Today is the last day of Mental Health Awareness Week, a week that the Mental Health Foundation has been leading since 2001 to bring the UK together to focus on getting good mental health. This year the theme is ‘community.’
It’s an interesting theme that isn’t it? Community makes you think of togetherness, of support and not being on your own, but in my opinion, the reality when it comes to mental health can be very different. Because despite all the great work that has been done over the past few years, mental health can still be a taboo subject. And not necessarily because of society but because of us as individuals. Since this day in 2018 when I made my first public post about a bout of counselling I’d been having to help me process depression and anxiety, I like to think that I’ve benefited from that honesty and the community around me. I’ve been an advocate for talking openly. Yet, towards the end of last year, I went the complete opposite. I stopped being open. I didn’t make use of the community around me. I pretty much struggled in silence.
And I completely know the reason for this. Because I felt like a failure. I’ve always been the sort of person to be a perfectionist and to just keep going, but in a way since my late husband died, I’ve felt a different sort of pressure. The pressure to be brave and strong. These are two words which have been used to describe me countless times. If I’d had a pound for every time I’ve seen them written about me or had them said to me, I probably wouldn’t need to work! I’ve said before that I don’t like the word brave but am coming to accept the word strong, but this has been to my detriment at times. I sometimes feel that f I’m so strong and an inspiration as people repeatedly tell me, how on earth am I meant to admit that I’m struggling, that I need help and that I just need to admit defeat for a while? In my head, I couldn’t let people down. I couldn’t fail at being a widow. I couldn’t let people see that grief was still having an effect over four years since my husband died. If I’m meant to give hope and inspiration to others, what would people think of me if they knew the reality?
But sadly, this was my reality. And I tried to hide from it and pretend it wasn’t, I really did. Yet for a myriad of reasons, towards the end of October, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hide for much longer. And so, I made a call to our Employee Assistance Programme. I’m so incredibly fortunate to have a service like this at my disposal and it’s something I’ve made use of in the past, so I had an inkling that I knew what was going to happen. As suspected, following my assessment, I was referred for therapy. But a different type of therapy to what I’d had in the past, I was being referred for EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) with CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). I’d come across these acronyms through others in the Widowed and Young (WAY) community but didn’t really know that much about them. If I’m being perfectly honest, when I first read about EMDR, it sounded a bit kooky to me! How could this possibly work?! Yet I knew I had to give something a try, it was time to finally process the trauma that I went through in 2020. And other trauma from my life up until that point.
You see, deep down inside I know when my mental health has taken a dip. I find it very hard to concentrate. Work feels unmanageable. I have no enthusiasm to do anything. My temper is shorter. I can’t juggle as much as I usually do. Life simply feels too hard. I doom scroll because to do anything else feels pointless. I can see the dip in my mental health in my eyes. My whole demeanour changes. I looked back at a photo of me with a friend that I’d taken in August and was desperate to get back to looking like that. Desperate to see that sparkle and lightness in my eyes. I know the exact moment I realised I’d achieved this aim of mine, but that’s a topic of discussion for another blog.
Yet I pretty much kept all of this and how I was feeling to myself. Colleagues knew because of needing to juggle work and appointments. They’d been slowly watching me go downhill for a while, so when I told my line manager, she told me she’d already flagged that they needed to keep an eye on me. That is one community I’m incredibly lucky to have. Friday was another great example of that community when I spent time with our team on Hampstead Heath as part of the firm’s One Firm One Day. It was great to be outside in the fresh air for the day especially during Mental Health Awareness Week and I became the queen of brambles! As we had a drink afterwards, someone I’ve worked with for a very long time commented that I looked lovely and snapped a pic. It’s one of the ones in the collage above. I looked at it and was reminded once again just how far I’ve come these past nine months.
Anyway. I digress. Back to November. My daughter knew that things weren’t great and I was back in therapy because I want her to feel comfortable talking about mental health and understand that therapy is not a bad thing. A few friends knew, a couple mainly because they’d been sat with me in a prosecco bar while I was crying (classy I’m sure you’ll admit) but I just didn’t feel capable of telling lots of people. It felt exhausting to do so.
And exhaustion is one of the reasons I made that call. My overthinking was off the scale. I’d struggled to sleep again. I’d wake up repeatedly. I would wake up just as exhausted as when I’d gone to bed. Sleep did nothing for me. I was stuck in what felt like an endless loop of being awake and feeling exhausted while all the while knowing the same would happen the following day because it wouldn’t matter whether I got one hours sleep or five, it made no difference. So, I just didn’t need anything else that would add to this exhaustion.
