Feel Good 101_The Outsiders' Guide to a Happier Life Page 5
Also, whilst I had many negative experiences in my previous jobs, there were definitely some benefits from doing all of them. I made some wonderful friends and have some great memories – and I also learned an awful lot about the real world. You may not be able to begin following your dreams right away, and there will be times in your life when you may simply have to buckle down and do a less-than-desirable job in order to pay the bills, but in the meantime, you will learn how to survive, keep your head down when rumours and gossip spread, how to smile and be polite in the face of the rudest people – and knowing you have it in you to survive a shitty experience is something you can be proud of.
2
The Brain Stuff
Warning: This chapter covers a lot of sensitive topics concerning mental health, and is a heavy read. If you wish to proceed, only read when you feel calm and comfortable. If you wish to skip this section, the next chapter is on page 72.
You made it past Chapter One! Oh, I’m so relieved that you’ve enjoyed what I’ve written so far. Let me be absolutely clear, before anybody gets the wrong idea – whilst I am definitely a much stronger, happier person than I was many years ago, my journey continues. I am not always happy, and my mind is not always as clear as it is on the day that I am writing the introduction to this chapter. I have my good days with my mental health, but I also have my bad days – as does everyone. The following segments in this chapter go into greater detail about my struggles with my mental health, such as depression and anxiety. They were not easy to write, and so they may not be easy to read. Nevertheless, I wanted to include this small introduction to stress a point: in no way, shape or form does having any kind of a mental health issue make you less worthy of love and care than anyone without one. Some days will be very hard to get through, but even the world’s leading health professionals are making new discoveries about the brain all of the time. You are not a failure if you have a mental health issue. Along the way, you will encounter people who will try to write you (and your problems) off, as though only physically visible afflictions are valid. Over the years I have been told many a time to ‘man up’, ‘get over it’, ‘smile more’ and, of course, ‘ just stop thinking about it’. I used to get angry at the people behind those words, but after hearing them so many times, I now turn my frustration into the love I wish I was shown during my hardest times – I turn the other cheek, laugh inwardly at their ignorance and walk away, hoping and praying they never have to struggle with a mental health issue of their own. Of course, not everyone reading this book will struggle with mental health issues, and I am truly so happy for those individuals. However – my struggles have shaped me into a wiser, stronger person. With every pit I fall down, my arms get stronger as I claw my way back out again. I am who I am today because of what I have been through. I wrote the following segments a few months before I wrote this introduction, and I have chosen to leave them frozen in that moment of time, unedited and raw for you to read. I believe they will give you a better insight into my mind and explain how I have come to be the strong, independent woman that I am today.
Anxiety: My Story
Fuck, I don’t want to start this chapter. I’ve been putting it off for hours. I’ve been trying to distract myself by watching YouTube videos and passively snacking. I’ve had the video of Shia LaBeouf telling me to ‘just do it!’ on repeat for well over an hour. Fuck, I don’t want to write about this, I don’t want to think about this, I don’t want to give this thing the satisfaction of acknowledging its presence and impact on my life – but I have to. I promised myself I would write about this, and finally go into detail about the mental health problem that I’ve struggled with for almost ten years.
I suffer with a very specialised form of anxiety.
I say ‘suffer’ – that’s not strictly true anymore. I certainly used to ‘suffer’, but I’m finally at a point in my life where I can (almost) peacefully co-exist with it. I can manage it. However, this anxiety has defined almost half of my entire life – my later teenage years and early adulthood were all led by this horrid, self-destructive beast that lived rent-free in my brain.
I don’t want to write about it, I don’t want to make my brain think it is okay for it to repeat what I’ve been through, but I’ve been learning to fight against my instincts since I was seventeen years old. So fuck my fear – I’m going to write about it.
When I was ten years old, I was on holiday with my parents in Gran Canaria, one of the Canary Islands not far from the coast of Morocco. It was the second (and final) holiday I had with both of my parents, and I was having the time of my life – going to all the little clubs for kids at the resort, swimming in the big pool outside our room, visiting the water parks – until my dad collapsed.
My dad collapsing was a culmination of his ears popping on the departing flight due to cabin pressure, and the sheer boiling Macaronesian heat. He was sitting outside our hotel room on a deckchair in the shade when he began to feel unwell. As soon as he stood up, he collapsed, hitting his head on the hard patio. My mum shooed me away to one of the resort clubs as she shouted for help, and I ran off, confused, thinking my dad was just playing around. After all – my dad had been perfectly fine and healthy for all of my life. Nothing ever went wrong with my dad. I skipped off down towards the kids’ club early, knowing that so long as I did what my mum told me to do, everything would be okay.
My dad was treated by doctors, and felt better almost immediately, but the rest of the trip was tainted. After we flew back home, my dad’s health declined. He began to feel dizzy and would collapse without notice. For the next two years between the ages of ten and twelve, I had to endure the long, nervous trips back and forth to the hospital, waiting outside private rooms with my mum whilst they conducted test after test, first incorrectly diagnosing him with epilepsy, then meningitis, then telling us that he had a heart condition – none of which turned out to be the right diagnosis.
