One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back

The time has come again, where my condition has changed. It hasn’t improved. I’m reluctant to say that it’s got worse but I’ve been consistently struggling with more things for the last month so I guess I’ll have to face facts. One aspect has been improving and I’m incredibly grateful for that, I’m coping a little better with being outside. It’s quite random as to when I feel better about it and I’m never quite sure how much of it is that I’m so used to this feeling of panic and anxiety that I’m now not noticing it quite as much when I’m out, or whether the sheer desperation to be outside, to be back in the real world is giving me the motivation and drive to push through the symptoms harder than ever before, or if the symptoms actually are a bit less. Either way, I’m coping better and staying calmer when I am able to go out. Something that is really helping with this is photography. Ever since I started trying to push myself back into going out when I first got ill and became housebound I’ve been using my mobile phone to take pictures of things I like when I’m out. When you’re anxious and on high alert, you notice a lot more about the world around you than most people do so I’ll see the slight movement of a bird landing or bees pollinating flowers, this is exhausting because I’m trying to process so much information so I always come home completely exhausted and usually feel quite rough for the rest of the day but it’s worth it. Photography is helping because I have a goal and it also breaks the walk down into smaller chunks because I’m just focusing on the next photograph rather than the whole walk. I also have to keep my breathing under control or I just get a blurry mess, especially when I’m trying to use the mammoth zoom on my shiny new proper camera and get it to focus on a particularly flighty bird. It takes a lot of focus but looking at the camera screen also helps me escape from the heaps of thoughts that normally fly through my head and I’m finally able to use the heightened hearing and vision to my advantage, it’s making me a great bird-spotter! While this is proving very useful, it does come with its own challenges, having a whopping great camera attached to me does make me feel like I’m drawing attention to myself and I have very very low confidence at the moment so this is really hard to deal with. I constantly remind myself that it’s just a camera and people will obviously know what I’m doing and possibly even be jealous, but it still makes me very worried and paranoid about what they might be thinking.

As for the negative bits, well those have just been a kick in the stomach. For a few months now I’ve been coping much better with planned visits to my Dad’s and my Grandparents’ houses and I’ve been settling really quickly once I’m there but ever since New Year’s Eve when I had a big panic about going out for absolutely no reason, I’ve been really struggling again and my IBS is back with full force making it doubly hard to even say yes to any plans let alone to follow through with them. Even the thought of having to go somewhere at a specific time makes my stomach knot now. It’s just horrible. I had done so well getting myself to that point and finally becoming more comfortable and it feels like such an enormous step backwards and it’s even more frustrating that I don’t know why it’s happened or what triggered it. Even when I think about going to someone’s house, there’s no specific thoughts about what I’m anxious about, I just have this really intense feeling of dread and a knotting feeling in my stomach and if it lasts long enough I get an IBS attack because of the stress.

On top of that, I’m also getting pretty bad health anxiety. Bad to the point where I start getting imaginary symptoms of illnesses that I can’t possibly have come into contact with and I’m now getting very fearful of being around people who might be contagious with anything, even a cold, because they make me so unwell because of my other underlying health problems. Again, it’s making me really anxious and makes me not want to go out anywhere or touch anything, I’m back to being overly worried about getting food poisoning from foods that I know are cooked and uncontaminated and yet my head still makes me ask questions about it and check things are hot enough and aren’t pink, my poor boyfriend must be going spare being constantly quizzed, he’s a chef, his job is to cook all day every day and not make people sick and yet I still worry, just in case. It’s not a trust issue, I’m worse when I’ve cooked stuff because I don’t have much confidence or belief in my ability, I just seem to be permanently switched on to worry mode. Again, I have no idea why, nothing specific has happened to cause this, just 3 weeks ago I had a cold and while it wasn’t nice it really wasn’t that bad and yet I’m really frightened of getting another one.

