In which Viv goes a bit emo...

Can't even think of a funny caption :(

WARNING: Rambling, depressing post ahead which includes absolutely no handy tips on how to deal with anxiety! Thank the sweet lord this is anonymous...

So, at the moment, something slightly odd is happening to me, and I can't really figure it out - or, I can, but I don't really want to face the conclusions. I'm quite embarrassed about what I'm about to say, and feel like I'm letting the side down revealing this, but at the same time I'm hoping being honest may help you - and me - in the long run! Here goes.

I feel like my anxiety is shifting and changing shape - I 'fix' one thing (obsessive thoughts about panic and travel and health and dying etc) and it simply morphs into another mind-consuming obsession, which at the moment seems to be pure, unadulterated self-hatred and self-bullying (god knows what the right name for this is). I've never had this one to such an extent before, so I don't know if I'm just getting horribly depressed and need to go back on medication (this is the scary conclusion I don't want to accept), or if this is just bog-standard anxiety posing in a different costume. Maybe you can help me figure it out!

Apart from a general, base-level fear that I'm completely messing up my life and failing on every single scale and by every single measure, I'm starting to angrily analyse all of my actions - even on an infinitesimal scale. I'm comparing myself to everyone - people I know, people on TV, people I see on the train - and feeling like I am disgracefully inferior. I feel I'm horribly ugly and shouldn't be seen (and that I'm wasting my only moments of potential 'beauty' thinking that as I'll only get less and less attractive from here), that I'm not as intelligent as I thought I was, that I am awkward and pathetic, that I'm unadventurous and dull, that I'm friendless and like poison to be around, that I'm terrible at my job, and on top of all of that - that I'm wasting every single precious second of my one-and-only life with these thoughts.

I'm gazing at women I know, hungrily, wishing I was more like them. I feel bad for people who have to talk to me, even for a short while.  I'm beginning to follow myself around, mocking myself, saying 'oh, great, that was brilliant. Look at you walking like that, look at you, so pathetic and useless. Yeah, just slink over there and hide, that's so like you' etc etc. (For a brilliant take on this evil, bullying self-commentary see this amazing, wondrous cartoon about depression). 

And I'm FURIOUS with myself about all of it! I'm turning into someone I really don't like, and I'm working myself up into a frenzy of hatred and anger and disappointment and venom and I just don't know how to fix any of it.

I thought we were meant to get more confident as we grew up! I'm almost thirty, and I'm now comparing myself with a confident 11 year-old I know and am wishing I could be more like her in every single way. I feel like I'm gradually losing my certainty and sense of self with every day. I used to be a screamingly, proudly self-confident A-type personality (debating and public speaking champion, A + student, sports-mad, head girl, popular etc - just generally precociously over-the-top and certain), and now I'm slipping into EMO self-loathing just when I'm meant to be feeling my maximum levels of self-assuredness!

What's happening?! Is this anxiety, or depression, or am I just losing my marbles?! Please help me get my mojo back...

V x

Wrap up your anxiety and walk away...

'NO-ONE SHOULD SEE THEIR OWN LIVER!!!'

Well, the entire global anxiety community can finally lift their ragged nails from between their teeth and heave a sigh of almost-relief - I'm back! 

Sorry for radio silence - have been desperately catching up on work and life after my convalescence, and mainly recovering from the shock of seeing my own gnarly internal organs in Kodachrome technicolour.  My surgeon insisted on proudly showing me evidence of how he managed to laboriously pick my diseased gallbladder off my liver. 'See the swelling and adhesions here? All terribly sticky and difficult. Here's where I cauterized the liver to stop the bleeding after I pulled the gallbladder off'' (me, inwardly, raging:  'WHAAAT? You seared my f-ing liver you f-ing maniac?! Is one of my internal organs now medium rare?') Outwardly, eyes wide and ingenue-ish: 'Hmmm, fascinating, how intriguing to see the mark it makes!''

And it kept on coming. 'And here's me avoiding the artery there' (inwardly: 'WHAAAAT?! There was an f-ing artery nearby?  You want me to congratulate you for missing it, Sweeney Todd?') Outwardly: 'Marvellous, just thrilling, gosh, thanks, how skilled you must be!' etc etc ad infinitum. Surgeons, note, anxious patients do not relish hearing or seeing such lurid details of their near-deaths and battered remains. Patients, note, no-one should have to see their own liver. You may have to book a 6-week course of counselling to get over seeing INSIDE your own skin, so poke your eyes out before a surgeon ever offers to show you a photo. 

Anyway, onwards and upwards my friends.

Today I went to my lunchtime meditation, and - double-whammy of joy, not only was my old friend Barry White on the desk (sadly not leading the meditation) but I also think I'm vaguely getting the hang of it again. 

There's a long, tree-lined driveway leading up to the meditation centre, and we were instructed to visualise leaving all our worries, fears and plaguing thoughts in little parcels under the trees before we came in, and we could pick them back up when we left.  For some reason this really cracked me up - I imagined parcelling up all these weird little phobias and obsessions in shiny paper, labelling them, and placing them under the trees like presents, saying 'aah, Fear of Death and Disease! This one's a good one, worked quite hard on this on, very proud of the size of this one', and 'ah! My old friend You Have No Friends! I weaved you so big; you're truly magnificent!' and 'Big Box Of Vague Dread About The Future! It hurts to leave you here when we've had so many wonderful nights together!'

We were then told to try to keep our mind with our body, and not let it run off back to the parcels under the trees. And for some reason this really clicked with me. The mind is not tethered to the body, and that's an incredible, miraculous, astonishing thing - our imagination can take us anywhere in the universe. But this is really not bloody helpful if your imagination is morbid and anxious, and takes you to nightmare-ish places you don't want to go, and ends up driving you slightly round the twist.  

So I loved the idea of keeping the two together, for a while, like a couple of old lovers on a bench. For some reason I immediately visualised my mind like a red balloon tied to an old bike  (slightly odd that I visualise my body as a bike...). And it just felt really...restful, and right to finally have the two together - like when Harry and Sally finally got together for good.

And, as cheesy as it sounds, as I walked back down the wooded drive and looked at all my virtual packages of worries and dreads and neuroses and fears and prepared to collect them, I suddenly thought - 'What if I just leave them here? What if I just walk out and leave them right here?' And I strode down the drive toward my life, the sun beating down on me, and I felt light and weirdly free, and (seriously, it was like a film) a tear actually rolled down my cheek.

So, awesome readers, I think you should go for a walk somewhere wooded and hippy-ish, and put all your discrete bundles of worry and fear and anxiety and dread under the trees there. Look at them, think about how much you sat on them and brooded on them and nurtured them. Be proud of the baby horrors you've created! Think of all of them, sitting there, all knobbly and covered in bows - and just walk away.

Free!