After two years of being misdiagnosed and incorrectly given all sorts of pills that made him ten times worse, he was finally diagnosed with vertigo, caused by a fault in the balance mechanism of the inner ear. He began to take medication to get it under control, and things returned to (almost) normal. However – during these two long, agonising years watching my mother cry almost every day, I began to realise that my parents were not as immortal as I’d once believed. Up until this point, my dad had been a superhero with zero weaknesses, impervious to illness and someone who would be around for ever. Now, to twelve-year-old Emma, he was simply mortal. He was someone who could get ill, and would get ill – eventually to the point where he wouldn’t be able to fight any more.
My dad’s illness took its toll on my parents’ marriage, and shortly after I turned twelve, my mum and dad separated. Due to my parents’ work and childcare arrangements, I was always a little bit closer to my dad than I was to my mum, and so I stayed with my dad. Now it was just Dad and me. Over the course of the next few years, through secondary school, in part due to the fact that I was a complete loner, we began to rely solely on each other for support. My dad was (and always has been) my best friend. As his condition improved and was managed by medication, my fears about his mortality slowly retreated to the back of my mind, until I no longer thought about it.
Until the day that I did.
I was seventeen years old when I had my first blow of anxiety. I was lying in bed, trying to get to sleep. Usually, I’d have no problem falling asleep (I’m the type to pass out the second my head hits the pillow) but for some reason on that fateful night, my mind was fully awake. I still remember the exact thought that flashed through my brain, seemingly from out of nowhere, and the horrid feeling of being metaphorically struck by a freight train as I processed it.
‘Your dad is going to die.’
You know the expression ‘his blood ran cold’? The metaphor that you read in crime thrillers which tells you something bad is about to happen? I found out that night that it isn’t just a metaphor. Almost imm
ediately after my mind conjured up that simple phrase, presented as a fact, I felt the blood in my veins turn to ice. I no longer felt warm. My heart began to pound in my chest as I lay there, unable to move, my skin breaking out in a sweat as though it were burning hot, when I was actually ice cold. I felt as though I needed to be sick. I felt my stomach twist, as though it was being wrung out like a dishcloth by two tightly squeezing hands, before feeling it plummet to where my intestines were. I felt my cheeks burning hot whilst the rest of my body shivered, prickling as though being jabbed by tiny little needles. I suddenly felt light-headed and as though I was no longer on the planet I once felt safe on. The simple phrase ‘Your dad is going to die’ burned its way on to my retinas, repeating itself over and over like the incessant demands of a child as I lay there hyperventilating, trying to stay quiet so as not to wake up my dad sleeping in the next room. My dad was going to die. I was going to live to see my dad die. My dad wasn’t going to be around for all my life. My dad was going to have a heart attack. He was going to be alone, trying to call for an ambulance, when he would no longer be able to breathe, and he was going to die. Mental images flashed through my brain a million miles a minute, making me envision my dad, my best friend, lying on the floor, dead. I began to cry, still shaking, still feeling as though I was going to be sick, until eventually I was able to steady my breathing and fall asleep, my brain finally exhausted.
This was the first time in my life that I had experienced a panic attack. It didn’t happen again the next night, or the next – but unluckily for me, this attack wasn’t an isolated incident. Before these attacks started happening (which was only ever at night when my brain was idle and I was alone), I would listen to music with noise-cancelling headphones on, letting myself be carried away by my favourite songs so that I could be happy and at peace before going to sleep. After that first attack, I couldn’t do it anymore. What if, when you’re listening to a song, your dad starts having a heart attack, and cries out for you to call an ambulance, but you don’t hear him because of your headphones? What if his last moment on earth is him crying out for help, and his daughter ignoring him?
Over time, these attacks decided that they would no longer be confined to the brief moments before sleep. My dad is almost always by his phone and, nine times out of ten, picks up after about three rings. Every time I called him, whether it was from college, work, or whenever I wasn’t near him, I would count the rings. My anxiety would heighten with every additional ring that went unanswered. After five rings, I knew he wasn’t going to pick up, and immediately, in my mind, he was dead. He was lying on the floor, motionless, dead. As soon as I heard the automated voicemail instead of my dad’s voice, an attack would occur. Immediately, my heart rate would soar and my stomach would plummet, I would sweat, my blood would run cold, my cheeks would prickle – and I had to get out of whatever room I was in. Whatever the size of the room, it was too small. This would happen at YouTube parties, on dates at restaurants with my then-boyfriend – wherever I was, on the rare occasion my dad wouldn’t pick up the phone, I would spiral into an attack without fail. I would ring his spare phone, and if he didn’t answer, I would phone my mum, who at this point lived nearby and could pop over to his house to check on him. After a few minutes of enduring an attack, my phone would vibrate, and I would look down and see my dad’s number.
‘Sorry, pup,’ he would answer. ‘I left my phone in the bathroom. How’s your evening going?’
