Why Now

Some people have asked me why I've started to write this blog. Is it because I'm feeling unwell? The truth is this has been something I've been considering doing for a number of months (possibly even in the form of the video blog). I often hear about the people who take leadership in reducing stigma around mental health, and increase understanding, and I've often wanted to take some leadership myself to share my experiences more.

 So far, I've not been able to communicate my experiences of mental health verbally to people, and it's not for want of trying (the words don't come out, I'd just usually say OK). I have therefore decided to try recording them on this anomalous blog, to share my experiences so that people have a better understanding of who I am and what I experience. I'm happy for people to ask me questions based on what I say within this blog.

I understand that I fall within the group don't talk about their feelings, men of working age. The only way we can change that is if people are prepared to take leadership in sharing their experiences. That's what I'm doing.

I therefore want to enforce that this isn't an knee-jerk reaction to feeling distressed, this is something I've wanted to do for a while and I'm now starting the process of communicating about how I feel further.

I'm thankful for the feedback I've received from people, from family members and people afar. I want to reassure my closes family members that they can ask me about the contents of the blog. I also want to reassure people that this isn't a call for help. I know that I need to carry out some more counselling and do plan to arrange that shortly (I will go private because whilst I know we have a very good Mind association that provides counselling locally) the counselling service provided as part of IAPT service wouldn't meet my needs.

This is something I want to do. I hope you can learn something about me through me writing this blog and maybe I can develop the confidence to speak about my feelings verbally.

Thanks for the feedback so far it's been greatly appreciated.

Back to Work

Today I've gone back to work after taking a few days off last week to recoup from my difficult period. Things didn't start well, I got up late. It appears that if you've got your alarm clock plugged in, you need to make sure if the switch for power is actually on (I didn't last night). To be honest I was tossing and turning to around 2am anyway. I probably would have struggled to get up at full fitness at 6am anyway. I arrived at work an hour late.

If I have an addiction, and I probably have quite a few. I'm addicted to checking my work emails. I can do it multiple times a day even at weekends. I suppose this actions doesn't help me switch off. I decided therefore that when I went off on Wednesday that I would not check my work emails until I was back in work. This has been somewhat difficult however probably is a necessary part of my recovery.

This allowed me to ease back into work by checking my emails, and doing a to-do list of all the tasks I'm still required to do.

In work today, I was running a meeting in the afternoon, so the morning was spent preparing for this meeting getting back up to speed on the afternoon would be the meeting. It was during the meeting that I realised that I perhaps wasn't at an 100% yet. The meeting required me to do a lot of speaking, and because of my anxieties over previous meetings I wasn't completely self-confident. People who attended the meeting will notice that at times I was stuttering. This is something I can do at times when I'm not feeling hundred percent, I can confuse myself while saying a sentence (which can confuse others). In some ways I wish I could have taken a backseat within today's meeting however it wasn't possible.

Perhaps if I'd been feeling at my optimal wellbeing it would have gone better. Perhaps it wouldn't have done. I hope we achieved what we needed to within the meeting, even if I looks like I lacked focused, which I did.

Anyway I'm feeling better than I did last week and ready to move on to life's next challenges, however I am conscious at this point I'm not in the stage where can I hold an hundred thoughts (which perhaps I never can which is why often go on a cycle of feeling well then not feeling so well). Saying this doesn't remove the guilt I'm currently feeling that I'm not able to do as much as I was able to do a few weeks ago (and should be able to do in a few weeks time). I suppose that's one of the things with my distress is that compounds my distress. When I'm feeling low, I often can feel guilty for not being as productive as I can be, because I'm feeling low which makes me feel even lower.

When your body is Morrisons, but your mind is anywhere but

As you may have read from previous post, I struggle to sometimes put things in boxes. When I feel things don't go well they resonate within my mind. I go over them over and over again, trying to work out what I could do differently. I often can't see the positives for the negatives.

This happened recently with the event that hadn't gone so well. Two days after the event I was   doing my weekend shopping in Morrisons (other supermarkets are available, however I would suggest avoiding Tesco's). During the then I had been going over the event two days before, not constantly put it kept dropping back into my mind). I was thinking about the event as I went shopping (I was kind of hoping the shopping would distract me). However I kept coming over in coming back to the event, I couldn't stop going over what I would change.