For those of you who know me in real life, please don’t stop inviting me to things, I’m desperate to be back to how I was before Christmas even and able to reliably say yes to plans at your house, but please understand that I may not be able to say yes at the moment or may have to cancel last minute. Even writing this is making me feel sick and anxious because I just feel like I’m letting people down. I’m so worried that my family and friends will think this is about them or something they’ve done or not done and it truly isn’t. I have absolutely no idea what’s caused this and it’s doing my head in that my condition changes so randomly and unexpectedly, it’s really unsettling. In many ways I wish my condition was constant because I’d know what I could and couldn’t do and could work on improving those things instead of working for months and months to get myself to a slightly higher level of functioning, only to have it taken away again for no reason and have to start from scratch again. I never have given up and I never will but my goodness is this testing that resolve. It seems like no matter how hard I try it’ll never let up, I’ll never actually get back on my feet without the carpet being pulled from under me again. I can’t even express how much it hurts to be back to struggling this much to go to places and see people I’ve known my entire life. I hope that if they’re reading this they believe what I’m saying and that this truly is just a random change in my condition and nothing that I or they have done. I love visiting my grandparents and helping look after my Grandad and spending time with them both, I had a lovely Christmas with my dad and his partner and her family and for the first time in ages I felt settled and not at all on edge and then under a week later I was having a panic attack and just feeling like my thoughts had been taken over again. I managed to pull myself together and calm down with the help of phonecalls to two family members and actually get to my dad’s but I just couldn’t stay calm, I kept feeling more and more on edge and unable to cope, with what, I don’t know, but just this rising feeling of not being able to cope and soon after midnight I went home and spent over an hour in floods of tears because I just couldn’t hold it together any more. I got in the same state a few times over the following two days, a great way to start a new year eh?!

Since then, I’ve tried to just think it was a blip, I really thought it was at first, I hadn’t been sleeping properly and Christmas is usually a tricky time for me so I thought a few good nights’ sleep and a bit of calm and distraction and I’d be back on track, but I’m not. I’m over-emotional again and randomly crying or feeling totally overwhelmed, I can’t keep still and feel bored most of the time, I often feel angry for no reason or like I want to run or jump or scream. I’ve got so much energy inside me and yet I can’t focus on anything for more than a few minutes most of the time, I can’t plan to save my life at the moment and then I get totally overwhelmed by all of the tasks I have to do or the mess around me and I don’t even know where to start with sorting it out. I feel intensely lonely when Joe’s at work and I find the computer and even my phone really intrusive and I regularly feel like throwing them out so I don’t have to deal with so many FB notifications or crappy emails or spam calls. I desperately want to be left alone, to have contact on my terms rather than being constantly contactable, but I also hate being alone, I can’t bear my phone being switched off because I get so anxious without it, it’s a real Catch 22! So currently, I’m trying to keep busy, as best I can. Joe’s helping make meals for me and helping me plan them to make sure that I eat properly on the days he’s not here. He’s helping me organise stuff so I know a priority order for my reviews otherwise I just do random tasks on loads of them and none of them end up ready to be uploaded, and I’m trying to get on top of the chores in the flat so that they’re easy to do and more manageable, even on my bad days. It’s really hard being this incapable. I’m good at seeming ok, readers of my reviews have very little idea of the challenges I face when writing stuff or getting it uploaded. I’ve recently even gone back to feeling anxious about posting them which is why I’m hardly ever sharing my reviews at the moment because I’m so worried that people will disagree or criticise me or that they’ll buy the item based on my review and recommendations and then not like it. It’s ridiculous, I know, but it’s really hard to talk myself out of thinking and feeling this way and it’s taking a lot of encouragement to get me to post stuff because my low confidence is affecting this too.

So there’s my latest update. Hopefully I’ll have better news soon and I’ll be back to enjoying visits to see my family without feeling cripplingly anxious ahead of time. In the meantime, I shall be keeping busy as much as I can and trying to be kind to myself, and also photographing everything in sight. My mum’s been into photography for about 2 years now and she’s completely obsessed and has been trying to persuade me to get a better camera for months so I finally have and in the two or three weeks since I’ve had it, I’ve taken almost 1200 photos, a huge number of which have been birds in the trees outside my flat so luckily even on the days when I can’t venture outside, I can at least take photos of things through the window and escape from my thoughts for just a little while. Below are some of the photos I’ve taken over the last couple of weeks, I don’t really know what I’m doing with a camera yet and I have no idea how most of its features work but I’m just so excited to be using it, and outside occasionally and able to be in the world and seeing everything, even frost-covered litter, to me it’s all beautiful because I actually got to see it and I couldn’t be more grateful for those times when I get to experience the outside world because my world has, in many ways, just got that little bit smaller and more scary and I’m glad that I can at least get a glimpse of it sometimes and record that forever, even if it is a case of One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back.