I Am Not Alright

This is me, my personal writing, my story. This is why mental health stigmatisation must end!

Over the past year or so I have begun to feel different and it is a feeling that is difficult to describe, it feels like a fear of nothing and it is a very real fear that leaves at best an uneasy feeling and at worst a feeling of absolute dread similar to that after being given a real freight. And the worst part is that it comes and goes, I have days that are great and I feel confident and on top of the moon. Like I could rule the world, although at the time of writing this it does seem that the bad days are more often. These are the days where getting out of my bed seems impossible, and the thought of having to even look at somebody else leaves my head spinning. The bad days are the days where I feel horrible around the people I love most and feel worthless and unwanted. The bad days are the days when you can feel your heartbeat through your chest when you are sitting in your sanctuary.

Possibly the most common question we face on a day to day basis is “How are you” and the answer is always “Alright” or some variation of. I am here to say that I am NOT ‘Alright’ any more. Every week is a battle with myself and I welcome you to my reasonless rambling about what it feels like to be sinking while you watch everyone else float.

Let’s start with the symptoms. This is what my own head does to me to make every day a losing battle with myself. 3. 2. 1. Go. I often find that when I am engaging with others (even the people I’m close to) I constantly find myself tripping over sentences and stumbling my words, and getting sudden fits of the shakes to the point it feels uncontrollable and I can’t use any motor skills to do things such as write or pick up a kettle and others notice my shaking which on one occasion was once so bad that my knees gave way in front of a support worker and I lost my balance and fell over. Due to these feelings I find myself avoiding social situations or cancelling last minute and I have been described as ‘Missing In Action’. I don’t even have to be with others to be feel choked by a non-existent threat, I can be sitting at peace and then I have thought of things like bills I haven’t got, or debt that I’m not in. Then I can feel my chest tightening and I become very aware of my breathing which then leads to irregular breathing and a few times it has gotten to the point where it feels like my throat is physically closing and I am gasping for breath. This is always seems to become to more enhanced when I am in very public situations such as on public transport, as I can often become very paranoid and very self-conscious. I begin to think everyone who is talking, is talking about me and everyone who is laughing, is laughing at me. And that kicks off the irregular breathing, and tight chest.

I don’t know if I would feel as bad if my irregular fear of everything only haunted me during the day but it follows me to bed. On good days (days where I have felt like myself instead of a mumbling, bumbling, choking social reject and idiot) I find myself fighting against sleep, so that I don’t have to mentally start a new day. It’s either this or my brain can be active enough to keep me awake for 48 hours at a time when I am going to bed at night. When I do get to sleep I have the most bizarre dreams, not always nightmares but always vivid and weird enough to wake me in the night and leave a lasting funny effect for the rest of the day. On top of this I find it impossible to get out of my bed, I feel that it has went beyond laziness and is more a compulsive action.

Now it’s all good saying what is happening but the question is why? Why can’t I sleep at night? Why do I start to shake? Why does my chest tighten? The truth is I have no idea. As life stands at the moment. I am comfortable, I’m not great and some may say I scrape by, but I scrape by successfully.

The next question may be why don’t I speak to someone that can help? Honestly I don’t have the social skills, it takes a level of confidence that I simply don’t possess to talk to someone about this sort of stuff, and I seem to lake the ability to talk to anyone about anything meaningful. For example I love my dad and it is easy enough to type but I can’t even tell him that without choking. How am I supposed to tell him that I am not ok? How am I supposed to explain all the things that I have listed? I manage to keep myself together, and I have never let on about any of this to the ones I love and always make an active effort to give the impression that I am coping. It makes me wonder if I am stupid and maybe everyone feels the same as I do and feel like they are worth less than everyone else but I feel like I am falling to pieces in front of them without them noticing and me being unable to tell them or talk to them and believe me I have tried. Many times I have tried to spit it out and instead I just brush it under the carpet. Maybe I am a coward, too scared to talk to someone for coming across as dramatic, and I think if someone tells me that it’s ‘just a phase’ I might just break down.