Whilst I was shopping I heard somebody calling my name, I got the impression that they'd been calling it for a while, it turned out to be one of the volunteers at RBUF ( the charity I at as Chair for). I think it's great that we have been able to develop such a wonderful community within the charity is sometimes just interesting that I can be sometimes too anxious to take part in the peer support we've developed)    

When the volunteer was saying Hi to me in Morrison I was not within the supermarket (I was physically but within my mind I was somewhere completely different) I'd somewhat zoned out part of me from the activity I was doing was going back to the issues causing me distress. This isn't the only time I've zoned out, I suppose my recent car accident was a result of me zoning out for a time whilst at the traffic lights to focus a little more on the issues causing me distress.

One of the issues I personally out of my mental health is that I can't switch off. If I feel I've let people down it haunt me for week.  I can appear to be quite well whilst this is going on, taking part in normal activities (such as shopping in Morrision) but within my mind it's somewhere different. This is one of the things with mental health nobody can see when you're not well (where you can see if somebody's got a physical injury)

Did that meeting go well?

As much as possible, I am not going to discuss what takes place within my job roles. I'm bound by confidentiality, and it would be unfair to people I work with to discuss them within this blog. I will talk about some generic stuff that links to my anxiety.

Earlier this week I had a meeting in London. This followed the event where things didn't go so well, and which I hold myself responsible for the failure.  Following this event, I lost some of my concentration, I struggled to sleep, the event was resonating in my head. If I'm truthful, I put so much of my soul and energy into the event, that following it not going so well I was totally exhausted.

However as they say, life must go on. On Wednesday, I took part in a meeting with colleagues. I had to leave early, and struggled to get to sleep the night before, things resonating in my mind. I arrived not in a great state. One of the corridors to the office I usually use was blocked, so I had to walk through an unfamiliar office, with unfamiliar people in it. This caused some immediate stress, as I had thoughts racing through my head that everyone who was in the office I walk through was watching me and questioning who I was (but they probably were not).

I sat in the office, before walking to a meeting room on the other side of the office. At the start of the meeting I was not feeling great, I was feeling anxious, and I was questioning whether I could contribute to this meeting. Once I got into the meeting room, as the meeting was starting I was really questioning my ability to contribute. However something flipped. In my mind I told myself that this was an important meeting and I needed to be able to contribute, so I got myself into a place where I was able to interject into the meeting (make my points). Whilst the meeting progressed I started to feel good and forget about my worries briefly. However things changed towards lunch. The meeting broke up for a lunch break and I returned to the office to look for some information.   

I was also hoping to get a drink during the lunch break. I didn't though. As I walked past the kitchen, I was able to see in that the kitchen was half full (it had about 10 people in it). Because of my anxieties I was too anxious to walk into the kitchen to get a glass and some water, so I simply return to the meeting room. When my anxieties are higher (during times of depression) I can struggle with walking into situations with a number of people in cross proximity.

I return to the meeting room and carried on the meeting. After the meeting finished, I went back to the office and started to think about the meeting. This is when I started to question how I performed in the meeting. Was I to aggressive, were people really pissed off with me, did I speak too much. Because I've been off work since this meeting I've not had an opportunity to speak to the people within the meeting to get their viewpoints on how it went.

As a write this, I'm not sure how the meeting went, because I'm not feeling great I could have been aggressive when I was trying to be assertive, this is common for people with anxiety issues. Worse still I've seen a TV programme says that someone fulfils the aggressive person within each team, and my the aggressive person within my team (I'd hate to think I was).

The meeting may have gone well, I'm not sure until I speak about it. However I did reflect on the meeting on my journey home, then lying in bed, the following day and the day after that.

I really worry that I offend people (which sometimes people with Asperger's can do, unwittingly) because the last thing I want to do is ever upset people, but I'm so fearful most of the time that I've unwittingly done so.

This train doesn't have any row of seat space. I'll get off this train and wait for the next one

Recently, I've taken some decision that I don't know why, which I feel I've taken because I've not had a clear mind. Two weeks ago I was travelling back from Birmingham after an event which hadn't gone so well. I decided to take the train from Birmingham to Liverpool, switching at Crewe to the London to Manchester train. Part of the reason for doing this is that the train that goes directly from Birmingham to Manchester is usually standing room only. However even if there was a seat available next to an existing passenger I would struggle to sit next to them because I lack the self-confidence to do so.

