I will be me again.

As I write this I am lying in bed at 3.25pm having managed to write only 76 words on my college assignment before my brain decided to give up on me. I’m considering sleeping as I’m exhausted but I know I’ll wake up feeling groggier than I do already. And with sleep there’s the risk of bad dreams or the dreaded sleep paralysis. Decisions, decisions.

After being referred over 8 months ago, today I attended my first CBT session at New Craig’s (local psychiatric hospital). Today was a huge day for me as I have been feeling more and more hopeless lately. Medication doesn’t work for me, talking temporarily helps, and there’s only so much calming youtube videos I can watch in a day. Nothing seems to be curing me, or even subsiding this miserable illness.

You see, I have what they call generalised anxiety disorder, chronic panic disorder and more recently, I have depression. That’s what they call it but what does that mean? Why do I feel like I do? How can I stop feeling this way and how do I be ‘me’ again and not just these debilitating illnesses?

For months I have battled every day with panic attacks and the constant fear and dread that something awful is going to happen to me. With every panic attack or emotional meltdown, I seem to have lost a little part of ‘me’. I didn’t see it happening. It has now hit me like a blow to the chest that I don’t know how to be me anymore. I used to laugh so much more than I do now. I used to worry a million times less. I used to say yes to everything because I loved socialising. The hardest part is that I used to appreciate moments of pure joy and I could take myself back to those moments in an instant and smile. Now I am struggling to remember what that feels like.

I don’t feel like I am living. I am merely existing. But I am not suicidal, for I am scared of dying. I have developed an unhealthy fear of death which I carry around with me like a lead weight. Each panic attack feels like I am dying. I tell myself that it will pass and I will be okay but then the voice in my head butts in with “what if this is it? Maybe you will die this time.” Now call me crazy, but if this happened on a daily basis, sometimes 3 times a day, would you not be scared?

My depression has crept up on me over the past couple of months, I can see that now. But I had no warning. I was too focused on not dying or trying to overcome my anxiety to notice that I was crying most days, constantly feeling drained, lacking all motivation, forgetting to laugh at what would usually have me in hysterics. I have had bouts of depression in the past and I remember saying to a friend back in Summer last year, ‘I wish I had depression instead of anxiety because this is unbearable’ and now I have both, so be careful what you wish for.

So that is a brief description of my current mental state. Not the best is it. But today marks the day that it is going to change. I am no longer going to let my thoughts control me. I will be me again and I will live without these crippling illnesses once again. As my therapist advised me to write, that is exactly what I am going to do. And hopefully as time passes, my blog will start to look much different. I am not this negative person I have become, and I am not my thoughts. I am me. Or I soon will be. And that is my promise to myself.