Recently I’ve seen a lot of posts on facebook asking people to support friends and relatives who are suffering from mental health problems. I think it’s time I came clean.<\/p>\n
At the back end of last year things started to get on top of me. Our lives were busy, but we had a goal to gain financial freedom and we were working like mad towards it. We hadn’t had a break since we’d rolled off the ferry in September 2013, but that wasn’t a problem, I could handle it, or so I thought. I had to use up my holiday allowance before the New Year so I booked a couple of weeks of at the start of December which was used rushing around preparing the shop for our new tenants.<\/p>\n
As the days went by my mood got darker and darker, then one day I started to cry in the car on the way to work. I had no idea why I was crying but inside it felt like someone had died, I was numb. Outside it didn’t feel like me at all, it was as if I was hidden behind a mask. I didn’t know it at the time but I was stressed\/depressed\/anxious – take your pick, no one has really got to the bottom of what it was or what caused it – but I can tell you now it wasn’t pleasant.<\/p>\n
I’d had job pressure before, so I know when my body is telling me I am stressed; my hands start to peel, I don’t sleep well and I get flashing migraine lights (but luckily not the headache that goes with it), but this was different, I had none of that.<\/p>\n
A few more days of tears in the car passed (I could hold it together at work and in public) before Jay managed to persuade me to visit the doctors. I was offered the choice of sign off from work for two weeks, medication or both – I didn’t want either. I could handle it. But after only a couple more days things were worse, it was getting harder to muster up the energy to do anything. So I called the doctor again and got signed off for two weeks – there was no way I was going to take the pills if I didn’t have to.<\/p>\n
My natural instinct was to curl up in bed, pull the duvet over my head and stay there, and I did for a couple of days. But I didn’t want to be off work, I felt like a failure, I hated myself, I thought the world hated me and I spent a lot of my time under the duvet fretting about work. Slowly I emerged from my cocoon and made it onto the sofa (still under the duvet), I researched depression and alternatives to medication and found that exercise was thought to be almost as good, if not better, in some cases. I went to the local leisure centre a couple of times for a swim, read more about depression and how to cope with it and made myself do stuff – inside I still wanted to crawl back into my bed though.<\/p>\n
The time between Christmas and New Year was already booked off work as holiday (still trying to use them up) so I only went back to the office for a couple of days. It was tough, very tough. I emailed my work colleagues to let them know that if I burst into tears on them it was nothing they had said, it was just what I was going through. Although I didn’t really know what I was going through as the doctors didn’t know what had caused it. The description I related to the most was from a brilliant book by Ruby Wax<\/a>: your brain is like a PC and if you have too many windows open on your PC for too long it will crash. I was amazed at how many people in our small office wrote back to me and said they had suffered the same thing – yet no one spoke about it.<\/p>\n \n