But at all points remember, I can’t give in to this exhaustion. I’m a solo parent, there is no-one else to help with the parenting. The constant juggling of who’ll do the school runs, the dance runs while maintaining a house, working full time, managing finances and trying to live is relentless. Especially when you’re doing all you can to keep yourself busy rather than face what you’re going through. So, I just kept going. I didn’t make the most of the community around me, because it just felt easier to do things myself rather than explain. I didn’t want to discuss what had led to me to reach this point. The realisations I’d had about my life and my behaviour. In a way I felt a little embarrassed that I hadn’t actually realised what I’d been doing. But that’s been my grief journey for you. I lived for so long in “survival” mode. Then I went into “I must live” mode. And then I realised I had to find a middle ground. Somewhere between surviving and running myself into the ground.
I had my first few sessions of therapy and found them absolutely exhausting. Oh good, more exhaustion to add on top. I was so, so tired. This is when I had to rely on another community. The WAY community. I’m on the rota for the New Member Zooms but simply found that the thought of hosting these on a day that I’d had therapy was too much. I had to ask for support to swap sessions. I had to be sensible and look after me. I then dropped a note on the WhatsApp group with other WAY Members that we formed after the AGM last year. I’d been trying to plan something and had just found that I didn’t have the headspace, so felt the need to apologise. Understandably this was an apology that I didn’t really need to make. Everyone got it. And when I admitted that I’d felt like a failure but had since had a word with myself, I was met with comments along the lines of that was good because if I hadn’t had that word, they would have done!
I relaxed into the fact I was back into therapy; I was vulnerable and honest in those sessions. So much came out that I didn’t realise I’d buried and never really processed. The actual EMDR began later than initially planned, but sometimes life just throws different things at you that throws things off course. You can’t really plan for anything. Yet in the run up to this, I started making little changes myself. I started saying no to people. I started to slow down. Christmas 2024 is a prime example of this. For the first time in my life, I spent the day in Christmas PJs. My daughter and I didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t have anyone to us. I cooked for the first time on Christmas Day making the most of Aunt Bessie. I just didn’t need pressure. I didn’t need expectations. This wasn’t about anyone else; this was about doing what I needed. Potentially selfish, but sometimes in life you just have to be. Equally I didn’t over-plan. I didn’t fill our weekends. I sent my therapist some photos of my calendar from August through to October last year vs. the photos of January to February. The difference was palpable. I was beginning to finally feel comfortable to be at home again. Being at home a lot of the time stopped being a trigger and making me feel like I was back living in lockdown when my world fell apart. I was finally starting to realise that I didn’t have to fill my time and always say yes to people in case if I didn’t, they stopped liking me or died.
This is a bold statement, but over the course of the next few months, EMDR* gradually changed my life. I sometimes wondered what people would have thought if they could have seen me sat there for an hour a week, with my eyes shut and just tapping the tops of my arms (my sessions were virtual and so this was the technique used). Things that previously would have caused me untold stress and been difficult to manage no longer were. Some of which had been the case for over 10 years. I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t understand how it works, but it has certainly worked for me. I’m in the position now that I will happily talk about the last six months and my mental health. I can reflect on it in a way I couldn’t do at the start of November. Next week sees my final session and I’m not scared about this. It’s time for me to implement all I’ve learnt on my own.
Yet the past few months haven’t been complete smooth sailing. I completely struggled in March. I would find myself asleep on the sofa at 8pm. The exhaustion crept back in. They say the body keeps score and knows key dates and this certainly felt the case for me this year. The five-year anniversary of my husband dying was very difficult. I can’t pretend otherwise. It would be churlish to do so. But for the first time since he fell ill and died, both my daughter and I have been in therapy at the same time. Because in March I gave her no choice but to go back. Again. A myriad of reasons led to me making this decision for her. But at no point did I think she was a failure. At no point did I think she’d let me down. I knew it was what she needed to help her work through so very much. Funny isn’t it? I can be completely objective about therapy for others, yet when it comes to me, I still put way too much pressure on myself.
But fortunately, she grounds me. Another one of the photos in the collage was a selfie taken exactly one month after my late husband died during Mental Health Awareness Week in 2020. Like I say. I talk about mental health with my daughter so openly. She is way more in tune with mental health than I was at her age. Recently after a fairly hectic day, she simply said to me “you seem stressed, what’s wrong?” And thus began an honest and open conversation about my day and how I was feeling. Similarly, when I said I’d been wondering whether to write a blog to mark Mental Health Awareness Week but wasn’t sure whether I’d have anything to say, she simply gave me a look and said I’d have plenty, after all I could also talk about her. The fact she’s growing up with this attitude fills me with hope for her future, maybe, just maybe she won’t feel like a failure if she ends up needing therapy as she gets older. That she’ll learn to trust and lean on the community around her. That she’ll be comfortable being honest, open and vulnerable.
After all. Vulnerability is a superpower. Imagine just how much more powerful we’d be as a community if we leaned into this a teeny bit more.
*It goes without saying that this is my personal experience of EMDR and CBT. I am not an expert on these therapies and cannot provide advice on them.
Life is a rollercoaster 