Greetings from a tired girl,
As I'm sure many of you are aware, today is world mental health awareness day. Recent studies have suggested that mental illness affects one in four people and is it any wonder in today's day and age? The pressures on young people to look and behave a certain way, which largely comes from exposure to social media at a young and influential age, can be damning. Yet, not being a part of social media can make them feel outcast and lonely. It's more difficult than ever to find a graduate job, or a job in general, due to overpopulation and people working their way into a late retirement. Those jobs that do open up often require two years' experience (or more) but with few placements allowing anyone without experience, how are we to get into the profession to begin with? Of course, an ageing population brings its own problems - pressure on the NHS, sheltered accommodation and loneliness to name a few. So starting a conversation about mental health has never been more important. I'm certain that every person reading this will know someone affected by mental health issues, whether they have opened up to you personally or not. However, I think the person we find it hardest to recognise the warning signs in is often ourselves.
Two years ago, I was a month into my last year at a school I was educated at for seven years. I started as an 11-year-old, fairly academically gifted, with a bright pink rucksack and a passion for school. I was exactly what you would imagine if someone told you to picture a "nerd". I earned this title quickly at school and I was proud of it - I wanted to be thought of as clever and determined. Other people preferred "teacher's pet" which didn't particularly bother me either. It wasn't until my second year when a boy I didn't know told me to move my "fat ass" out of the way in the lunch queue that I started to pay more attention to the things people were saying about me.
That year I turned 13 and by 2013 it was virtually a rite of passage to get a Facebook account upon turning 13 - apart from those lucky people who managed to convince their parents that Facebook was a necessity at age 11 "to keep in touch with their primary school friends" who were going to a different secondary school (that was incidentally 10 minutes up the road). My birthday is in March, so by the time I was old enough for a Facebook account all of my friends were ahead of the game, and that's exactly what it felt like at that age - a game. Except there were no winners, only losers.
Don't get me wrong, I can see the perks of social media as a leisure activity. But nowadays everything requires access to some form of social media, making it increasingly difficult to opt out of the trend. This isn't a new idea for those of us who grew up with it, either. It was expected that you would have a Facebook, instagram, snapchat account. As such, we became accessible 24 hours a day, which paved the way for online abuse and bullying. Cyber-bullying is one of the biggest social issues facing our society today with over 25% of adolescents reporting having been repeatedly bullied online. I was lucky because when it happened to me, I was able to talk to someone about it but many people do not feel that way. I think this comes from it being widely accepted as a part of growing up and too often gets brushed off until the problem is much larger and difficult to amend.
Despite having a confidant, the constant fear of being judged was a heavy weight to carry and by the time I turned 14 my hands would shake when I got onto a public bus and the thought of eating lunch in front of people made me feel physically sick. The obsession with being what other people wanted was fed by the people around me who were all going to the same extremes to fit in. We all wanted to be replicates of each other so we would blend into the crowd and prayed that it wouldn't be us that was the topic of abuse. God forbid you wore a skirt below the knee or didn't cover a spot with a ridiculous amount of concealer every hour in the girls' bathroom. Everybody knows that kids are cruel and you gave us a platform to continue this anonymously. Suddenly we were living in a world where children were losing their lives to suicide based on comments made in Facebook chatrooms by people who could not be held accountable.
By the time I started my last year of sixth form, I struggled to control the near-constant feeling of panic. Most of the time there was seemingly no reason for this to occur, which only made the feeling worsen. I would walk into the common room, feel heads turn to look at me even though my eyes were directed down to the floor and subsequently feel the panic rise up to my throat. I would place my bag down and go straight to the toilet where I was often sick. That was my life, every day for around six months. On the occasions where someone found me crying, I would be paraded through the sixth form to the staff office (surrounded by glass windows) and asked what was the matter with me. I didn't know how to tell them that I didn't know but I also couldn't think of anything that warranted the response I was giving. All of the staff I came into contact with that year treated me as though I might break at any moment. The students didn't though. They continued to whisper in the hallways and theorise about why I was crying that particular day. Finally all of my paranoid fears that everyone was staring at me as I walked into the room came to life, and they really were. Just waiting for me to break down again.
A month before my final exams were due to begin, I was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder, something that I had likely been dealing with for an extended period of time. Since then, I have been on and off medication to manage the symptoms that made it difficult for me to function on a daily basis that year. I also see a counsellor who is helping me to work through some of the reasons why my mental health declined the way it did.
As you can guess, I have never spoken about this publicly before and as such this is new information to the vast majority of you. I think it's important to note that I am not ashamed of my anxiety or the package deal that comes with it, but I've also never felt the urge to talk about it either. Given the nature of my anxiety, I didn't want to give anyone another reason to talk about me. However, since I am now writing a blog raising awareness of invisible illnesses, I thought it was time for me to share my experience with one of the most common of them all.
Anybody who suffers from anxiety will tell you that every day is different and that they're not all bad. I am still a work-in-progress, as we should all be in order to continue to better ourselves, but I am learning to manage my anxiety (often by letting go of things that are outside of my control). Going forward, I will be starting cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help me cope with the implications of chronic fatigue on my mental health.
If you are affected by any of the issues I've raised in this blog post, please don't think you are alone. There are so many people out there with mental health issues and the more people who allow themselves to have a conversation about it, the faster we kill the surrounding stigma. If you are looking for some extra information, Mind is a mental health charity with an excellent website that you can access at: https://www.mind.org.uk/. If you're not sure where to begin, I would recommend you start there. If you are looking for immediate help, you can call Samaritans on 116 123. Or, as always, if you just need someone to listen drop me a message. There is help out there for everyone.
Please be kind and remember that mental health, good or bad, is invisible.
Charlotte x
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