Non-titled – 31/05/2014

– This blog post again does not have a title as I didn’t put one when I was writing the notes for it. I am now remembering to do this 🙂

Waking up with anxiety is a big problem for me. I’ve noticed that when I record my Moodscope score just as I wake up in the morning it is usually a lot lower than my other scores that I have taken during the day. I don’t know if I should record my Moodscope scores twice- once in the morning and once in the evening. At the moment I am just trying to focus on recording the scores at least once a day. My plan for battling the depressing thoughts that \are fuelled by anxiety at the beginning of the day is by pushing them away by repeating a mantra in the morning when I wake up in my head. The mantra of ‘I love myself. I am a good person. I deserve good things. I deserve to heal’. Most times I just end up blurting this out in my head in a frantic attempt to push these thoughts away. I am starting to feel better in myself and the anxiety thoughts that I get at the beginning of the day as soon as I first wake up are beginning to lessen which is excellent.

When I made the notes for this post I wrote that I am aiming to dedicate portions of the day to self-love and positivity. I was also aiming to begin with spending 5 mins of each morning repeating this mantra. At this moment in time I haven’t specificially set out 5 minutes for this mantra but I am saying it and reminding myself to say it at different point of the day. I am also trying to find the time to sit down to write a daily journal entry, making a blog post and drawing, or going out and doing activities that I like. These all count as acts of self love , as do eating food, showering, sleeping, spending alone time and exercising. This is a lot to take on but when I think about it I have been doing these things anyways. I am aiming to attempt to continue to connect with myself on a daily basis as a grounding method.

I have been feeling overwhelmed with the amount of personal work that I have to do. However, when I wake up feeling tired and pissed off, I have to remind myself that the good mood I have been experiencing and the more positive experiences I have been having are due to me doing all this work despite it being difficult, alien and tiring. I am being to feel that it is ok to spend time alone, and that it is necessary. But also spending time with others and spending time doing other activities makes the time that I spend alone by myself feel more worthwhile and I enjoy that time more. My newest challenge is the challenge of being in the present. Not being in the past and feeling depressed. Or feeling anxious and worrying about the future. It is interesting how mental illness links with timeframe. A lot of the time I now find myself saying ‘Just worry about today’. Taking each day as it comes is completely new to me.

Lastly, the more I read about depression and anxiety, the more I begin to be able to name depression caused thoughts and anxiety caused thoughts as they are. Simply labelling a thought as ‘you are caused by anxiety , fuck off’ or ‘depression is making me think this’, is pretty empowering and is pretty useful aswel. I want to make the ‘normal’ voice in my head the loudest, so logically by labelling the negative thoughts as what they really are , this should help?? I hope so anyway..

 

28th May 2014

(I didn’t have a title for this blog post, I only have the date on which I made the notes for it)

Of recent I have been scoring in the 40’s and 50’s on my moodscope. These are the highest scores I have recorded on there since last May when I started to record my mood. The beginning of my highest scores ever began on the 28th of May, which is a far cry from this time last year. I have a picture that I drew on the 29th of May 2013, when I believed that my little sister was about to die. I drew the angel of death. I think that picture was one of the darkest that I have drawn. I still have it on my wall, I think it is important to acknowledge the feelings that I had at that time, but to also take into account that all is well now.

I have a habit of not wanting to come home. I think this is linked to the fact that I feel as if home is not a place that I want to come back to. ‘Home’ as in the sense of the childhood home that I had no choice but to go back to. I am trying to make sure I make the journey back home when I go to visit friends, I think it is important for me to feel as if I have a place that I can go back to, which is safe and which is my own space. Safety and personal space is a thing I am working very hard at attempting to create. I think it will help in the journey of attempting to heal from never feeling safe during my childhood. I remember being at home and dreading the sound of either my mum or dad coming in through the door. The locking myself up in my room and pretending to sleep. Even not eating because I did not want to be around anyone. I still do that now sometimes when I feel particularly low. I lock myself up in my room and don’t eat for days. It doesn’t do me any good and I am punishing myself due to the actions of others.