This is not the first time I have felt this cloud of strange feeling creep over me. In fact it’s the third. The first time I was 17 and I decided to move from my home not long after my mum had suddenly passed away and I moved around 90 miles away and started college. I quickly found myself lost and unable to cope with absolutely no income £0 and I didn’t know how to deal with it. Things escalated and before I knew I found myself living in a pig sty and I spent a month without electricity and just lived under my covers day after day wishing life would just stop. This lead to me being kicked out of college because I didn’t attend, I then lied to my dad about it. Inevitably he found out that I had been booted out of college but I had never explained just how bad that lost month was or told him the level of absolute nothingness I experienced. I just moved back home, broken and defeated. But I still swear silence on how bad things had gotten and until writing this had never openly communicated about just how low I had hit during that period of my life.

The second time was a few months after settling back with my dad (and his new found fiancée and step-son) and was room sharing with my best friend and big cousin. It was September 2015 to be precise, I remember and will always remember it well. I felt like this was much more sudden with less of a build-up than the first time. My cousin and I spent most nights listening to music or watching rubbish on telly, the nights were enjoyable but I was stuck in a rut and was unemployed, I wasted the days in bed and struggled to find a reason to get up in the morning, I started to feel like a waste of space. Not necessarily that nobody would care if I was gone but enough to feel like I wasn’t making a difference and was just taking up space. I’m sure if I had just spoke to someone it wouldn’t have escalated to the point that it did. After a few weeks of this constant feeling of hopelessness I decided that I was going to try and kill myself. It was that cut and dry at the time. If it worked it worked. If it didn’t it didn’t. Clearly it didn’t instead what I had done was mouthed 3 striped of tramadol, felt no effects, then agreed to meet my cousin off the bus around half an hour away from my house. I was fine until I was 5 minutes away from the local Asda where I was meeting her and was walking on a wooded nature walk path. That was the last thing I remember before waking up on the floor of Asda with 2 paramedics leaning over informing me that I had just had a Full blown seizure, or fit and to top it off I had split my head open. I was taken to hospital where I met my dad. That was it I had some staples in my head and walked home the next day with my secret. Nobody asked questions so I never gave any answers and to this day my family and friends believe that it was a human glitch and I have never given them any reason to believe otherwise or let them know that it was in fact a tramadol overdose. Of course there were hospital appointments which I never attended. Until writing this I was the only person who knew what I had done and why and once again I brushed it under the carpet where it remains until this day.

That leads us to now, where I feel myself slipping down that very familiar slide and still my mouth remains shut for fear of ridicule or not being taken seriously which sparks the symptoms I mentioned earlier.  I know what impact these feelings can have, they can cause you to lose all sense of feeling and belonging, they can rob you of your confidence and your personality, they rob you of your dignity and leave you wanting to scream the walls down but only being able to whisper and on the darkest days it can cause you to want to make it all end, to just not feel anything. The worst part is that I miss being able to feel at ease of comfortable with those around me. I have forgotten what it feels like to feel genuinely content and yet I still can’t ask for the help that I need. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel so bloody terrified to seek help if it wasn’t for the concept of being stigmatized as weak, or having people think I can’t cope. I’ve coped thus far, and between the pressures of stigmatization and the underlying fear of absolutely everything I seem to have developed it feels like I have impossible barriers to clear so that I can just move on with my life. So don’t think that I am broken or that I am unstable, unrealizable or lazy because I put every effort into making my day to day life look easy, I am not weak and you wouldn’t be able to spot me on the street I am just another stranger you walk past and never noticed. I am still stuck in the cycle, so the next time someone asks “How are you” I will reply “Alright”. You don’t have to, don’t make my mistakes, don’t suffer because of other peoples believes and opinions. Don’t suffer out of fear when there is no real danger, don’t find yourself in crisis, don’t leave it too late. This is easier said than done, believe me if I was strong enough I would take my own damn advice and I would maybe be able to start my path to recovery. Don’t suffer in silence, and together let us work together and do our part to help end mental health stigma’s and make it a little easier for us people that choke on out voices.