The State of Things

So this is something that has been happening to me more frequently as I start to get a better handle on my emotional highs and lows: I'm now getting anxiety over feeling happy. As someone who has struggled with anxiety for half of his life, I believe it is absolutely fair for me to qualify feeling happy or enjoying myself as a kind of success. I think the reason I have become anxious over feeling happy is because that particular feeling is often so unfamiliar to me. Ergo unfamiliarity equates to uncertainty, and uncertainty leads to anxiety. I can't properly express how awful this is. Times like these make me hate being me. OK, so I don't even get to have one good day without crashing down? Thanks anxiety, I really appreciate that, you dick. Today, it just crept up on me. From about half past ten this morning, I felt that tightening in my chest, the knots in my stomach. The general sense of dread and discomfort. My brain wasn't racing like it usually does when anxie...

Today, I'm going to talk about the positive impact that snowboarding has had on my life. I always hated sports in school. P.E always felt like such a chore, and I hated the inevitable bullying that came with it because I sucked at seemingly everything. Looking back, I think the biggest issue was that schools mostly teach kids team sports, where one guy can ruin for it the entire team. When you're always that guy, that gets really old really fast!  I suspect the emphasis on team sports is to encourage cooperation, but to my mind it always seemed to just encourage more boisterous competition and separation.  I remember liking running, tennis and badminton but that was honestly the only physical activities I enjoyed during my school years.  Then there was a revelation. Towards the end of my teenage years I got a job at an indoor snow slope. Something about the simultaneous badassery and down-to-earth attitudes of the snowboarders really appealed. They were always smilin...

One of the more difficult challenges with managing anxiety is recognising our triggers. Knowing which conversations, locations, events, people or circumstances flare up anxious thoughts and make us feel uncomfortable can be extremely difficult to recognise. Today, I was talking with friends about how difficult it can be to differentiate between a legitimate and justified emotional reaction, or a more 'out of control' anxiety induced response. I feel confident in saying that the longer one suffers from anxiety, the more challenging it can be to make this distinction. I'm having a really shitty time with work. There's no other way for me to phrase it. I'm unhappy with the direction of the company and the decisions being made there. This has lead to myself and my immediate colleagues all feeling crippling undervalued. It's gotten so bad that just going in to the building, or seeing a particular person there is severely affecting my mental health. This is partic...

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...