I have actively been doing more personal work. I think I am getting better at connecting with myself as opposed to just writing streams of misery and dwelling in that misery. I miss myself, I had a very close relationship to myself when I was younger, I suppose I had to, nobody else did. I think this relationship is important and I am working on trying to mend this relationship and get it back. I am recognising that the self- help that I am doing has contributed to this and now I want to be able to feel strong in the confidence of myself and know that the work I am doing is having an effect and is making me stronger.

In regard to my improvement in Moodscope scores, it is not that I have been feeling fantastic, I think it was mainly me being honest in my feelings that helped me to improve my mood. I think a big contributor to depression is the fact you become numb to your own feelings and you forget that you have any or pretend that nothing affects you. I think this just works to make you further depressed. Of recent, due to the CBT iIhave completed, I think I feel a bit safer in attempting to be honest in how I feel with people that I trust. I think this is important, it allows me to get things off my chest and it allows me to remember that I have people that I can talk to if I need support.

I ave become resigned to the fact that I probably have to get used to doing a lot of writing from now on, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. I think for me writing is a release, it is the first way that I am able to get thoughts out of my head and in time this allows me to speak about these thoughts. Writing makes the thoughts real which can be scary, but also helps me to evaluate and process my thoughts. Writing in my personal diary aswel has also helped me greatly and I often feel better for writing things down in a place that I know is for my eyes only. Although I still have the fear someone will read it against my will. I think this also stems from childhood and having no privacy in my house. Now I am an adult and I am entitled to privacy and nobody can take that away from me.

 

Why do I never want to get out of bed?

Although I made the notes for this blog post about over a week ago, it is pretty relevant as I am writing after spending the entire day yesterday in bed depressed and thinking. I think the only people who can understand this and why this happens is those who have gone through depression themselves. It’s times like this I realise that I am unwell. And I guess sometimes I need to spend the day in bed, often after spending a day or two I feel a lot better and have managed to think through some things in my head, also for me I think it is a chance to spend time by myself away from the world.

I was questioning why I never want to get out of bed in the mornings. Of recent it has been the anxiety that kicks in. Anxiety that comes to me first thing in the morning and it says that today is going to be shit. You are shit. Everyone else around you knows you are shit and pathetic. Everyone is going to laugh at you. Your boyfriend is going to dump you because you are too stressful. You have failed in life. etc. etc. All this in probably the first minute of waking up. This is too much.I decided to counteract these thoughts by the first thing I do in the morning when I wake up is too tell myself ‘I love myself and I deserve good things’, I have been repeating this quite a lot of recent. And now it seems easier to get rid of the dark thoughts when they come. 

Sometimes when you have gone through a heavy day and wake up to a new day, it feels as if you have to face the weight of coping through another day. But I guess I have gone through a lot of crap days, so I’m guessing what lies ahead cannot be worse. I’m sure I can survive the aftermath. I know this deep down, just sometimes I do not believe it, until I have to be strong by myself and cope

I think a main factor of depression is due to being depressed, you do not want to face the day by yourself. It is the feelings of loneliness and despair that make it tough. Some days as soon as I wake up I want to cry. Maybe this is not necessarily a bad thing. I remind myself I have not really felt any emotion for the past year whilst on Prozac, this is probably my body’s natural response.

When I lay in bed , I get to remain depressed and think of how things will go wrong. In my rational mind I know this is not healthy, but at times it is only through being in bed that I can pin point what is upsetting me deeply. For instance, yesterday I read alot about looking after the inner child, rejecting parents and I reflected a lot on my childhood and my relationship with my mum, dad and uncle. This gave me a lot of insight and I was able to connect with my inner child and feel the grief and emotion that I was not allowed to feel when I was younger.

