Mental Health
"Mental health problems don’t define who you are. They are something you experience. You walk in the rain and you feel the rain, but you are not the rain."
Earlier this year I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue and while I am not sure if it is an actual mental health issue but it has without a doubt had a huge impact on my mental health. I have been working with a healthcare professional for 6 months but still have really bad days.
Logically I understand that the bad days aren’t my fault and not something I can control, I still find them incredibly frustrating and hard to deal with.
I never struggled with anxiety until about 6/7 years ago. There were a few triggers for the anxiety but things started spiraling from there and ended earlier this year with my adrenal fatigue – I had literally stressed myself to exhaustion.
It was like nothing I have ever experienced – EVER.
The hardest part about dealing with anxiety and extreme exhaustion is that the world doesn’t stop so that you have time to get your cortisol levels back up.
Deadlines don’t move. Colleagues still rely on you. Kids still need you. The dog still needs to be fed.
Life goes on. And sometimes (most times) that makes the anxiety worse because you start doubting yourself and you feel bad for letting people down and the dog is still there, providing emotional support – even when you feed him late.
When you have the flu people can see you are sick. If you have chicken pox or bad sinus – people can see and hear you are sick. If you break your arm people can see you are struggling to type or shop.
But anxiety is invisible. You can sit in a meeting with insane anxiety and no one will know. You can even participate in the meeting completely exhausted and no one will know.
It is not because they don’t care or aren’t sympathetic, it is because they can’t see it so they don’t know it is there. How many meetings have you been in where someone says “Sorry guys I am struggling with anxiety today, please bare with me.”
So many of us deal with our anxiety alone. We do our best to get out of bed. We attend the meetings, or we find reasons to postpone them. We are there for the kids and we feed the dog.
It is HARD! Really hard.
And it is frustrating. I know what needs to be done and I want to do it but my body just physically won’t come to the party. It is frustrating to have this fight with yourself almost daily.
I know mental health issues are front and centre at the moment and organisations are starting to take them more seriously but if I am honest, it doesn’t make it any easier for me to deal with. It is still hard.
The Day 6 prompt for #Blogtober was Mental Health.
