a moment of weakness

 on some days are harder to get out of bed than others. today was one of those days, where i physically could not get up.

i have spent the last two months at one of the lowest points i’ve been with and i cannot even pin why. i keep thinking i’m okay but i think my brain has other ideas.

it’s hard to ask for help when you don’t know what you need help with. i cannot pinpoint a feeling or moment that is keeping me here but i feel like my head is barely staying above water. most days it is not, but i get moments of air that are keeping me from completing drowning.

i hate the metaphors but drowning is the only way i can even slightly express how i am doing. and it isn’t getting easier, if anything with every passing second i am falling deeper without even knowing it.

and i don’t know the way up from here. how could i when absolutely nothing feels wrong, but i cannot get out of bed most days and the days i can the basic things in my life feel overwhelming. just the other day i burst into tears when i simply opened the cupboard to get a plate for some food and just today i had an anxiety attack because i made a fucking tiktok wrong. 

i am so tired and i cannot say it again. i don’t know how else to comprehend and express my feelings than to mindlessly write it down and even with that i can barely do it. some days i just don’t. i just lay in my room with the lights off or, like i did today, i sleep and sleep and sleep until i can just about muster the emotional and physical energy to stay awake.

and relapse is really hard, especially after so long. when you think you are so far away from the person who was hurting so much, but in reality you never stopped being that person. it is hard to come to terms with the fact that  recovery isn’t linear, but more that recovery doesn’t seem to get easier the further along you are. 

everyday just seems to get harder. and it’s getting harder to believe that it’s getting better any time soon.

365

 today, march 17th, marks me being one year clean from self harm. 

i've been struggling with self harm since i was 12, and now i am 23 and just hitting a year clean. a life time ago i never thought i could make it to my 18th birthday. not long ago i was convinced i would be trapped in a cycle of self harm forever, because it was the only way i knew how to cope. and whilst in recent years relapses were far and few between, i still was unable to fight it or redirect it. it felt like a build up of the need to relapse that one day when i was weak was too strong to fight off. but i'm getting better at it everyday, trying other outlets or simply just stopping myself and here i am, at the one year mark.

i thought this feeling was going to be only overwhelming happiness, but instead of happiness it just feels, nothing? i thought i was going to feel like the weight of the world was gone, i was finally taking contol back from this thing that had been controlling my life for so long but instead i feel like i have replaced self harm urges with overwhelming anxiety and instrusive thoughts instead. it's hard. i am happy. i should be happy. but i can't stop thinking about how this moment was supposed to be happy, but it just doesn't feel it. and maybe that is reflective of how i'm doing. maybe i'm not happy simply because i am in a really bad mental health state and i still think about relapse. maybe i thought by one year i would simply be so far away from relapse that i would really considered myself recovered. maybe i thought it would be easier than this. 

i think i always had this view that once i stopped, if i could stop, that all the feelings associated would just go away. i used to think that self harm was a huge cause in the anxiety and the sadness, and in some ways it was. i would be sad that i hurt myself and i would be anxious about people finding out. but i think now that i used it to simply rechannel the anxiety especially. and i know that sounds like something i should've known this whole time, but it is easier to think back now when i'm in a clearer mind. 

all i used to know was hurting, and i was hurting in so many ways that thinking about it just makes me too sad. if it wasn't anxiety or depressive moods, it was a war with eating, or it was my inability to process emotions, or it was my struggle to focus and pay attention or it was thinking i was not worthy of the life i had or it was pushing everyone away because i did not want them to know the "real" person. i was hiding my entire life and it simply was too much, and it outpoured in disordered eating and self harm.  eventually i managed to cope with it a little better, but i still could not stop self harm. not until now.

i do not know if this is the be all or end all. recovery has not been the easy process i thought it would be. it's been losing important people in my life and learning from my mistakes, it's been learning to manage my own feelings and how i process and present them. it's been going 1 step forward and back 10. it's been admitting that i am the problem. it's been admitting alcohol for a while was the problem. it's been not doing things because i mentally couldn't do it. it's been opening up and talking about how i'm feeling and doing things that absolutely terrify me. 

and whilst this feeling may not have been the complete overwhelming happiness i thought, it is still there. i am still proud of myself. there was a long time in my life where i was hurting myself on a daily then weekly basis. i was wearing long clothing in 30 degrees, learning the best ways to keep it covered or lying about how i scratched my arm. i used to think i was alone. i didn't even know what mental health was for half of my teenage years. i saw my friends struggling too, i was helping friends through it without asking for help myself. i handled things well, i handled things badly. but i made it. and i will continue to have my ups and downs, and if i relapse again i know it will be okay. i know i can come out fighting like i have many times before.

