So here it is. My first blog post.
I’ve been debating with myself as to what tone to set for this blog. Purely factual with information and advice about anxiety and mental illness? Too sterile. And anyway, who made me an expert?
So what about just a personal blog about my every day life, seen through the lens of someone with a mental disorder. Better. But what makes my life so interesting to someone who doesn’t know me?
So I’ve decided on a combination of the two.
I must admit there is also a more selfish reason for writing this blog; I want to know if there are other people like me out there. I feel very alone in my particular experience of living with mental illness and I want to know if there are others out there who feel the same (or similar rather) as me. For example:
- Medications that for the masses work in a certain way work differently for me. Some that are supposed to be soothing can from one day to the next send me into an overdrive hyped up frenzy, and others that are meant to elevate your mood can trigger extreme physical anxiety symptoms. I am more sensitive to the tiniest changes in increasing or decreasing dosage of any and all medications than anyone I’ve encountered online or IRL. These experiences make me feel like a bit of a freak and I want to know if there are people out there who experience this in the same way I do. Who knows, maybe it’s more common than I think and maybe we can help each other in numbers and just by knowing we are not alone.
- I am bipolar with two secondary diagnoses of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and General Anxiety Disorder. This is a fairly unusual combination and it makes it harder for people around me to understand what’s going on. Nothing is clean cut. Nothing is as they read online it’s supposed to be. I don’t have three months of hypomania followed by three months of depression, it’s much messier than that. I want to know how people with that same messiness cope in terms of conveying to their friends and family what’s going on, cause I haven’t been able to figure it out (yet) and I think those around me are very confused as to what’s going on.
- I’m happy. At the same time as being severely depressed. By this I mean that I have a deep inner happiness and feel truly grateful for my life every day. My depression is almost always physical. By that I mean physical anxiety symptoms. Everything from the classics like a racing heart, dizziness and chest pain to more obscure ones like derealisation, brain zaps and phantom vibrations. These can be brought on by an unsilent mind, i.e. racing thoughts, negative thoughts, obsessive thoughts. But it can also just pop up out of nowhere. I’ll be walking around enjoying my day and my life in general and then bam, it just hits me like a ton of bricks. This very sudden shift is of course due to my bipolar disorder, I know that it happens to a lot of other people with this disorder too but I get the sense that what hits them is usually symptoms of a clinical depression, i.e. an overwhelming sense of sadness and tiredness. Come to think of it I have actually never encountered someone with purely physical sensations of depression and anxiety and I don’t know if I’m alone in this.
So if any of this sounds familiar to you I’d love to hear from you. You can comment in the section below or contact me. Maybe we are not alone in this at all and wouldn’t that be a great discovery? To that end I will also encourage guest writers from time to time so as to not only put my own experiences and reflections out there but also those of others with different diagnoses and experiences than my own. Then maybe we can all find some common grounds and learn from one another, maybe find ways of thinking and doing things differently in order to improve our chances of living a successful and fulfilling life despite mental disorders.
I feel excited about sharing what I know, learning what I don’t know and finding comfort and solace in numbers. Let’s go.