Anxiety and the inner voice

I wrote about my mental health journey about three years ago in an article titled “Me, Myself and Anxiety” and shared it on this site with the hope it would help other people going through similar experiences. I always feel a sense of embarrassment when I reveal personal aspects of my life, but I can live with that if it helps just one other person by opening up about their struggles and seeking support. When I published the last article, I was in a positive place in my life. I believed I had total control of my future as I was coming to the end of my degree, an accomplishment I thought I might never see. If you were to compare this article with the first one I wrote, you might think it was two different people and in a way it is. When things are going well I think we can get caught up in the moment believing everything is perfect and all our past traumas are behind us. It is during these moments that I believe we tend to overlook our recovery and lose valuable ground that we have made.

Fast-forward from my last article, I have recently left my job because of stress that I struggled to manage (fortunately since writing this article I have secured a new position for the New Year) and my relationship was impacted out of fear and bad habits developed from a negative head space that I have lived in for almost two-thirds of my life.

I do not like to ask for help and I know I am not alone in that. Some of us do not even know where to look, but resources are out there on websites such as Aware.ie, who run courses online and in person, and ‘A Lust for Life’ which has tools on its website that can help. I was always in a fortunate position where I had an understanding and supportive family, but unfortunately, not everyone gets the same opportunities. I have tried different therapies over the years, seen numerous professionals and tried different medications, but I didn’t always engage to the level needed. I did not like to acknowledge I needed support. If something did seem to help me, I would then disregard it saying “I’m fine now, I can move away from this part of my life”, until the next trigger would send me into a downward spiral I could not escape. I think there is still shame within me that I suffer from anxiety and instead of acknowledging that it’s something I will need ongoing support with, I pretend it is just a short-term issue that I will never need to dwell on it again.

Having spent 20 years living with anxiety and the power it has held over me, it seems impossible to regain that control. I struggle at times to put myself out there and trust people. This stems from losing all my friendships as a child when anxiety took a foothold and not having the social life most young people would grow up with to launch you into adulthood. On paper a simple solution would be to reach out and say “Hey, we should go for a pint or coffee sometime” but your head can be so convincing in telling you “That’s a terrible idea, why would they want to do that?” Having been behind my peers for so long when it came to achievements or milestones, I would be highly critical of myself saying I was a waste and not worthy of love or friendship. This is a huge area I will need to work on and I know it will be difficult, but we all need to find the courage to reach our best selves, whatever area of our lives we are working on.

So many of the issues and hurt that have happened to me in the last number of years could have been avoided or handled more positively if I had just taken the initiative to stick with my support and shut out the negative inner voice. As I have said before, we sometimes underestimate the power of our minds. Depending on your head space it can convince you that you are useless and will never achieve anything, and then at the other end of the spectrum, it can tell you that you can climb the highest mountain in the world. Along with talking to someone, I have started engaging with more books that may help me. The most recent one I started is, “The Confidence Gap”. It is still early days in knowing if it will offer any guidance, but I’ll avoid what I normally do, which is give up. Giving up is always the easiest option, but it is also the most costly.

A lot of the time I see my life as something I am merely surviving rather than living and you start to question what the point in that is. It is a terrible outlook to have and one many of us face, unknowingly to those around us. This is something I hope to change not just for me, but also for others. Unfortunately, this article might not offer the advice I would like to give to whoever reads, but I do hope it helps you differentiate between the voice in your head that wants you to succeed and the voice that wants you to fail. If I could offer one takeaway it would be to put in the work to better your health which will ultimately better your life. Do not get dragged down by the trauma of your past, it will drown you if it can and you deserve better. Hopefully, by reading this you learn from some of my lapses in judgement and I hope I will come back to you in the future with a more positive outlook and share what I have learned. Just don’t give up on the thought of better days ahead.