it gets easier. i know it's hard to believe but it gets easier. it might take time, but with help, it gets easier.

the burden of honesty

 

i feel like i’m stuck in a rut. i’ve felt off all year, and i kept thinking it was going away but it wasn’t, not permanently or temporarily long enough to make it feel like i was doing something to make it better. i’m just sat at rock bottom and i cannot find a way out, any time i think i do it’s a dead end.

my mental health has been up and down all my life and i’m aware that i probably just sound like a broken record with every post i write but it’s just so hard to understand what is wrong because i don’t even know myself. most of my teen years old were just pure, overwhelming sadness and just wanting to not be alive. i was at war with everyone but mostly with myself, and every day was a success just because i survived. 

that feeling went away in my 20s, but it exchanged the overwhelming sadness with feeling emotionally nothing mixed in with constant anxiety. it is impossible for me to interpet and talk about how i am feeling and why because i just simply do not know and i don’t think i ever will. how do you answer the question whats wrong when absolutely nothing is wrong but all you want to do is sit in bed all day and do just that. just sit or lay there. 

i have lost the ability to do, or want to do, anything. i don’t have the motivation to do absolutely anything and it is absolutely exhausting just trying to do something and just not being able to. if i manage to do it, i can’t without getting distracted within 10 minutes and stopping again. i spend all my day on tiktok because i just can’t do anything else. talking to most of my friends seeps too much energy so i just don’t and i convince myself that they hate me so i don’t talk to them even more. i’m in a cycle of unhappiness and isolation that i cannot pull myself out of.

and i’m lonely. 

i feel like i have nobody. i feel like most of my friends hates me or will just leave me and i know that’s probably just past experience talking but i don’t know how to accept it. when all you see in yourself if the flaws, how could in your eyes anyone get past them either? i feel like i need constant validation and even that isn’t enough. 

i feel like a burden. i am a burden. and i mean it. i can’t be the happy, at minimum okay person that i should be. i feel selfish all the time. a small thing feels like everything and nobody that i love deserves to have to hear it. and i know i shouldn’t feel this way but i can’t not. i don’t know how to cope with anything, i don’t know how to do anything and i feel like i don’t even know how to exist like a person. being honest about how i’m doing is a burden. i’m sad today and i will be tomorrow. everyone is, most people are feeling down at the moment and i feel too guilty to talk about it in any truth. so i don’t. i avoid the question and if i don’t then i don’t say what i really want to say, just what i think the person wants to hear. i leave out that every night recently i’ve been thinking about relapse again because i’m supposed to be doing better in recovery and i don’t want anyone to think otherwise. i don’t want anyone else to hold the burden and the worry about me when there is so many more important things to be worried about.

i’m overwhelmed. i’m so fucking tired and i don’t know what to do anymore. i feel just nothing and i hate it. i wish i just didn’t care about anything but it’s all i can do. and i know i need to get help but i can’t bring myself to get it, mainly because i don’t think i deserve it. i’m not sad enough to get it. maybe one day i can persuade myself but if not now, when?

i just don’t feel like i was made to belong here.

the loudest noise in the room

 

i have always been a firm believer in everything will get better but tonight i'm not sure i do.

i am having one of the worst days i've had in a while. i find myself saying it alot but this time i mean it. anxiety is debhilitating me, earlier i cried just getting out of bed after sleeping all day because that is all i can do. i feel on the verge of tears whilst simulatneously feeling nothing all the time and i don't see a way to move past it.

recovery was supposed to make it easier but sometimes it makes it worse. the bad times are just amplified and i haven't found a better way of coping with it. i thought the idea of relapse would by now not even cross my mind but it's still sometimes all i can think about. i find other distractions but it's still at the forefront of my mind and even though i manage to fight it some days it's just rarely. these thoughts weren't supposed to be so intrusive, especially not now. how do i win what is a constant battle? how long until it is too powerful and i'm too tired to stop it?

my mind just doesn't stop. and when i run out of good things to think about it turns into negative things. it turns into being scared to sometimes even breathe and i don't know how to make it stop. how do you make it stop bringing up bad memories and worries about things you could've done differently 10 years ago? how do you think of things that don't make you hurt? 

i just don't know where to go from here. i don't feel like i deserve help, i don't feel like i'm hurting enough. but each day is getting harder, each breath getting more painful, each night gets a little longer. how do you stop the panic when all you are is the panic?

how do you stop feeling alone in a crowded room? how do you take some time for yourself without it feeling like you're just being a bad friend when all you want to do is get better? i can't even open the curtain, the lightswitch feels kilometres away and my flickering lamp is the only light i see both physically and metaphorically.

maybe if i say it out loud it will help. i don't know how but maybe writing it down will help me understand myself that lil better.

it was supposed to get better as i stayed clean, but sometimes it's hard to believe that i'm better without it. i know thats just my anxiety and sadness talking, but it is the loudest noise in the room.

trying my best

 I've always advocated the importance of talking about your mental health. It was the reason I started writing this blog in the first place. I needed an outlet to talk about it, and this provided me the perfect opportunity to do so. However recently I've neglected it. And when I have mentioned it, I haven't been honest enough. So I want to change that.

