what false beliefs or incorrect logic is leading you to the negative conclusions. There's something oddly naive about the underlying assumption that negative conclusions must be wrong.)
This means you end up telling yourself that all the things like dangers and fears which seem really real are not real, and the things that seem really far-fetched are real, and it gets very confusing and disorienting quite quickly.
Memory
I was heading towards a new relationship when all this kicked off (abysmal timing of course, but I hadn't seen the whole mental health thing coming, and even once I did, I couldn't see why having someone around who would look out for me wouldn't be a good thing). Everything felt so significant that at first, I remembered every single conversation we had, the precise words burned into my brain. I'd always wondered how people who write memoirs remember specific conversations to quote later, but now I was doing it myself.
Then I found out something I would have liked to know, and he said he'd already told me, and I simply couldn't remember him telling me. I said he hadn't, but he was insistent, he had definitely told me.
Suddenly I didn't know anymore if my brain was telling me the truth. I remember a feeling like I'd been hit, everything reeling, like a short circuit through my mind. Later I convinced myself that he was wrong, that he had forgotten (and knowing him better now, that is by far the likelier explanation). But it was a massive knock to my confidence in my own memory.
I don't know exactly when I started struggling to remember things, but somewhere along the way I think my brain just got too tired, from overthinking and trying too hard, and I simply don't remember things like I used to.
Exhaustion
I didn't realise how real this one was until the destructive stuff was basically all over. I laid aside one of the biggest challenges I had been trying to deal with and suddenly found I had tired my brain out so much it needed a really long rest before I tried dealing with any of the things that had broken it in the first place. Sometimes the wrong thought flitting through my mind can drain my energy in an instant. Six months on it still happens, but in between times I'm less exhausted, which is nice, except for the fact I can't really remember why all the things I wanted to do were important; they mostly sound a bit tiring and not quite worth the effort.
Here's a conclusion, because I've run out of steam
I was going to go on in this post to talk about some of the good stuff that's come out of this, about what some of the answers were for me and where I'm seeing value in having been there. Fact is, though, that the exhaustion thing is kicking in. I don't want to keep trying to be positive, and for all I don't describe myself as sick anymore, there's still so much of life that used to be really beautiful and now just mostly hurts. There were answers, there are still answers that I'm uncovering, along with new, hopefully slightly more helpful questions. But for now this is me out; looking back over this and feeling like there's still so much that remains unexplained and unresolved.
I'm glad I've made it through the valley; but there's still so far to go to the top.
And here's a different conclusion, that I wrote in a different mood, and which is just as true
It's a weird sensation being mostly well again. Some things are just as bad, but I know I have what it takes to deal with it. Sometimes when I feel completely crap, I find myself laughing, giggling through my tears, because as bad as it gets, everything is so beautiful compared to how it would have been a year ago.
I've only ever had two dreams that I would call nightmares. In the first, I was being attacked and the only way for me to escape was to slowly and purposefully strangle the leader of the gang attacking me, until he died. I was upset all day after that, until my perceptive mother wheedled the story out of me.
The second came after reading a dystopian story based on Cinderella late into the night. It had that odd feeling of realism, that actually if you try to recreate Cinderella in reality it would be incredibly disturbing, a tale of a very vulnerable girl who didn't really have the choice about what happened between her and the prince. As I fell asleep it was as though I stepped into the story, into the gritty nastiness of it, the dank and dirty feeling. Eventually I began to fight to wake up, but the story had a hold on me and it took everything I could muster to keep my eyes open and anchor my attention back into reality.
I remember lying there in pitch blackness, exhausted and completely disorientated, repeating aloud basic facts about myself. My name. Who my parents are. Where I live. How old I am. Where I'm from. I remember struggling to grasp which things were real and which were part of the dream. I remember wondering vaguely if the things I was saying could really be true, because the feeling of realness was gone from them and the only thing that felt real was the dream I was still half living. Eventually things shifted back into place and I found I could close my eyes again without losing track of reality. I'm not sure I had ever felt so tired.
