Something personal

Solidarity teaches you the most about yourself. Your moods, your thoughts, your physical needs like hunger or human contact. Only when you put yourself or find yourself in a situation where you and you alone are responsible for yourself, your actions, your progress, are you forced to ‘see’ yourself. And sometimes what you are confronted with is ugly, because you realise that there are aspects of yourself you’d rather not have found out, aspects that you wouldn’t want others to realise. For example, I get distracted very easily. So easily that in the process of writing one e-mail I would have made myself a cup of tea, checked my message on my phone, had a scroll through my pictures on my phone, went to the toilet and daydream about the weekend. An optimistic person would say that despite the breaking down of a simple task into a long process I have managed to get a lot done in between. A pessimist would say that I am not particularly a productive person. And here’s what I also discovered: I may have a minor bipolar disorder, which gets activated under intense anxiety.

There were days during my self created isolation of writing my dissertation where I am in an extremely productive state because everything seems doable, possible and just brilliant. Concentration would be sharp as a pencil. Life is beautiful, creative and satisfying. You have an endless amount of energy, which you want to share with everyone. And then there were days when I just could not convince myself that I can do any little thing. Feelings of self-loathing, exhaustion and hopelessness would completely take me over, sitting down or standing for minutes at a time staring into space, unable to make myself move physically because the mind refuses to animate. When you try to improve the situation by ‘offering’ to yourself things to do to keep yourself busy and not not thinking, the other part of you will find the negatives in each situation, the impossibles in every action.

During this time, if just one little thing goes spectacularly right, then the euphoria starts again. I realised that there is a trigger. The happiness trigger is almost always to do with people. Speaking to someone close on the phone, bumping into a friend unexpectedly, having a really good work conversation makes life just worth living. Of course when you’re aware of what your happy trigger is you start to dread and genuinely fear the sad triggers, because I know that if they jump out of somewhere, I can’t do anything about it, and usually it starts with the headaches. Pressure, guilt, misunderstanding may seem easy to handle, but when you know that these will trigger you into a state of mind which you cannot leave and sometimes, worryingly, you do not want to leave, you do everything you can to avoid the triggers. You wake up in the morning and try and see what the day will be like today. And some days it feels like this:

Photo by Ellen Forney

Funnily enough, my dissertation was on the concept of resilience-a theoretical thesis about how to respond in the event of disturbances or disasters and develop a self-organising system containing adaptive capacities. And somehow the theory taught me more about myself and has helped me to learn how to ‘bounce back’ from the sadder times.

When you physically and mentally isolate yourself you realise how isolating, and a scary thing to say aloud, a mental issue is. When people, jobs, everyday tasks surround you it’s not so easy to recognise the patterns, and this only confuses your mind and body. This summer has been a revealing one and it has taught me about the processes in my head, the triggers, recognising when it has started and then taking actions against it. And one action I take is to go for a quick run, and then meet a good friend. What about you?

World Mental Health Day 10 October 2014

http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/our-work/world-mental-health-day/