For today’s blog post, I am going to speak to you about something close to my heart and that is my mental health and where I am at now. I am always very open and honest when it comes to my struggles with my mental health disorders. I think that if just one person out there can relate to what I am speaking about. Or if I can help one person, then I am doing something right. Sometimes suffering with your mental health can seem like an incredibly lonely pace, but the truth is that it doesn’t need to be if we open up the narrative.

In the early days when I was first diagnosed with OCD and depression, I felt out of control and in a rather dark place. There was so much stigma attached to the words and I was ashamed that I wasn’t like everybody else. It became a really hard pill to swallow and for some time I did wallow in self-pity. But then I realised that I could make something positive out of my mental health and I began to open up more than I ever had before. In this post, I am going to share where I am today and how my everyday life is impacted by my mental health.

 

 

My backstory.

In my late teens, I would get very wound up regarding things that should not have affected me as much. This intensified over the space of a few years. After much back and forth with the doctors and a private facility, I was diagnosed with OCD. My options at the time were to medicate the condition or just carry on as I was. I decided just to keep going and try to get a hold of how I was feeling. I made changes to my daily life to help manage my OCD. Throughout all of my efforts, at times my impulses and frustrations grew so large that I would sink into a deep depression. To the point where I could not get out of bed for weeks at a time, which is when I would have to rely on anti-depressants to make me more stable.

 

How I am these days.

As I said, these days after living with the condition for such a long time I can help to manage my everyday life and I stick to a routine which I know works for me. The past couple of years have been pretty uneventful with regards to my mental health. For the first time in a very long time, I felt like I was once again in control of my own mind. That was until the Coronavirus hit and every single routine and plan that I have worked hard to put in place over the past couple of years both with my personal and work life came crashing down and I was back at square one and in a blind panic. I sank into a depression again and the climb back to ‘normality’ was incredibly difficult for me.

 

My mental health and the pandemic. 

I was in a panic about catching the virus, and passing it on to my grandma whom I care for. My husband was still having to go to work and visit hospitals and I was simply terrified. My OCD is not normally centred around cleanliness, this was a new progression due to the pandemic. However, due to the virus and the climbing numbers in the number of deaths, I quickly grew fearful of leaving the house and everything that was happening around me. I was also working from home even though I felt safe in my own home. Quickly, I became very reclusive and that routine that I once longed for so much was ripped to shreds and I felt like I was going absolutely crazy trapped inside my own home. I stopped wanting to get up. Stopped wanting to get dressed in the morning. Stopped wanting to function like normal. I knew that when I was at home, I was safe.

 

How I am able to manage my day-to-day.

I quickly learnt that I do not respond well to medication. Even though it may help me get out of bed when I have sunk into a depression, I do not need medication every single day. That is because for the most part, I feel mentally stable for 95% of the time. In order to ensure that those deep depressions do not occur frequently, there are steps that I take in order to make sure that I am in a good place. For me, this involves getting all of my thoughts out of my head and getting them on paper – and by paper, I mean on to-do lists or Excel spreadsheets. I live my life by various documents that I keep up with and doing that, I feel like I unload my mental capacity and I feel worlds better for it.

Most people would look at the coping mechanisms that I carry out day to day and think that it is absolutely insane. However, it works for me and my mental health and that is what I need. Plus, I am incredibly good and confident about speaking to different folk about my mental health and I feel worlds better sometimes just vocalising how I am feeling.

 

My round-up.

I am not going to lie, and I will admit that it was an uphill climb to get to where I am today. This all took a hell of a lot of work. Throughout my life since my early diagnosis, I have been on and off antidepressants and there have been many trial-and-error periods. The main thing that I have learnt along the way is that no two people are the same when it comes to mental health. What works for me, would surely be a nightmare for somebody else and vice versa. I just need to continue to learn what works best for me and my headspace.

 

Like with most things in life, once you receive a mental health diagnosis, it is about coming to terms with things. I know that my journey with mental health certainly isn’t linear. There are times when I feel on top of the world, other times when I can feel myself crashing and times when I am rock-bottom. The more time passes, the more I become accustomed to how my mind works and I begin to think about. I just encourage anybody out there with either a new or existing mental health diagnosis to speak openly to people and get that off your chest.