Lastly, I think the scariest thing about depression and not wanting to get out of bed is the suicidal thoughts first thing in the morning. Getting up and the first thing you think is ‘I wish I was dead’. I don’t want to live the rest of my life like this. And I am confident I won’t. I am out of bed today, I can get out of bed tomorrow. Hopefully this will all pass.

Life beyond self hatred?

When I began this blog it was sort of half a personal blog for myself, and also a blog for the public. I don’t know why but I always have felt the need to broadcast my life to people in the hopes of sorting out things in my head. Obviously it is good to talk to people about your problems, but sometimes I find myself writing or acting out my life in the way I feel that other people would like. I don’t think this is good because it doesn’t particularly help me, it just puts in my head the idea that I am staring in some sort of soap drama, when in reality I am not, and really what I need to do is reconnect with myself and stop disassociating from my life and my feelings. I need to learn to live my life for myself, something I was not taught to do and now I am struggling to learn how to do.

 Yesterday I bought myself a little pocket notebook, one of those small notebooks that I can slip in my handbag and carry around with me to jot ideas down. I am using this notebook as my blogging notebook, mainly because I ask myself a lot of emotional questions and have the bad habit of overthinking and then never remembering what I was thinking about. I think it helps me to think out things but sometimes I feel I think too much and it doesn’t really get me anywhere.. perhaps that is anxiety.

Its a bit strange getting used to the idea of writing out my blog before I type it up, but I think maybe in this way I keep a bit for myself, I do it for myself, I am the first one I am writing to, I am not writing for the benefit or for the eyes of other people. I thought that it would be a good idea for me to write a personal blog for myself. I guess in this sense it is a diary, but instead I just ramble on about things. Come to think of it I don’t really understand what the difference between a blog and a diary is really, I guess a blog is just online.

anyways i guess i should type up what i wrote yesterday (saturday):-

 My problem with anxiety and depression and fantasying catastrophes for myself, the destructive high of drama and negativity reached new heights yesterday. Partly it was not all my fault, but I understand that I do need to work hard at taking care of myself and being present and off the internet and in touch with myself. I haven’t really decided what my plan is. To plan blog posts and write them up, or to generally keep a diary. i think keeping a diary I can write in, or as many different writing books as possible would be best.

  I am tired of hating myself and feeling bad and undesirable. When I am not causing myself stress of thinking that the worst is aways about to happen, of feeling that good things do not deserve to happen to me. Of never wanting to feel present in my life. As if my life is unimportant and that I need to be someone other than myself. It is a habit and an addiction and like all addictions, the negative effects are time wasting, both mentally and physically. I think the main truth if it really is I feel lost and I’m not  really quite sure what to so with myself. Perhaps this is what spurs on the need to feel miserable all the time. I need to actually be able to sit down and not be too hard on myself, I have been through alot, particularly atm and I am going through and anniversary of sorts. 

I think now the message of one day at a time, i really need to take seriously, before I push myself into another breakdown. I am finding it very hard by myself, being alone, not having constant comfort from my bf, feeling as if I will never see him again, feeling as if he will leave me and forever abandon me. The fear of abandonment, it is my biggest fear, although I will never talk about it to anyone. Never to a counsellor, never to a friend, never to my bf, never to myself really. How does a person get rid of the fear of being abandoned, when they constantly feel that they themselves are not worth sticking around for? 

I am very tired atm, I think it was the mental exhaustion from Friday, I need to rest and relax, but as soon as I think that, the first thought is to go back onto social media, on to fb, on to the internet, to feel wanted. I think perhaps recognising when I am not in a state where I feel good about myself, that it is not productive or helpful to do these things.

