Finding Hope‘How To Feel Pretty’ by Anna Akana
Posted on March 3, 2018
This is a great little video on ‘feeling pretty’. I find it pretty easy to talk about mental health stuff but I really struggle to talk about body image and even more so when it comes to talking about it from my own perspective. Anna Akana is both very eloquent and funny and this video is a great reminder about keeping perspective when it comes to beauty. It’s a good lesson in body image but also in talking about body image: so much advice is inspiring but difficult to put into practice. What struck me about this video was how actively useful it is, as well as being inspiring.
“But above all else, most importantly, please just let yourself feel pretty.”
You can find more of Anna’s videos here. I really, really recommend them!
The Boy On The Bus
Posted on February 28, 2018
A few weeks ago, I went up to London to go to a concert with one of my friends. On the train, I’d started writing a new blog post (about getting a diagnosis – expect it soon!) and when I moved from the train to the bus, I kept going. Twenty minutes into my journey, a boy sat down next to me. I’m terrible at guessing ages but I think he was around twelve. I was in my own little world, typing furiously, when he asked me how long it had taken me to write “all those words.” It took me a moment to shift gears. I thought about it and said that I’d been writing for about an hour and a half. He looked half-amazed and half-appalled, which made me laugh. I told him that I like writing so it was fun for me. We talked for a few minutes before he asked me why I would want to put everything I’d written on the internet for people to see, which surprised me: I hadn’t thought he’d been reading over my shoulder.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that question. There are a lot of ways of answering it and I’ve been turning them over, trying to figure out which one is the best, which one represents my feelings in the truest sense. But maybe I need all of them to explain it: because I have this need to be honest, because I like to write, because I want to do something that matters, because I want to help people, because I’ll explode if I keep all of this inside me, because I want to be a part of changing how people see mental health, because I don’t want it to always be this hard… If I put something out into the world, maybe something will change. If I do nothing, I change nothing.
I’ve known some people who are very against giving people their hard earned secrets and while I agree with that in some areas (as much as I complained, doing the hard work in school subjects like Maths because the teacher withheld the shortcuts did mean I learnt more and retained it longer), I categorically don’t when it comes to mental health. If something I’ve learned can help someone else get a diagnosis or support with even slightly less struggle, then I will absolutely share it. Of course I resent how long it took and how painful it was to get to this point but that doesn’t mean I want someone else to go through the same thing. Imagine how quickly things would change if each person in the chain had it slightly easier than the person before. Feeling helpless is something I really struggle with and if there’s something I can do – anything I can do – to help, then I’ll do it. The damage that’s caused by the stigma and lack of understanding around mental health is irrefutable, in whatever form it takes. Not all suffering is equal but some people still seem to struggle with that, as if you have to go through certain things, certain examples of stigma or whatever, to be allowed to struggle. That’s just ridiculous to me. It’s like the “It’s just attention seeking,” response: if someone is asking for attention, maybe it’s because they need it. But that’s a rant for another day.
Getting back to the point… I have been so inspired by the positive, helpful things that I’ve seen people put out into the world and that’s what I want to do. That’s who I want to be.
The Weird World of Anxiety Dreams
Posted on February 24, 2018
I have experienced anxiety dreams, in one form or another, for most of my life. I don’t know very much about the science behind dreaming but as I understand it, we tend to have anxiety dreams when we’re trying to cope with stressful stuff, or they are our brain’s way of telling us that we need to deal with something. Some of the common ones include losing something important, finding yourself naked in public, being chased, and scenarios involving the end of the world. I have had all of these at one point or another so I thought I’d write down the ones that stick out most in my mind and put them out into the world. Maybe some of you guys can relate.
The first anxiety dream I remember having was about being trapped in a car. The car was sitting at the top of a hill, on a street I knew well, and then it suddenly began to roll down towards the busy main road. I was stuck inside, panicking and unable to make it stop. I always woke up before I reached the bottom but I can still feeling that suffocating fear. I think these started when I was about five or six and I had them many times for several years. Then, when I was a teenager, they changed slightly. Instead of being stuck in a moving car, I was suddenly expected to drive somewhere without knowing how, without ever having had a lesson. I don’t know why but the expectation that I could was definitely there. I would get in the car and attempt to drive and while I was initially successful, it was just a matter of time before something went wrong. This is apparently a very common anxiety dream, which isn’t surprising given that most of us hate feeling out of control.
My most common recurring dream is one where my teeth start falling out. There are a couple of different variations of this: sometimes my teeth just become wobbly and slowly fall out one by one, and sometimes they just disintegrate in my mouth and I’m spitting out fragments of enamel. They’re incredibly vivid and I’m always convinced that they’re real. I wake up breathless and disorientated. I have no idea where this one comes from or whether it means anything. I don’t subscribe to the theory that when you dream, specific things have specific meanings, but it seems pretty likely that feeling out of control in a dream links to feeling out of control in some part of your life. I still don’t know what teeth are supposed to represent though.
There’s another one that I’ve only started having recently. I’m walking into college, heading to a Maths lesson when I remember that I haven’t been to a Maths lesson in months and therefore will be expected to hand in months of late homework which I do not have. I could just not go but the exams are getting ever closer and I need to learn it all. My anxiety is just starting to spiral when I wake up and it takes me a while to untangle myself from it. If I were going to guess the meaning, I’d say it had something to do with my fear of falling behind and not being good enough. And getting into trouble. But that’s not a big leap to make.
I don’t know how anxiety dreams fit in to the picture when you live with an anxiety disorder, when you live with significant levels of anxiety every single day. Does it mean that the level of anxiety necessary to trigger the dreams is just higher? Maybe every dream we have is an anxiety dream but we only remember a fraction of them… I don’t know what the answers are. But I thought I’d put my experience out there and see if anyone relates to it. If any of you have had anxiety dreams, I’d love to hear how similar or different they are to mine.
Finding Hope 