Have gratitude for YOUR body

 

The pain in sharing

The months after my recovery from my nervous breakdown/ spiritual awakening/ freeze mode/ darkness episode, I began living in a fantasy world believing I was “cured”/ enlightened to the issues I had been facing for a lifetime.

I spent a few months living in lockdown, enjoying myself with the love of my life in an unfamiliar environment surrounded my nature in Northern Vietnam. During this time, I completely stopped focusing on my mental health. I truly felt happy within myself and externally. Even through the external difficulties I was facing at the time with homesickness/ visa issues/ work related issues I still felt fundamentally happy and I can truly say right now that I’m closer than ever to becoming more fulfilled.

Recently I began sharing on social media again, I really feel the pull towards sharing a story that’s relatable to so many people but also untold within the general public/ locality. People respond to my stories about how “brave” it is to share. I don’t want to be told that I’m brave, to be honest I just want to share my story in a way that’s collective and relatable to other people that don’t feel comfortable in sharing their story or in a way that inspires others to do the same. Wouldn’t it feel great for it to be normal to tell a friend or colleague you can’t respond to their email right now or go to their birthday party because your anxious or going through an episode of depression and that you just need some time instead of having to lie and say; I feel sick, can’t make it today, sorry.” I say this because when I finally started being honest about the real illness I was facing, people began to learn how to respond in better ways than “when do you think you’ll be better../ did you visit the doctor?”. I just wanted the white lies to stop, the frequent spontaneous illnesses to stop and the questions about details of these frequent physical symptoms to stop. I just needed to stop lying to myself and others.

When I shared my story at the beginning, I was completely egoless nothing stood in the way of me sharing my experiences because through sharing a felt like I was becoming better. The physical agony, sensory issues and the numbness to reality at that time made it easy to share with the public about what was happening to me and people could see first-hand the extreme weight loss, how the illness was affecting my sensory issues as I recorded a video and clicked post without any second takes.

But like I said, after I stopped sharing, when the physical symptoms eased and lockdown became part of our lives in an unfamiliar part of the world for me; I stopped exercising, I mindlessly began eating again, I started watching tv shows and movies that I vowed to stop watching when I was ill because I knew they were not good for my thoughts and I hated watching the evil in the world. Example of the TV shows I binged were the handmaid’s tale and the serpent. Don’t get me wrong; they are great shows but for me, I’m sensitive and consuming these shows, just like the consumption of all the bad food and lack of exercise are just not good for me.

 I wasn’t working at the time and because work (just like school growing up) was a major trigger to my mental health issues, I just thought I was doing fine. I also was able to spend so much quality time with my boyfriend and we never got bored of each other. When lockdown eased in the part of the country that we were in; we were able to go on some spectacular trips around the beautiful surrounding areas. I began posting on Instagram again but not about mental health. They were pictures of happy times and beautiful scenery. Portraying the cliché of Instagram and showing the best bits. I began getting messages about how happy people were to see me happy (I appreciate that) but what I didn’t know was that I wasn’t taking care of myself physically an emotionally. I had stopped exercising, stopped doing yoga, stopped meditating daily and low and behold the issues of anxiety have started to resurface.

 

I agreed to take part in a podcast. I was honored to be asked to participate in something that advocated good healthy mental health but felt absolutely awful after I had taken part in it, I had a sense of imposter syndrome. A voice inside my head was telling me it wasn’t the right time to share; essentially, I had fallen off the horse and it was like I was pretending to be healed. I began to feel paranoid about how I had spoken about myself, oversharing experiences, mentioning things that were personal and feared I came across as though I was blaming other people for my illness because I come from Ireland; a place where people are quite private about circumstances within the home. In the piece I failed to mention how much my family had to put up with through the years, that I love them so much and that I put absolutely no blame on anyone for how I perceived experiences throughout my youth, it was “my” narrative and other people in my narrative have their stories and perception of experiences too. When I mentioned how I needed to forgive people I meant for minor things that manifested into more within my own mind.

I began identifying signs of my mental health diminishing yet again, so that’s when I realized it was time to share again. Except this time, it’s more difficult and I’m struggling to open up without feeling anxious afterwards.

When the podcast was released, I was truly ashamed of how personal it was and how the people close to me would perceive it. I feared I had offended people; something that was never my intention.

To make it clear; when I say I believe many things relating to anxiety or depression can all stem from childhood, I’m not saying my childhood was bad, I never had to go without and I always had the security of a safe home with a warm dinner every night.

 I really believe it’s more about how a child might perceive certain incidents without being able to articulate the exact emotion their feeling during a certain time and not having the vocabulary to express themselves through the experience.

In my early years I grew up with a semi-present alcoholic father that would make a lot of empty promises. One particular promise I remember was him promising he would come to see me and buy me a canopy for my bed. He never showed up, but as a young girl I was promised a canopy and would have been upset after waiting a week for this gift, so my single mother brought me to the shop and got me a canopy; something she did out of love and not wanting to see me get hurt. I suppose at the time I was around 9 the emotions I was feeling were a lot more complex than the “sad/ confused by father” and “thankful to mother”.

I’m sure many people can relate and had a lot of incidents in their early years that were similar to this; a mother picking up the slack for an absent father (visa versa). As an adult I can now say the real emotions I was feeling were disappointment in my father and guilt and shame for all the things my mother had to do for me, I also became paranoid in my own narrative that I was too much of a burden, especially because the difficulty I had expressing my emotions properly. I expressed them by acting out, shouting, crying, arguing, getting into trouble. This lasted right up until adulthood and manifested into the extreme guilt and shame that led to depression and anxiety and I feared I could never express to my mother how much I love her and appreciate her resilience and my Stepfather; my “real” father who has been the most wonderful male influence in my life. It’s even more difficult living so far away from home and being unable to visit home due to “covid circumstances”.

I’m well aware so many people have had it way shittier than I have and never present any mental health problems or they’re strong enough to handle their emotions and that’s great for them (if they really are okay and aren’t bottling it up/ doing something about it). Comparison is really a terrible thing and can make the pain of it all even worse. You are you and you are not the same as others and that’s okay (something I’m still learning).

As I write this, I want to share that I’m the most anxious I have been in months. The physical symptom’s have come back such as my upset stomach and I’m becoming less tolerant of loud noises again. Whilst learning about Reiki. i have been discovering what it means to be an empath both physically and emotionally and if you don't learn how to control it, situations and being around people with certain emotions can feel heavy, something I was never able to articulate as a child when being around someone that felt terrible, it made me feel feel terrible/ frustrated/ sad (soaking up the negative energies).

My mission is to use my professional experiences in health, education and my personal experiences to help other people. For years I have pondered about further education since my public health degree and something inside me resisted jumping back into further education because nothing seemed like the right fit for me. Having a calling to do healing work is both beautiful and so scary and it’s hard to know where to begin and I know it will take a long time to get were i need to be and it probably won't make me wealthy but i will feel fulfilled, Reiki seems like a great gateway into healing work and part of the course includes self-healing, learning about it on the hard days definitely does helps with the feelings of worthlessness or the ego saying you haven’t achieved enough/ people won't understand or just because my path is different to others it’s not something to be proud of.

The ego is something that needs to be broken down and however wonderful it might be to be aware of the ego; it doesn’t mean the ego goes away or you can always fight against it so the most you can do for yourself is just try 😊