It’s been a little over a month since my first post on this blog about my battle with anxiety. I wanted my second post to come a little sooner than this, but unfortunately I am a serial procrastinator (which isn’t the best habit to pair with a love for writing!). However, here I am once again to plague your screens with a few too many words.

To say I wasn’t expecting the response I received would be an understatement. When I considered writing about my experience, my main focus was ‘Who will this help?’. I didn’t want to publish something that people couldn’t also find a bit of themselves in. Of course, in part it was a release for me to get it all out on a page, but ultimately I wanted to write something that would make other people feel less alone.

In the following days from hitting publish I was on the receiving end of some amazing messages. Some from friends, some from acquaintances, and some from complete strangers – each of them just as meaningful as the rest. I found myself in this incredible bubble of honesty and bravery, with so many people sharing similar stories with me. It made me realise that the assumptions we make of people from their online presence can be so far from the truth. You really do never know what’s going on in someone else’s life, and I think a lot of us forget that sometimes.

I cannot, and would never claim to, know how it feels to live with mental health battles outside of my own, when the two main things I have suffered from are grief and anxiety. However, I think there is a universal truth to be taken from the hardships we may face.

When you are unhappy in life it can be so hard to picture yourself in a time where everything feels good again. I have experienced bouts of unhappiness that stem from obvious reasons, but also some where I cannot understand what it is that’s making me feel this way. I’m sure we’ve all seen old photographs of ourselves and thought either ‘I was so happy then’ or ‘I was so unhappy then’, yet we can’t pinpoint an exact moment between then and now that things changed.

That brings me to getting better. When my anxiety was unbearable, all I could see was a wall separating me from the life I wanted to live, and the one I was currently living. To scale the wall seemed impossible and I nearly resigned to the idea that this was how it was going to be from now on. I’m sure when Alex Honnold first glared up at El Capitan he couldn’t imagine making it to the top, yet in 2017 he was able to climb it without so little as a safety rope. Getting better is about trying and failing, trying and succeeding, making changes, but also remaining consistent. My point is that there’s no one way to do it. Suddenly we are nearly 7 months in to 2020, a year that has not turned out how any of us could have ever conceived, yet I find myself in the best place I’ve been since the New Year. I respected that I needed time to love and look after myself, and in turn, I found a way over that wall without even thinking about it.

Sometimes you might find yourself taking two steps forward and one step back – but that doesn’t invalidate the one step forward that still occurred. It is ludicrous to think that we can be so kind to others, yet so cruel to ourselves. After all, you are the one person in your life that can offer yourself unconditional kindness whenever you may need it. As always, I want to repeat how important it is to talk to someone, and if you feel like you’re at the bottom of that terrifying wall right now, I can promise that you’re about to find your first foothold.

– LS