I'm struggling, but not in the way I'm used to. I'm feeling okay, whilst I have some depressed days, I am feeling better in myself. But rather than feeling depressed, I'm feeling something else that I have not yet been able to easily put into words to understand. I have just lost every ounce of ability to do anything, I have no motivation and the idea of doing anything is completely overwhelming. I feel as if the only things I can do are watch tiktoks and occasionally play games, and that just ends up being changing games for 7 hours because theres nothing specifically I can focus on. I feel the need to be preoccupied and overstimulated almost 24/7, even just writing this I have 1000 things going on and I keep getting distracted by my phone. This is making it near impossible to sleep. I cannot switch off for long enough to get a restful amount of sleep. I'm tired, I'm in pain and frankly, I'm burnt out.

It feels like I'm burnt out on life. I thought that I would graduate and slowly regain my motivation and get over burnout, but I simply have just redirected it on other things. Whilst I know this is probably due to still being in lockdown, I cannot help but wonder if it's simply more than that. Whether all of this, the anxiety, insomnia, sadness and other things just has an alternate cause that now is causing this demotivation, inability to stay focused and struggle to think, speak and articulate words. It feels like my brain is just a fog sometimes and it really taking it's toll on me mentally. When I can feel it happening, which tends to be a lot of the time, it makes me feel super anxious because it makes me super conscious of my actions and how people think of me. I will be just talking and my brain will freeze and I will just physically want to scream because 6 months ago I was absolutely fine and now I can barely sometimes speakwithout stuttering and I struggle to utter a sentence or string a thought together.

Streaming doesn't help that. I love streaming. I love my community, making friends, making people laugh and just having fun with a game whether that be alone or with others. But streaming comes with the need to be active, talking, constantly thinking and constantly engaged with well, talking. Talking to stream, talking about the game and a lot of the time, talking to yourself. It's really hard to do that when your brain just simply freezes and you almost forget how to talk or even sometimes think. There are only so many times you can apologise for the same thing without it coming across as a bad day. And I don't know how to make it better. Instead, I just let it pile onto me, just adding another problem to the pile. 

And I know it doesn't sound like much, but it is enough. With everything else going on in the world as well as within my own brain, not being able to basically function is just the cherry on the cake. My life feels like it's on hold, I know so many people are in the same situation but I know so many people that are thriving and I feel like I'm going backwards. I get too anxious to job hunt so I'm stuck in a job I don't really want to do, I don't even know if the career path I had laid out is one I even want to do anymore. I feel so lost and I feel like I cannot be the successful and perfection focused person that I always have forced myself to be. I just feel like I'm failing, and when I feel like I'm failing I feel like I am letting myself down and to simply put it, I feel absolutely worthless and useless. Unlearning this is something I am starting to try to do, but it's not always that easy.

I don't know when everything will improve. I thought it was. Everything isn't that bad, but I feel like I am just holding onto too many upsetting things from the past that is just holding me back. I feel like every single small thing is scary and I am worrying myself about things that have not happened yet. I just need all the fog to end. I need to be more open, I need to start to talk again. I need help, because I'm worried that it won't ever get better if I don't.

twenty two

 today is my last day as a 22 year old. it feels weird. another year has abolutely flown by and i feel like i have not done enough to turn a new age.

we have been stuck in lockdown since march, so 10 months of me being 22 was stuck inside. at first this was great in theory, i was benefitting from being stuck in one place and not having to travel into uni, and being able to keep whatever sleep schedule best aligned with work. and whilst i was mentally hit and miss, i managed to do my 5 assignments i had due within a month in the beggining of lockdown, with all but one being a 65 or above. uni gave us a blanket, any mark under our term 1 average was to be just taken away from our calculation, and lockdown meant i no longer had to do the assignments like a workshop that gave me more anxiety than i could even comprehend. 

we started to come out of lockdown in the peak of my research report. the first lockdown anyway. so whilst people were flying to different countries and living their "best lives" and seeing their friends/family (within the law) after months of being apart, i was stuck, up at night and asleep during the day, sat at my pc almost crying over my dissertation that i felt like i was doing completely alone. 

