It’s the middle of June, summer is in full swing. The days are warm and Kilkenny is bustling with a mixture of tourists and everyone on holidays from school or college. I’m at work as a barman, content smile on my face as I pass colleagues and customers. However, beneath the surface I’m ready to scream. I’m weighed down by this crippling sadness, my chest is heavy and breathing is a struggle. “Just get to 11:30pm and I’ll be fine” I thought. These feelings have come and gone before. I know how to deal with it. No one needs to know.
That night I walked home at a snail’s pace. The feeling hadn’t passed. I felt like I was carrying a boulder on my walk home. I reached the bridge by the castle, and for those who know Kilkenny, there’s a little walkway with benches down by the river Nore. I felt drained, so I sat on a bench and stared at the moon lit river. I began to cry uncontrollably. I sat for about an hour in that one spot late at night with tears streaming down my face. I had finally broken, 10 years of bottling everything away had finally overwhelmed me. Fear and anxiety were winning, I could no longer face this battle alone.
At the age of 15, I lost my father to a brain haemorrhage, and as a result my mother had a breakdown and ended up in a mental institution. Suddenly, my sister and I were parentless and put into care. I spent the next 8 years with a wonderful foster family who treated me like their own son.
I never had a great relationship with my mother, and having been apart from her since the age of 15 hasn’t helped that relationship. Such a whirlwind of change led me to bottle any grief and emotion and life went on as normal. Suppressing all these emotions has had a damaging effect on relations with a lot of my family ever since. Fear of facing these memories has seen me literally run away from any source of them. I’ve spent so long trying to run away from fear, panic, anxiety and hurtful memories, but you can’t run away from yourself really can you?
The seeds of anxiety were there before my father’s death, but in the aftermath, it manifested itself slowly as years went by. I never went to counselling at 15, never talked it out too much with anyone. This became the norm. No need to talk about it, I can store it away and it will vanish. I became an expert at storing things away for the next 10 years. I changed schools at 16, not easy for a teenager of any background, let alone one who spent the previous six months losing a parent, a family home and being placed in foster care. My silent battles with anxiety slowly became daily as the years passed by.
I carried on with a happy go lucky act with friends etc. on a daily basis but I was painfully unaware that by bottling up all my sadness, grief and emotion that I would feed the fear and anxiety that was brewing inside me. I always felt anxious before work, school, meeting new people, even sometimes meeting friends. I put this down to lack of self-confidence but really anxiety and fear reared their head at every opportunity. I always put on a brave face, a “Nothing to worry about here I’m totally fine” smile in the public eye, despite the sickening feeling in my stomach, the heavy breathing, the gut wrenching panic when faced with a challenging situation.
Recently, after years of denial and self torture, I have finally accepted that I do indeed suffer from anxiety and it has had a profound effect on my life. However, I have realised that I don’t have to go through this alone. I recently sought counselling about my past, something I should have done years ago, but it’s been extremely effective nonetheless. I’m finally facing up to the fact that I suffered alone for so long, that anxiety is a big part of my life. I’m in the very early stages of my recovery, as I’m still learning about my anxiety and developing techniques to control it.
It’s all very new, but I have to admit that there is a level of excitement rather than fear about dealing with it. I’ve cried more in the last 3 months than I’d cried in the previous 13 years I think, but I’ve opened up to friends, family, a counsellor and I feel like dark clouds are being lifted. I’ve become closer to friends who I would never have suspected are going through any struggles, but then again my own fronts have convinced people that I’ve had no struggles either.
I cannot stress enough how effective it can be to open up about your struggle. There are so many amazing wonderful people in all our lives that are willing to listen and help us through our tough times. My only regret is that I didn’t open up sooner!
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