About this time last year I wrote a blog post describing the state of my mental health. You can read it here if you want to. Writing that post was a milestone because although I had been struggling for a long time, I had found it really difficult to express what was going on and I hadn't really successfully told anyone. I sat late into the night writing that blog post, because I knew that come morning, I wouldn't remember what it was I wanted to say. I'm glad I did; it has proved a really valuable place to send people who want to understand what is going on, and also for myself when I begin to wonder what really happened.
This is going to be a really long, really self-indulgent post. If you feel like reading it, you're welcome to; I'm all for raising awareness about mental health struggles. But be aware I'm writing it mostly for myself, to have my experience in words, so that I don't need to try and remember or try to explain again.
So what did happen?
In shorthand, I tell people that I struggled with anxiety and panic attacks. Things started turning sour from early 2015, and I first got panic attacks in April. December 2015 included some of the worst times of all, but in January 2016 things began to turn. That was when I wrote the blog post. Since then I've been getting gradually better, in a stop-starty sort of way. From January 2017, I am pleased to say I'm not sick anymore; I'm living with a bunch of consequences and issues that aren't yet resolved, and I still have panicky moments and despairing moments, but I am of sound mind.
Life seems so easy now by contrast. It seems like a good moment, maybe, to look back with a bit more perspective at what the heck was going on.
Anxiety and racing thoughts
It started from a place where I was questionning a lot of my core beliefs and at the same time dealing with some completely new challenges. I thought the best approach was to get all the processing out of the way so that I could deal with the challenges, and I pushed myself to figure everything out. Processing turned into overthinking, and overthinking became all-consuming. My mind would travel round the same track of a problem I couldn't seem to get out of, and as the thought process became more familiar my mind sped faster and faster, too fast to have spotted any new solutions even if they had been there.
About 6 months in, I made it a discipline for a week to spend 20 minutes each day not thinking about one particular problem that was eating me up. I couldn't distract myself, so I would sit in my room with my eyes on the clock and focus entirely on pushing away every thought that came to me, because every thought was about this one problem. Once 20 minutes was up I would let my mind race away again, but they were my first steps in learning to discipline my unruly anxious thoughts.
It still took a very long time after that. Once I was mostly better, I had a few days of deep, deep discouragement realising that I had woken up pretty much every day for the past 22 months with that same problem on my mind. I'm glad to say that in the last couple of months it has finally stopped being the first thought to greet me in the morning, but there was a time when I wondered if I was saddled with it for life.
Something rancid and something gone
What I think isn't captured in the word 'anxiety' was a horrid feeling underlying it. I've never been much of a worrier, and that was changing, but alongside the new anxious thoughts something else had shifted. It felt like poison, or a disease. In the way that when you have a tummy bug, any food, whether good or bad, can make you sick, everything around me seemed to pick up an off taste, to be slightly wrong in a way that was indefininable but that made me want to throw up. One source of anxiety was never knowing when this feeling would come up, what would trigger it, and whether I would be able to handle it.
Sometime in September I got this feeling one day, and I realised that it had been a couple of months since I'd last felt it, and despite the rancidness of it I was suddenly really happy knowing that feeling was basically no longer in my life.
The second thing underlying my anxiety was that suddenly I wasn't able to handle challenges anymore. Usually when an unexpected difficulty arises, you can grit your teeth and just stagger on anyway, but suddenly I couldn't do that. In a few months I lost the best part of my confidence, not because I ever doubted the skills or abilities I had always had. Rather, something inside me that I could depend on was gone and if something went wrong I simply didn't have the capacity to deal with it, to put it right. I stopped making promises when that happened; I still don't commit to anything without the caveat 'assuming I'm well'.
Taking myself seriously
A lot of the feelings I was dealing with when I was unwell just didn't make much sense. I would look at my life and think, there's nothing wrong; or at least, nothing that is any more difficult or confusing than what I'd lived with up to that point. So I couldn't see where the things I was dealing with were coming from, and that made it feel as though I had made it all up.