but i made it. i finished it. i handed it in and completed my presentation at the end of september.

i was okay for a few weeks, went out a few times to see people but then at the end of october i fell into a huge depressive episode and didn't talk to anyone for weeks. i was too anxious to do anything so i didn't.

a week later we went into a 4 week lockdown, which i stayed up all night, alone, missing my friends but appreciating myself because i wasn't exhausted all the time. i was worried about getting through it, but i was excited by the idea of having a somewhat normal christmas, socially distanced seeing my friends and getting to finally go out with my mum for lunch. 

we then were thrown in into a lockdown over christmas, which now shows no sign of ending.

the third lockdown has been especially hard. i don't know why but the beginning of the month i was just super low most days, my better days being at work where i had human interaction.

all these lockdowns have had one huge impact on my motivation. at first my motivation to do my degree, now my motivation to apply for jobs. everyone keeps asking me when i will be leaving my part time supermarket job to use my degrees but the idea of doing that now is so terrifying. i wanted to travel, i wanted to move out, i want to do anything but apply for a job and be worried about it falling through due to the state of the world. by now i thought i would be in a job, a job i liked, but there is few job i like the sound of and most i'm not qualified for. 

22 has not been the year i expected. it was supposed to be easy, it was planned to the tee. i would finish my masters in september, quit my job travel for a few months, have christmas off then apply for jobs. only one of those things happened, and i do not know when the rest might. but 22 brought things that i would not have had if it wasn't for all of this.

i have a masters degree. i started streaming and i am affiliated on twitch, growing a small little community and having fun. i treated myself to a new pc, a vr headset, i made SO many new friends at work or online in stream communities. I am 10 months clean, I reregistered to the doctors, I am trying to look after myself better than I have been.

the idea of turning 23 has always scared me. you see so many people doing so much grown up shit at 23, and i thought i would be so much more than i am. i thought i would be in a full time job with a partner and living my best life.

it's okay that i'm not. 

and i'm looking forward to twenty three.

Graduate

 I am officially a masters of science graduate.

This is something I have been working towards being able to say for the past 6 years of my life, the first time I realised sports psychology was a field I was able to study. Since that moment I had this exact path planned out. I was going to complete my BSc in Psychology and then complete a MSc in Sports Psychology. From that moment, I pushed myself academically, I worked as hard as my mental health allowed me and I was never taking no for a definite answer.

I have never been "naturally smart", I would put in 110% of what energy I had into my studies for a long time, but would never reach the highest grades, unlike my older brother who would get top marks with little to no studying. I had to work what sometimes felt like ten times harder than him just to even match his grades and it was always so tiring. In class I was always one of the smart ones but I was never a stand out. Sometimes it was hard to deal with, I was putting in all this work for what sometimes felt like nothing, but when I finally found what I wanted to do none of that mattered to me anymore. I knew the grades I had to get to get to each step, and through many mental health difficulties where I felt like I couldn't go on, I somehow kept going and kept going. I can't count the amount of times I nearly gave up. And maybe for a moment I should have. I probably should have taken a break, allow myself to recover from so many education burnouts and so many mental health downfalls. 

But I didn't.

 And I'm not going to say that this moment was worth it, because in truth this is not the moment I expected it to be. I expected to be excited looking for PHD's or thinking about training to become a chartered sports psychology. I expected to have left my job and be persueing what I love. But I'm not. I'm still at my part time supermarket job, no idea what I want to do. Scrolling on job sites for hours on end at 5am and making myself anxious that I will never find something that I love the sound of. Any time I do I'm not qualified. It makes me wonder what the point of this was. I pushed myself so hard in my MSc because in truth, I didn't feel like I belonged there. I was surrounded by so many hard working, intelligent people and I was barely afloat. I was working night shift two nights a week whilst trying to juggle the hardest academic challenge I have ever experienced. And then it became juggling these whilst in the middle of a global pandemic. It became somehow even harder, I was doing everything alone with little guidance on alot from my lecturers, so many missed emails or key information from lecturers about essays because I was working so much on a different schedule to everyone. It became doing a research project all alone with little guidance, and it not coming out as well as I had dreamed. 

But I did it.

I made it.

It may have not been the experience I had hoped, but I made it.

I was doing workshops, case studies, endless presentations, so many interactive things that I could never have done a few years ago. I was writing essays I was genuinely proud of when I handed them in and even though it took a few to get into the swing, I was getting good marks. I learnt so much this year and as cliche as it sounds I learnt alot about myself. Not only that, but I met some amazing and hugely intelligent people, both my coursemates and lecturers. The year flew by, and I finished an academically challenging year.

I officially have graduated with merit in my MSc in Applied Sports Psychology.