The State of Things

Of all the myriad ways anxiety tries to sabotage my efforts to lead a normal life, this is the one I hate the most. Putting my writing out in this blog has been really helpful to me, a way for me to express my own thoughts and feelings and to hopefully help others through their own struggles. The reactions I'm getting are wonderful. People are going out of their way to actively encourage me, full of compliments and self-confidence boosting praise. I'm truly humbled. I want to keep writing for the sake of the people who benefit from reading my posts. Anxiety somehow manages to twist all of this positivity into a hollow, pyrrhic victory. The following is an example of the thoughts and feelings in my head during an anxiety attack: "Sure you've touched people and got a positive reaction, but what's actually changed in your life? Writing feels good but it's always felt good and you do it all the time, so that's nothing special. So what if you can write we...

I should preface this post by saying that I am not a doctor or a psychologist, and everything I'm about to present here is anecdotal or personal. Though many people have come to me relating their struggles with my own, I am acutely aware that everybody suffers differently, with varying degrees of severity. Thus far, everything I've written has been about raising awareness. Talking about topics that affect me personally, and my reactions to them as someone with an anxiety disorder. My goal was and is to make people aware of how my disorder makes myself and others react to everyday scenarios. I'm about to say the thing that most anxiety sufferers don't enjoy hearing: getting therapy was what helped me get my head straight. Why wouldn't an anxiety sufferer want to hear this? Because it involves admitting you have a problem, that you can't cope and you need help. That feels like giving in to all the negative thoughts in our head. As though we're not strong eno...

Trust is what makes the world go round. When I start my day, I trust that my alarm will go off on time to wake me, that I've got food in for breakfast and that my car will start to get me to work. I trust many things subconsciously too, that my drive in will be safe, that hopefully there will be no delays or incidents on my journey, that other road users will drive safely and sensibly, and I trust that the Bluetooth connection from my phone will allow me to listen to music on my drive. Naturally, there is also the trust we place in others. Work colleagues can hopefully be trusted to have done their own job to a standard that supports both themselves and the entire team, enabling things to run smoothly and efficiently. Then there is the trust in our friends. This trust varies greatly depending on the relationship we share, how close we are. Likewise, this trust is variable. We place a different degree of trust on the different attributes of our friends. Is Tim always late, or cu...

How many beautiful voices has depression taken from us? I'm a huge fan of Soundgarden and Audioslave. I have a syndrome of some sort that causes me to have a song stuck in my head every morning I wake up. One morning very recently, my brain decided to bless me with Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden. I'd consider Chris Cornell to be the greatest rock vocalist of all time. If you wish to argue that, you're allowed to say Freddie Mercury and possibly Robert Plant, but I still don't consider either of those titans to hold a candle to the majesty of Cornell. He had a four octave range. Why is that so special? To those who aren't in the know, this is a holy grail in singing. Extraordinarily rare, most people, up to and including the majority of classically trained singers only have access to three octaves. Consider an octave as a 'set' of notes that is accessible to you within your voice. Having access to a higher range of octaves is not something that can be train...

So I wanted to rant about what's happening in my head when I have anxiety. I'm writing this for my own sake, but I know a few people who can relate. This will mostly be a rant about what anxiety does to a me personally, and how crippling it can be. For context, I was diagnosed with moderate to severe anxiety three years ago, and that diagnosis has helped me to understand certain actions I've taken or behaviours I've had since I was sixteen. If you wish to interpret this as a cry for help, then you're probably not far wrong... Recently, one of my favourite people said to me: "your soul is so fucking pure." He said said this to me with such genuine conviction, even a sense of awe, it's honestly one of the most beautiful compliments I've ever received. The other folk who were there chipped in with their agreements. The context of why it was said isn't important, my concern is my reaction to it. I feel that the truth is that my soul is so cloude...

Some of you might be old and nerdy enough to remember the excellent Batman of The Future [or Batman Beyond as it was known elsewhere]. The opening sequence was really hard hitting for an animation aimed at teenagers. "Apathy. Greed. Corruption. Power. Hope" flashes across the title screen as a pumping techno-rock soundtrack set the tone for the show. It often feels as if that is the world I live in now. A world of falseness and negativity. We all seem to be striving for something that once was - our last hope - yet we're blindly accepting of tired of pop-culture nostalgia and political insanity. When apathy meets nostalgia, things get dangerously close to stagnation. Where is our cultural and societal progress? Our political parties are in disarray in the West, and extremist rhetoric seems to hold greater appeal to many frustrated individuals. If history is going to repeat itself once again, will our tired world allow charismatic fascists to gain ground as they have don...

This is worth talking about.  My own country seems to have voted itself into an effective one party system (with the media/propaganda reels repeatedly trying to enforce the idea of a weak opposition down our throats), and, well, everything sucks.  This is how it is: the overwhelming majority of all humans are idiots. I'm talking crushingly, brutally painfully uneducated, unaware and ignorant. Sometimes this ignorance is *deliberate,* because it's better off not being aware of how horribly you were lied to about, say, £350 million per week?  I wilfully include myself amongst the ingnorant masses, because I know that I don't have all the answers. The truth of it is, there are some people who make it their life's work to know better than us, though often those same folk are plain old, fallible, corruptible humans. I get it - most of the time it's better to stay safe in your little bubble, and vote for your own selfish needs. The world is a scary place an...