My Mental Health Journey...So Far

Hello everyone,

Today’s blog post is going to be a bit more of a serious one, which is a bit unlike me but I’m so passionate about this particular topic and I want to share that with you.

Mental health. There are so many different forms; depression, eating disorders, anxiety, bipolar, the list is endless. I want to share my story and my experience with mental health. My goal is to hopefully help just one person, that’s all I could possibly hope for.

Anxiety.

I can’t say I have anxiety because I haven’t been to the doctors or had a medical diagnosis. However, my “symptoms” and how I feel seem to add up and lead to one thing. Anxiety. I haven’t told my parents, my dad knows purely because I had a panic attack in front of him so I had to explain but I didn't want him to know and my mum doesn’t know either (unless my dad has told her). It’s not that I don’t trust my parents or I don’t have a good relationship with them, because trust me we are so close. I think that’s possibly the reason why — I don’t want to tell them because I know it will worry my parents and cause them to stress which doesn’t help me at all. I speak to my friends and I have a couple friends who are very close to me that suffer from anxiety too. We pull through it together and I talk to them all the time and support each other.

I feel like I’ve always had anxiety but I never really thought anything of it and I guess I thought it was normal and me just worrying too much but it was only 3-4 years ago when I was watching Zoella and she described how she felt that something clicked. So, as usual when you think something may be wrong. You google it. I googled how I felt and anxiety popped up — I’ve done all those quizzes and each one claims I may have anxiety. I haven’t been to the doctors as my parents don’t know but one day I’ll be brave enough to go and actually get a diagnosis.

I feel many different things and so my anxiety isn’t just one particular thing but if I HAD to categorise it I would probably say anxiety & panic disorder and also recently social anxiety. I say recently but I’ve just slowly become worse in social situations. For example, I know some people can’t leave their home or speak to anyone and I can’t possibly imagine what that’s like, but my social anxiety is more about what do people think of me? Do they judge me? What will happen if...?

I may get invited out and I will really want to go but I have to know more about the situation first, who’s going? and what it’s going to be like? I don’t like not knowing as I like to feel safe and organised, otherwise it just stresses me out and makes me anxious. I will want to go to the social event but anxiety can hold me back and I have to make a decision whether to attend or not. A lot of the time I do go, purely because I don’t want anxiety to over-power me (not saying that people who don’t go out are over-powered) but I don’t want to let anxiety “win” and also because my friends mean so much to me and I want to go for them.

I also may have anxiety and panic disorder which may also link to my previous point about “not knowing”. My main cause of panic attacks is exams. Yes, I know everyone is nervous in exams but I don’t get nervous, I get anxious and there is a difference. I get anxious no matter how big the test is, it could be a 10 word German vocabulary test or it could be my end of year exams. No matter the size of the exam, I feel anxious. I can’t remember the last time I was in an exam or revising for an exam that I didn’t feel anxious, and that upsets me but it’s something I can get through and deal with as I have friends to support me.

I found and posted this on my instagram story a few weeks ago and so many people understood and related to this and messaged me about it so I wanted to share it on here: 

“Social anxiety will make you do weird things, such as holding onto an apple core for 45 minutes during a meeting because you’re too anxious to go to the trash can that’s ten feet away. Or waiting for someone else to throw out their apple core so you know it’s okay. But waiting a few minutes after they do so you don’t look like you were waiting for them. And trying not to stumble because you know everyone is watching you walk. And feeling really proud and relieved when you arrive back at your seat after having successfully thrown away an apple core like it’s a difficult task.” - tumblr.

That may not make sense to some people but I definitely relate to it and so I wanted to share it with you.

I hope this post helped you or a friend in some way, whether you are going through something similar or you know someone who is. If you’d like to see more about mental health then please let me know as I really want to continue sharing!

See you soon,

Evie x