It’s that time of year again where we hit the anniversary of me being signed off sick from work. I swear it comes around quicker every year. As ever, I don’t really know what to talk about but having noted this day in written-form for the last 6 years, it seems a shame to quit now so I’m probably going to do what I’ve done almost every previous year and ramble until I come to a close.
Yesterday, I thought I’d read through all of my previous posts written on this date each year to see how things have changed or stayed the same, to see how my writing style has evolved and to see if it would inspire a specific thing to write about. It was a strange experience. My sense of things is often at odds with how they actually are and this is most notable in my sense of my writing. Often, when I write a post, I think it’s truly dreadful and mostly a rambling mess. I take a big breath in and start reading through ready to attempt to heftily edit whatever meandering thought soup has been typed out. Almost every time, I’ll barely edit it at all because when I read it back, it actually says what I want to say in a surprisingly coherent, cohesive and interestingly written way. But it never feels like that when I’ve written it and I’ve never been able to work out why. It’s exactly the same with my vlogs. I suffer from dissociation symptoms and usually only get 2 lines into my vlogs which I start knowing a theme and a couple of examples and little to nothing else in terms of a plan, and then I dissociate and have little to no recollection of what I’ve said. It means I have to go back and watch every video before posting it to check I’ve not sworn or said anything I’m not allowed to and haven’t gone too personal or dark or overboard about whatever the topic is. As yet, there’s never been a video that I’ve had to edit, re-record or not post. But still, every time I feel I have to check because my brain tells me that these things are not things I’m good at, that I’m not a coherent writer, that I’m extremely negative and that I’ll say all sorts of things I’m not aware of or won’t make sense. This has never been the case but somehow that doesn’t change my viewpoint.
When I read back all of my previous anniversary posts, I expected the first few to be ropey and written in a completely different style from how I write now. It’s not something I’ve worked to improve upon, I just assumed that with practice and time and ageing that my style would have adapted or changed and possibly improved. As far as I could tell, it’s not changed one bit. I still punctuate in the same way, I still love sentences that are far too long and I still list almost everything in groups of three because it makes my brain happy to write like that. As for the content, again, I fully expected that to really change because I know my conditions have over time but again, it was surprisingly samey. Not in a boring way, but in a, this feels like it changes but sounds remarkably similar year on year sort of way. I’ve mentioned before that my anxiety attaches to different sources and these change a little over time so I can get more or less anxious about being observed doing things or my health at different points through my time of being ill. But the severity of the anxiety, the magnitude of it seems to stay quite constant and while it does improve and deteriorate, this is just the pattern it takes, like the changing of the tides really, there are high tides and low tides but one always follows the other and they don’t get more or less over time, they’re just high and low and high and low. The most common themes I noticed though are that despite it feeling like it changes, my confidence levels are mostly very low and my ability to sleep properly is almost always something I struggle with. I’ve used the phrase before that these things are sadly bad and worse and nothing outside that. It sounds super negative but there’s honestly no other way of describing it because I don’t ever seem to have periods of good sleep where I’m consistently sleeping 8 hours a night straight through and waking up in the morning not feeling like death, or periods where I suddenly feel confident or develop self-belief. I seem to wade through life constantly battling those things, always trying to sort out my sleep and always trying to force myself to do things that everyone tells me I’m capable of and that I’ve previously shown myself to be capable of and still permanently feeling like I’m not and that I’ll spectacularly fail. Those things are mostly a constant for me. I guess it’s why I find it hard to know what to write about because often, the only change is the passing of time or what’s happening in my personal life, my inner life doesn’t really change all that much and so I tend to run out of words or ideas for a new spin on the same very old idea that it’s absolutely no fun at all to be ill with anxiety disorders.
One thing I have noticed is that despite the past year being exceptionally challenging for me due to personal circumstances and events (more info on this can be found here), in some ways my anxiety has felt more stable at points too. It certainly hasn’t been stable at the points where my world was turned upside down with benefits decisions and diagnoses and deaths of family members, but the bits in between have seemed like they’ve been a bit more stable. I think this might be because expectations on me have been lower than ever before thanks to the pandemic. It’s no longer expected for me to go out, to socialise, to be able to go shopping or to parties. For months at a time, we’ve been required to stay indoors, stay solitary, and keep ourselves safe. In some ways this has given me the space to just be and to not be constantly reminded of all of the things I can’t do but I do wonder how this experience might change as the world opens up again and those things all become encouraged once more. I’m also fully aware that my view on all of this, as ever, is hugely skewed by how I’m feeling while I’m writing this because for the last couple of days my anxiety has levelled off after a week of it being off the scale and so the relief that brings is all-encompassing and often blinkers my view of how good or bad things have previously been. I’m not very good at gauging that kind of thing. Just like my writing and my videoing, if I’m feeling good right now then things have been pretty good and I forget the intensity of the badness that I’m not feeling currently but if things are bad then I often also forget the intensity of the good periods too. It’s part of why I always intended (though never achieved) to blog regularly because I very much write in the moment and once that moment passes, my thoughts and feelings and take on the world shifts a bit. It’s why I usually have to create content all in one go because if I lose my flow, if I go back to it on another day then I’m almost never in exactly the same headspace as before and I lose all of the potency of the point I was making because it’s no longer quite as relevant to me.
I’m not sure that any of this sums up where I’m at right now because to be honest, I’m not really sure that I know. My Grandad died 10 days ago and that’s been a lot to take in and get used to on top of the anniversary of the UK going into lockdown, the illness and death of my Mother-in-Law, so much political turmoil about so many different things and spending almost a year fighting to be awarded disability benefits. I’ve spent a lot of the last year feeling like I was drowning and gasping for air. I spent more time than I care to remember genuinely wishing I was dead for the first time in a long time because things had got so bleak. I tend to look at the past, inadvertently, with rose-tinted glasses. I know the facts of how suicidal I was at points but because I don’t feel like that right now, I don’t feel that it was that bad but at the time I do still remember having to get myself through the day in parts because I just wasn’t coping. I know I’ve suffered from increased isolation and loneliness but also increased connection and communication and that’s been quite confusing. This year has been the year I’ve been least productive out of all of the years I’ve been ill for and I’ve found that so hard. I hate just existing and not having anything to show for my time and feeling like I’m just wasting time, life, waiting and wishing away the days until I feel better. I tend to avoid writing about the future because I know all too well how little control I actually have over that and so often I think that a little plan or a little aim will so obviously be doable that I’ll set it in stone here but I now know that’s not how it works and life twists and turns and often your plans and aims don’t keep up with you. Of course, I wish that by year 8’s post I’ll be telling you that I’m recovered and all of the wonderful things that would come with that but the realist in me tells me that’s quite unlikely. I’m just hoping more positive things will have happened this coming year, that I’ll keep the connection and communication I’ve built with people around me, that there will be less illness and death to contend with and that I’ll find my passion for something again and be able to get my teeth into a project, it’s been such a long time since I did that and it really is time.
If you want to go back and read all of my previous anniversary posts, they can be found below:
One Year On – One Year of Fear
Two Years On – Two Years of Trying
3 Years On, 3 Years of Managing
Four Years On, Four Years of Frustration
In The Midst Of Madness 