One thing that often happens when people struggle with mental health issues is that others tell them it's only feelings and to get over it. No-one ever said those things to me; no-one ever questioned that if I said I was struggling, then I really was. The only person, in fact, who I found it hard to convince, was myself. There's nothing wrong, I would think bewilderedly, striking round for something that might explain the fact that I was crying, or panicking. There's nothing wrong here, you can't be reacting that way, you must be making it up. Imaginary scenes played in my head where I would run to friends or strangers desperately pleading for help, and I'd laugh at myself and call myself a drama queen. Then sometimes I would think that actually, there has to be something wrong for real if you're crying every time you're on your own, like on the way to work and all the way through your lunchbreak and often in the toilets in between times.
But there was nothing I could put my finger on, nothing I could explain or even describe, and nothing I could see to do about it, and even now I look back at the facts and find I'm caught between wondering whether I made it all up or whether it was actually much, much more serious than I thought and I have had a rather narrow escape.
Other people
Another thing that didn't help me take it seriously was that for a really long time I really only struggled when I was on my own. It's probably linked to being an extrovert. I could have the worst day on my own at home, and then one of my housemates would walk in the door, ask how I was and I would say 'great', and it would be completely true - even though it wasn't true just before they walked in. This meant that when I tried to explain to people what was going on, I felt like I was making it up and often I couldn't even remember what I was trying to describe. It wasn't just that the bad stuff had receded into the background, but that it wasn't there at all and I'm tempted to say, didn't even exist at that point.
That was a main reason that writing the other post I mentioned above about what I was experiencing was so important. Suddenly if I wasn't sure what was going on I had something written to point myself to, like a witness statement confirming that I wasn't making it up.
Over time things evened out a bit; things aren't as bad when I'm on my own, but the things that are there don't disappear when someone else appears. The weird consequence of this is that people around me starting to clock something was up right about when I started getting better.
Self-harm
I never properly self harmed. I don't understand what produces the temptation, but it was definitely there and often still is when I'm upset. It was something to do with knowing that the pain I dealt with was coming from inside me, so somehow to get rid of it meant destroying something within me. I would slap myself sometimes, or bang my head against a wall, but it always made things worse and I am too rational by nature to keep doing something that actively makes things worse. I bite my hands sometimes; that does help a little bit. I've never been suicidal, but I get now why some people are; I know the feeling that there is absolutely no way out of the place you're in.
The good thing about writing this rather than saying it aloud to someone is that I can pretend I'm just writing it to myself, and then I can be much more honest.
Disconnection
I've been reading a brilliant book over the past couple of days, Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey, which I will be reviewing soon. The book is from the perspective of an elderly woman with dementia and her state of mind is beautifully captured, but the sense of vague confusion that pervades the book felt disconcertingly familiar.
The reason I brought up that nightmare at the start of the post was the feeling of disconnection from reality it brought. At no point in my illness have I not known which things were factually real, had actually happened, and which were not. But like in that nightmare, the sense of reality had a tendency to detach itself from real events and attach itself to other things instead; a book I was reading, or a daydream, or just some feeling or other.
Too many stories
The amount of fiction around made it worse. I've always run to stories for a little 'time out' from real life, but suddenly needing a lot more time out means that I was getting through a lot more fiction. Flitting between different stories on TV, in books, on the news and in very different contexts of real life made all of them feel sort of made up.
I still find it hard to get my head around the fact that the conflict in Syria, for instance, is as dreadful as it has become, or that Donald Trump is president of the USA; both those things seem way too far-fetched.
Shaky foundations
It didn't help that an awful lot of my basic beliefs about the world were up for questionning, and had been for a while. My world fluctuated between one where God was in complete control and one where He was just a figment of my imagination, and the chats I had about Him with other Christians were really just pretty stories we had all agreed to pretend were true.