On reflection, the fear that my bf will disappear forever has never been made reality, I think the main problem is fear of abandonment from my mother, father and uncle, during my time of need – childhood, and my inner child doesn’t know how to cope with this. I became an adult too early and now I am confused. It is as if I have an obsession with abandonment. It causes me to fail to spend quality time with myself and it causes me to fail to understand why people would wish to spend quality time with me

it’s better out than in…

ok. so i think i am beginning to make signs of recovery but i am still pretty nervous and anxious. i have been going out a lot more of recent, trying to learn how to relax, and i’ve been going back to the way i was in terms of wanting to be myself and not fit into the mould of what other ppl want me to be. ive been meeting up with friends a lot more… well the old friends i still may or may not have after being unwel for a very long time and not knowing how to cope with depression.

it is now more than a year since i first started this blog. i remember where i was then , tired – sleeping for whole days, not eating anything, not showering, my whole life revolving around whatever abusive relationship or guy i was involved with, a lot of drinking to be drunk and fucking random strangers… just to get a bit of attention.

i think the hardest thing to do in the journey of i duno.. journey of what journey of becoming one with ur mental disorder (?), is to first of all accept that you have a mental disorder. this is the first step and is actually pretty challenging. i dont even think i have overcome this first step but i’m getting there. accepting you have a disability takes time and ive found that actively speaking out on the internet and real life to ppl with the same sort of problems as i have has helped a lot.

another issue in this step is facing the issues or events in ur life which may have caused or triggered a particularly mental disorder. this requires being able to actually allow your to actually open up to yousrelf and having the ability to spend time with urself. this is another step which i working on. it helps in term of self -care… which i’ve gradually began to understand the meaning of.

for now i am trying to plan my time slowly and carefully and allow myself to rest and try and learn to be positive once again

Boxes

i feel as if i am in a ‘putting everything into boxes’ stage.

 

im a bit confused  my brain feels as if its trying to solve 101 problems at the same time the first problem being how the hell do i look after myself?

my head is spinning and i feel dizzy.

it sounds silly, i’m 20 and after so many years of focusing and looking after other people i still do not know how to look after myself.

i don’t think i’ve been looking after myself very well because my back pain is still there, i’m still anxious, stressed and exhausted all the time.

i duno maybe i need to sit down and have a think and some proper time to myself find a way to rest without sleeping the entire day away.

find a way to calm and centre myself in order to conserve energy and exercise my brain and body by doing positive things.. and retraining my mind to not always be in the negative.

i should probably practice the ‘holi-hour’.. one hour a day where you do something nice and relaxing for yourself which makes you feel good.

imagine having to pencil in relaxation time for yourself into your diary

… crazy world

Love?

selfishness.

my heart treated like a revolving door.

no mercy, cruel, unkind

blame.

no pity

one time, twice, a third

no more.

false friendships and and false trust

lies.

arguments.

stress

Heartbreak. Tears

Selfish, drunk and stupid

low self esteem

self-worth gone.

dragged on the floor with dirt

like the dirt you are.

embarrassed.

never again.

 

 

 

then the door opens again.

shit.

Mrs Jekyll and Mrs Hyde

I have a friend, but sometime’s it’s an enemy

sometimes she helps me think, 

at other times she helps me cry.

 

One day happiness

The next sorrow

One day sun

the next- a storm of hate

 

she comes and she goes.

there is no control

the drugs don’t keep her at bay

 

she wins hearts and she loses them

she shows love,

then manipulates

in my head there is only room for one.

still

yesterday was a weird day for me.

i broke down in tears as i contemplated my life and all the hurt that i have been through.

the confusion.

the loneliness.

the unhappiness.

the helplessness.

i acknowledged that i was not stone. that i was human. that my past has affected me, that i need support, that i need help, that i cannot control everything.

i feel pretty helpless and in shock atm.

the full realization of being hurt again and again and having the wind knocked out of you is pretty paralyzing.

desperation

now that it’s gotten to the point that each morning i wake up and my first thought is to cry i’m guessing i’ve probably reached some sort of breaking point. so i’m going to set myself some goals

1. to wake up in the morning and get out of bed

2. to eat 3 meals a day

3. to walk outside for 30 minutes a day

4. to spend an hour reading each day

5. to write a blog post each day

6. to shower each day

 

hopefully there will be some improvement, otherwise i give up