This form of separation anxiety continued for years. Just before my anxiety began, I had finally decided that if music wasn’t going to work out for me, I would study for a PhD in linguistics, and eventually become a researcher for speech development in children. It was something we had studied briefly in college, and I had finally begun to feel as though I could do something other than music for the rest of my life – but now, thanks to the cycle my brain would go into every time it was idle, I wasn’t even going to apply to go. I took a ‘gap year’ and worked in restaurants for the next three years instead. I said no to holidays and nights out with the few friends I had finally made, out of fear that, as soon as I was away, my dad would fall ill and die without me there. The fear of my dad falling ill and dying very quickly took over my entire life, and every life decision was based around it. Boyfriends would witness me having an attack and think I was ‘crazy’. Friends would frown and say, ‘You can’t think like that!’ as though my mind gave me any form of choice. No matter how many times I tried to tell myself not to panic, I was fighting a losing battle against my brain, putting my adult life on hold as I became a slave to my own thoughts.
When I was twenty-one and my YouTube was beginning to take off, I was having a meeting with my management team in London when the topic of me visiting America came up. I immediately shut down the idea. ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I can’t leave the UK.’ I was asked to explain my issues, and so I did. My YouTube manager was extremely sympathetic, but told me in no uncertain terms that I was going to waste a whole lot of opportunities if I didn’t seek help. She spoke to the father of one of her colleagues, who was a doctor, and managed to pull some strings in order to get me a free session. Explaining my entire backstory to a total stranger is still up there as one of the most terrifying things I have ever done – as soon as I began talking, I burst into tears.
‘I think it’s quite clear that your brain has got itself caught in a loop, causing it to act extremely irrationally,’ he said. ‘I’m going to prescribe you some medication, and we’ll see if that helps to unravel the knot.’ I’m not about to sit here and judge this doctor for prescribing me medication only an hour after meeting me – every doctor works differently. Should he instead have focused on getting to the root of the problem, rather than sticking me on meds and hoping for the best? Possibly – but the medication did have an effect. Over time, I began to find that I could go a few more phone rings before my panic would set in, and before too long I was able to fight my go-to irrationality with rational thoughts. He is not dead, I would tell myself as my heart tried to race. He has done this before. He has left his phone in the bathroom, or it’s on silent and he can’t hear it. He’s mowing the lawn and can’t hear it. He is fine. Give it a few moments.
Whilst this didn’t always work, and the attacks would sometimes break their way through, the medication – along with the support from my then-boyfriend – began to allow me to live a semi-normal life. I began to agree to go on trips away from my home town for more than one night, and I started to attend YouTube events in America. Slowly but surely, my anxiety became manageable, and eventually I was able to come off the medication and still go through the steps that calmed me down. In the summer of 2016, I finally bit the bullet and did the thing that I wanted to do when I was eighteen – I moved out of my home town, eighty miles away from my family. At first, it was hell on my anxiety – now, if there was a family emergency, I was hours away, just as I’d feared I’d be if I went to university – but over time, I began to realise that the increased distance between me and my dad wouldn’t affect the likelihood of something happening. The breakthrough point for me was being able to view my anxiety attacks as irrational – once I was able to recognise that my brain was acting irrationally, and would soon return to normal, I was able to begin to defeat that bad train of thought that had led to the panic attack.
I still have my bad moments. If my dad hasn’t answered the phone after about ten minutes, and my mum can’t get through to him either, I’ll start to panic. The telltale signs of restlessness and an increased heart rate kick in, despite my telling myself that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for him not picking up the phone. There might come a day when my dad will not answer the phone and something will be terribly wrong, or I’ll receive a call from my mum (my mum and I prefer to text, so whenever I see her number come up on my screen, I immediately jump to the conclusion that something bad has happened), but for the most part, I’m ready. Thanks to this irrational separation anxiety, I have
essentially mourned my dad’s death for eight years. I have seen images of him on the floor of his living room, alone, dead from a heart attack. I have seen images of me boxing up his belongings. For eight years, I have had to listen to my mind say, He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead and alone and you’re not there, and I truly believe that one of the reasons I have been able to (for the most part) conquer my anxiety is because I mentally tortured myself to the point where I simply couldn’t exist with it any longer. Of course, I am fortunate that I was able to overcome the brunt of my anxiety with medication and persistence, but there is absolutely zero shame in seeking therapy. Trained professionals will have seen many cases such as yours over the years, because you are not alone in your struggle – but each case is unique to the individual. Trial and error, met with a lot of persistence and determination to find a way to manage your mental health issue, will eventually result in you discovering the treatment that is right for you.
The fact is – and this is what I tell myself when I feel an attack bubbling in my chest – worrying simply does nothing. Sometimes, my instinct to worry is out of my control and unavoidable, but worrying in itself only produces negative effects, with no benefits. When my heart is racing, I ask myself, ‘Will panicking about this problem make the solution come quicker?’ and the answer is always no. This can be frustrating when you are worrying so much that you cannot calm down by your own command, but I’ve found that asking myself this question often injects a dose of rationality into my irrationally-acting brain.