Lying to yourself
When you're dealing with mental health stuff a lot of the advice that you are given is to remind yourself what is true and what isn't. (That's the idea, for instance, behind CBT, which is recommended as a treatment for both anxiety and depression. The theory is that you have unhealthy thought patterns which sustain the negative thoughts. The role of the CBT therapist is to help you unpick those thought patterns and pick out where you've gone wrong, what false beliefs or incorrect logic is leading you to the negative conclusions. There's something oddly naive about the underlying assumption that negative conclusions must be wrong.)
This means you end up telling yourself that all the things like dangers and fears which seem really real are not real, and the things that seem really far-fetched are real, and it gets very confusing and disorienting quite quickly.
Memory
I was heading towards a new relationship when all this kicked off (abysmal timing of course, but I hadn't seen the whole mental health thing coming, and even once I did, I couldn't see why having someone around who would look out for me wouldn't be a good thing). Everything felt so significant that at first, I remembered every single conversation we had, the precise words burned into my brain. I'd always wondered how people who write memoirs remember specific conversations to quote later, but now I was doing it myself.
Then I found out something I would have liked to know, and he said he'd already told me, and I simply couldn't remember him telling me. I said he hadn't, but he was insistent, he had definitely told me.
Suddenly I didn't know anymore if my brain was telling me the truth. I remember a feeling like I'd been hit, everything reeling, like a short circuit through my mind. Later I convinced myself that he was wrong, that he had forgotten (and knowing him better now, that is by far the likelier explanation). But it was a massive knock to my confidence in my own memory.
I don't know exactly when I started struggling to remember things, but somewhere along the way I think my brain just got too tired, from overthinking and trying too hard, and I simply don't remember things like I used to.
- Melissa. It's my boss interrupting my thoughts. Did you make that call? What's he talking about? My brain hurts and blanks out a couple times, hunting for the little piece of information. Just in time, there it is. Relieved, I smile. Just getting to it. And I make a note this time, and stick it in the middle of my screen.
- Up to anything fun? I ask. I've just walked in the door and my housemate it on her way out. She looks hurt. I told you twice already. It rings a bell, faintly. Sorry, I forgot. What I don't say is that I still don't remember.
- Catching up with an old friend at a wedding. It's fun seeing people again, but more tiring than it used to be. He's about to go but I hold him back for a second. I know I already asked you, about five minutes ago. I remember asking and I remember you answering, but I don't remember what you said. What is it you're doing now?
Exhaustion
I didn't realise how real this one was until the destructive stuff was basically all over. I laid aside one of the biggest challenges I had been trying to deal with and suddenly found I had tired my brain out so much it needed a really long rest before I tried dealing with any of the things that had broken it in the first place. Sometimes the wrong thought flitting through my mind can drain my energy in an instant. Six months on it still happens, but in between times I'm less exhausted, which is nice, except for the fact I can't really remember why all the things I wanted to do were important; they mostly sound a bit tiring and not quite worth the effort.
Here's a conclusion, because I've run out of steam
I was going to go on in this post to talk about some of the good stuff that's come out of this, about what some of the answers were for me and where I'm seeing value in having been there. Fact is, though, that the exhaustion thing is kicking in. I don't want to keep trying to be positive, and for all I don't describe myself as sick anymore, there's still so much of life that used to be really beautiful and now just mostly hurts. There were answers, there are still answers that I'm uncovering, along with new, hopefully slightly more helpful questions. But for now this is me out; looking back over this and feeling like there's still so much that remains unexplained and unresolved.
I'm glad I've made it through the valley; but there's still so far to go to the top.
And here's a different conclusion, that I wrote in a different mood, and which is just as true
It's a weird sensation being mostly well again. Some things are just as bad, but I know I have what it takes to deal with it. Sometimes when I feel completely crap, I find myself laughing, giggling through my tears, because as bad as it gets, everything is so beautiful compared to how it would have been a year ago.
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