So I got the train to Liverpool, where was able to get a seat. This train journey lasted about 50 minutes. And I was into Crewe at about 5.00pm. This train journey followed an event in Birmingham had gone off course and it turned into a disaster towards the end (A disaster I was largely responsible for). Even at this very early stage of depression, I could tell things were going round in my mind that I couldn't focus solely on the task in hand. I was starting to see that I wasn't thinking in a logical sense. 

Back to the train journey, I waited at Crewe for the train to Manchester I waited for about 15 minutes (the usually time) but had pop to the shop for a snake and drink (ending my diet effectively). The train from London arrived, and I boarded the train to try and get my favourite seat on the Virgin Pendolina (seat 37 & 38 in carriage D). No seats were available, well plenty of seats were free, but no rows were available. As a result, as quickly as I boarded the train I got off the train again and waited for the next train half an hour away. One of staff members at the station remarked on this, but I just ignored them because it kind of made me feel as stupid as I should've felt at this time. Before the train pulled away I knew it made a stupid decision, I was going to have to spend another half an hour at a train station and get on way to simple because there wasn't a row of seats available next to each other. When I was on the train though it seems like the only clear decision to be made. 

So I ended up getting on the train half an hour later, feeling more stupid than I did before, and feeling somewhat more the failure on a day when I didn't need to feel anymore of a failure than I already did. 

The same thing happened again yesterday. When leaving London I went straight for the train, found there wasn't a row of seat together and got off the train waited for the boarding of the next train (partly possible because virgin didn't have a barrier control at the  platform yesterday). I got after 5.00pm train, went for a drink and donut at the station (another great example of me keeping to my diet) and boarded for 5.20pm at boarding. That train didn't have any reservations on it on it, so it caused some anxiety whilst waiting for the train to see if  I could sit in the seat I had sat in. Not sure what I would have done if  somebody said that reserve the seats I was sitting in. 

When I got a station another decision almost caused me to freeze. I usually park my car in the station car park, and would pay for my ticket at the stations entrance before returning to my car. I was that these ticket machines had queue so I decided to use the machines by the lifts in the car park. However when I got that machine it wouldn't take credit cards, only cash. What to do next? I wasn't sure if if you could pay by card at the barriers, I know it used to be an option but I'm not sure if that change. I decided that I would I would try and pay at the barrier, however on the drive down to the barrier I became I became unsure. I also saw there was a queue for the ticket barrier, as one of the barriers was out of action. I Stastny can really panicky quite quickly what happens if I couldn't pay by card at the barriers. So I decided Palinte whisper parking space near the barriers and wait until the queue had cleared. The queue didn't clear for another 15 minutes, in which I start almost frozen in my car watching cars come down and join the queue. I was struggling to make a decision on what to do next, walk back to the station and pay for the ticket or try to pay at the barrier with a card. I was anxious about walking back to the station because I thought everyone would be watching me having drove to the bottom of the car park, walk back up to pay for the ticket. I also didn't want to be surrounded by anybody when I did try and pay for the ticket at the barrier in case it didn't work, as they would see me as a bit of a failure who was holding their evenings up. So I sat they're frozen in my car for 15 minutes. 

When the traffic to die down and I decided to see if I could pay at the barrier, when I spotted there was actually a pay station not 20 meters from where I was sitting. An option to escape had emerged. In the end I went and paid up backpay station I went and paid at the pay station and left the car park, but by then it was completely empty, the traffic had left.

If I haven't got so much going on in my mind I probably would've walked back to the station as soon as I realised I couldn't pay by the lifts, but because of the way I was thinking I just made a terrible decision and felt somewhat silly, and a failure afterwards. 

Suicidal or not Suicidal

Am I Sucidal?

Do I want to kill myself? Probably Not

Do I ever think about killing myself? Yes

I've decided to write about ending my life, because its something people don't seem to ever discuss. Its the dark side of Mental Health. As I mentioned in a earlier post, at the moment I'm feeling depressed, and during these period I give some consideration to ending my life.

Yesterday, I was in London for a meeting. I'm not sure how the meeting went, it will be something I refer to in a later post. Following the meeting, I didn't leave work immediately, I sad in a office to write some emails, not feeling great about myself. Their were other people in the office but little conversation took place. When it did I wasn't included within the conversation. Nobody chatted to me, and I didn't feel in a place to interrupt other people conversations so I ended up feeling rather isolated. At this point, knowing that my journey back home included using London Underground, I gave some through about whether I would take up the opportunity that presented itself on my journey home and end my life on the underground. Now I wasn't giving serious consideration to ending my life, but I was considering about how it could be done.

