Blogs like this being the ones that I write because I'm never going to sleep anyway, so might as well do something productive. I didn't used to post them, but now I do.
This morning I woke up and felt much as I have for the last few weeks. I was a bit perkier, I was up a little earlier, and I made an effort to wear something nice and put some lipstick on. These sorts of days are not my good days - my good days tend to be me in jeans and not really caring who objects. Thinking about it right now, they look a lot like my bad days...
Today was supposed to be an easy enough day before going back to the doctors to say to them again those words that I hate - the bad days outnumber the good, my anxiety is the one in the driving seat, I need help. I hate it because it makes me feel weak, I feel the stigma that is being "crazy" or "nuts". I've been called it to my face before, so why would people not say it if they knew I was in therapy or on medication because of an actual problem? It's part of this thing that people do called Catastrophising and I have to stop myself and ask, so what? Even if people do say that, and there is no guarantee that they do, so what? What does it change? Nothing, unless you let that be the reason not to do something about it.
So, I used the phrase "supposed to be"... Suffice it to say today was not an easy day.
I never know if it's unfortunate or not that anything at work that says "mental health" and "needs volunteers" I jump at, but it's something which I'm passionate about, so I jump and mostly it works out pretty well. Obviously it's something I have experience of myself, but it's also something I have seen around me a lot, and that only fuels my drive to talk about it, to learn about it, to share knowledge with other people because I whole-heartedly embrace the movement we are making away for a world that says "pull yourself together man!" to a world that allows men to cry over dog rescue videos or two guys to hug without being considered to be overly emotional or gay. Being able to express your emotions, or even just identify them is a big part of mental resilience.
Today was an event where I could learn more about Mental Health First Aid - something that I love as a concept, but in practice it's something that can feel a little bit brutal, and for me the hardest hit, and the one I should have seen coming, was the talk about suicide. I tried to just listen to it, tried to just be a duck and let it all wash over me (though in the context of that course a duck is something slightly different which I might actually write another blog about thinking about it...) but I couldn't. Today was not a day where I felt resilient enough to let it all just roll off of me, so I left the room looking rather frantic with only enough time to say no, I'm not okay over my shoulder when the trainer asked. The only thing I could do right then was extract myself from the situation.
I think if it had just been the stats and the figures, the red flags and how we can step in to prevent over 5000 people a year from taking their own lives I would have been fine. In fact, I know I would. It's hard to talk about, hard to hear, but it's about hope. It's about finding it, showing it, being it, whatever, but the difficult one is when we were discussing how a certain kind of suicide happens. How long it can take. The process of it. And I just broke and now I don't know how to fix myself.
Suicide itself is a tragedy. It doesn't matter who, how or why; it's just brutal for everyone who is left. Most times we forget that. It's easy to forget that in the midst of everything else, particularly when someone has jumped in front of a train and it causes delays. I'm sure everyone has heard someone in a train station telling people how selfish it is because of the impact on everyone else's day. We seem to be able to talk about it in the aftermath, but not before and we need to get better at that.
Tonight, I don't want to go to sleep because I don't want to see my friend's face. I don't want to have to live through a memory created by a very unhappy bit of my brain and remember how he chose to exit this world, particularly not with this newly gained knowledge of how it happened. Thinking about it when I'm awake is hard enough.
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