Later on, on the escalators up to Euston Station from the underground (which was packed and made me feel a little unnerved) I started to think about how I could kill myself at home. I knew I was off today, and nobody else would be at home from 7am to 9pm, so it would give me enough time to.... not be caught. I was thinking how I'd need to sort out the work stuff I have at home (I have three laptop I don't own, one of each job and a third for a charity I'm the Chair of). I would need to sort them into pile and leave contact details so my family could contact the required people they would need to (My two bosses, the CEO of the charity I chair, and the company secretary of the charity).

To be honest, If I died sudden I'm not sure any of my family would know who to contact. I think they barely know the names of the employers I work for, much less the name of the charity I'm the chair off (and have been involved in for over eight years). Maybe I don't speak about my life enough to then, but they don't really seem interested.

Anyway, back to suicidal thoughts, as I entered the concourse of Euston Station (which at the moment feel quite dark because of the new balcony they are building...... for a station they are plans to completely rebuild in the next 20 years..... why) I started to think about the effect on my family, and (as usually when I think through this) became really upset when I thought how they would feel after I taken my life and decided it was time to think about something else.

Thoughts about how I would end my life is something is something I give some consideration too often, especially when I'm feeling down. I never talked to anyone about feeling this way, and nobody ever told me they feel this way, so I believe this isn't a normal thought pattern for normal people, whoever they are.

Over the year I've considered many ways of ending one life, from hitting my head / drowning on a canal lock, suffocating myself at home, slitting my wrist/ neck (my less preferred options), jumping off various motorway bridges (including once giving it major consideration on Christmas Eve at 3am, whilst driving around on empty roads, fortunately that time one of the reason keeping me from doing anything was the fact I'd wrapped presents for family members but not put labels on them).

The closes I ever came to suicide was after an event in London. It was around two year ago and I was working for my previous employer. I was attending the launch of a Peer Support report. The venue was close to Farringdon station in London (which at the time was being renovated ahead of Crossrail arriving their).  I had just returned to work.... after being bullied at work (well I now believe I was bullied). My self confidence was rather low at this time because of the bullying behaviour of my then line manager. The first part of the launch event was networking over lunch. I struggle with networking at the best of times, I really struggle to approach people I don't know and start a conversations. That day I spend some time with people I know, but I got the feeling they would rather that I didn't spend as much time as I did with them. When the networking part of the event finished, we all retreated to the room where the launch was taking place. I sat right at the back (on my very own). The launch event lasted for about an hour, but it felt much longer than that. During the time the speakers were speaking, I started to mentally beat myself up. I started going over the failure to network with other professional and became more and more upset (not that anyone would have been able to tell). As the launch went on, I started to think about ending my life. I gave a lot of consideration to how it could be done at Farringdon Station. I could stand at the end of the circle line platform, and throw myself under the train as it approach the platform. The platform were tighter than at other station so I felt their wasn't anyway anyone could stop me. I consider this for what seem like hours. If I'm honest, I was probably trying to convince myself to do it. However part of me would have been guilty for taking three underground line out in central London near rush hour. In the end as the event ended I ran for the train and got back home within a couple of hours. That was the day on reflection I came closer to ending my life, but it never got within 30:70 of doing so.

Welcome

Hi

After a few weeks of consideration I've decided to start writing a blog about my experiences of Mental Health. As you may have gathered from the title, I have anxiety, and I'm an involvement worker. Well I have two post, one is working in involvement for a prominent mental health charity. The second is as a engagement worker (a great job for someone who suffer from social anxiety). As you may have guest (from the previous sentence) I have anxiety.

I'm out as a suffer of Mental Health, and it something I have no problem speaking about.... well expect it is. I have a large problem speaking about my own mental health, how my own experience affect me. I lie about how I feel, including to myself. Recently I was reflecting on a situation in work, where I had started to come up with so many reason about why I was doing something, that I never reflected that a major part of the reason was because of feeling that had caused anxiety within me). I saw it as a failure within myself, that I couldn't even admit the real reason to myself. Even too as late a three weeks ago I was still justifying reason why I wasn't using my office which didn't admit to my anxieties.

For the last few weeks I've been feeling depressed. I put a lot of pressure on myself to run a great event at work, which didn't go so well at all and I've felt really down ever since. I've not slept very well. I'm writing today having taken the rest of this week off work (in my own AL) to get better.

From time to time, I'm going to write some thought about how I'm feeling, to share my experiences of mental health