When I first started having panic attacks, other than being confused by the unwelcome Acid Jazz party going on in my chest I always felt weakened. By weakened I don’t mean that I felt lethargic but that I thought I had let myself down by succumbing to the sensations I’d been feeling. As panic and anxiety started to appear at random, I thought more about how I was letting myself down and this developed into a feeling of ineptitude. After all, panic and anxiety started to hold me back from various things I wanted to do. I cancelled on friends, neglected to self-care, missed the gym/training, couldn’t complete work etc. It just about permeated every part of my life, robbing me of any say over the matter in the process. Because panic especially can come at random, I’ve always had a feeling of trepidation before I do things because I might well have a bad night beforehand and that’ll throw everything in the air. It’s been hard to accept that these things will happen, it’s been even harder to convince myself that panicking isn’t a black streak that runs over my personality. 

At University I tried pretty hard to live by a routine, especially in my final year. At some points I actually did and I found a strange sort of pride in sacrificing drinking to make sure I did my laundry on a Sunday. Wow. I sometimes had a fairly consistent gym routine, and occasionally I ventured to do my degree. However there were plenty of times where these all just didn’t happen, and I felt ashamed of myself every time. This happened a lot but I remember having a panic attack the night before I was supposed to go to the gym with my friend. I woke up the next morning feeling drained, stupid and still a little bit anxious. Whenever these things happened I would religiously compare myself to men who were whatever I wasn’t at the time: consistent, strong, in-control, and although I didn’t realise it at the time I thought these guys were good men and I wasn’t. Social media had a lot to do with this because there’s a stylised version of masculinity that goes around which has a lot to do with strength, control, aesthetics and such-like; I would say I got sucked into it. 

When asked what I want to do with my life, I’ll tell you I want two things: to do something that makes me happy and to be a good man. I’m quite aware of my identity but of course those things can and do change over time. Unfortunately I let myself get sucked into this idea of masculinity that prides a stoic level of control over yourself and your emotions and of being consistent in everything all the time. Just think of the Rock running around in a stringer shouting “HARDEST WORKER IN THE ROOM” and you’ve pretty much arrived at something that looks like the kind of shoes I wanted to fill for a while. Of course men like Dwayne Johnson are highly unique and equally they lead an extremely tight lifestyle. Nonetheless, there’s a definite attractiveness to that kind of lifestyle. I wish I could explain why I was and still am drawn to that lifestyle when I like food, beer and sleep too much to ever attain that level of physical monstrosity. That’s the thing though, there’s been a huge dissonance between the kind of man I wanted to be for a while and the kind of man that I should be considering my actual fucking personality. I don’t wear stringers. 

I do still question myself when I panic or get anxious. Sometimes I still feel ashamed when I have to practice rhythmic breathing to calm myself down, yet four hours later the same broken record is spinning on and on in my head. I still sometimes feel like I’m a bit of a failure when I can’t make it to the gym after a tough night and on those days I’ll look at myself in the mirror and think “my god you do not look good.” I definitely still get worked up after my 10th micro-examination of a text message trying to decipher whether someones had enough of me. However I try now to think along different lines when I put myself under the microscope. I wonder what good I did in the day, for myself or for someone else; I also think about what I have achieved instead of what I haven’t. The big one is that I spend a great deal more time now being aware of what my panic is making me think of myself. Yes it affects my daily life and it probably will for the rest of my life but I try now to not see it as something that takes away from me. Having this disorder made me much more aware of illness and wellbeing, and my experiences with it have helped me to develop my personality in ways that has helped to befriend and grow alongside some truly beautiful people. In turn actually these wonderful people, whether they’re still in my life or not, have helped me to appreciate the good that I do bring to the world in my own unique way. I think I’m still a way off yet but I’m finally starting to recognise that my illness does not make me less of a man.

Over the last four or five years writing has come to occupy a pretty big space in my life. I write for different reasons: catharsis, reflection, to be creative, they’re probably the main ones. It’s not that I’m good at writing, I have my moments of flair for sure but I like it so much because I can express myself with as much or as little creative jazz as I like really. I want to dedicate this post to the why bit of this weird little corner of the internet that I occupy and why I like writing privately as well. My private writing hasn’t really come up yet so I’d like to talk about that a little bit as well.

I started writing as a hobby when I was 18. It definitely wasn’t for shits and giggles or to write erotic fan-fics, it was so I could document my mental illness. (no blog of mine is complete without reference to my constant companion, is it?) For real though I started writing so I could make what amounted to a diary of my experiences for therapeutic purposes. I started to write down details about my panic attacks, what I thought caused them, where they happened etc. Making regular diary posts about lying down and staring into the void for 20 minutes doesn’t sound like the sexiest introduction to writing does it? But that’s my origin story, take it or leave it. Anyway after some time of cataloguing my progress I started to find myself writing more and more about other things as well, for example I started to write entries about my general day along with the occasional empty musing about something I’d read or something that was happening in my life. At my job at the time I being the plucky youngster I was wanted to impress, so I had the idea of combining my interest in films with my new-found enjoyment of writing to make short snappy film reviews for the store. Unfortunately my time as a film critic was short-lived, I wrote three reviews and ultimately they got turned down because they were neither short nor snappy. But you can put your violins down because at this point I was writing for my own enjoyment and I was actually pretty good at it as well, I’d found a way to communicate my thoughts and feelings across in a meaningful way. I didn’t really realise it at the time but having that creative outlet laid a big cornerstone for my development going into my 20’s.

Writing has always been tied to me and my own well-being, be it directly in the form of therapeutic writing or indirectly through writing short stories or film reviews. I still have a journal that I add to infrequently; I used to bash myself for not adding to it daily but over time I realised that I don’t enjoy being a diarist because my life is comparable to a Sunday morning line dance with the occasional trip off the rails thrown in. I enjoy thrashing out ideas and in particular I enjoy taking some time to explore myself through this medium. My journal therefore has become an inconsistent, disorganised psychological profile with a smattering of entries about getting my shit together. This kind of free-form rambling is really important though because what it amounts to is your mind having an open honest conversation with itself without all the repetition and lack of meaning that comes when you just keep your thoughts locked away. When you keep your thoughts locked away it’s like you’re keeping the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in the box. You can’t make any bloody sense of the picture because you haven’t even found your corners to work from yet. Writing is what helps me to make sense of the things going on inside my mind. Writing also helps me to establish milestones in my journey. When you document something you give it a stamp of legitimacy that it couldn’t possibly have if it just remained tucked away at the back of your mind only to come out during an outpouring of emotion; that and you can look back on something you’ve written- a plan, perhaps? A reflection on where you’re at emotionally or mentally at a given point in time? When you write it’s as if you leave a print of yourself on the page, the words you throw down blend to create a picture of your soul. You really are a work of art, you know? Can you tell I’m bitter about the fact I can’t draw or paint? Writing has helped me keep track of myself and I guess a lot of my blog posts have contained this kind of self-reflective style of mine.

That leads me pretty nicely into the blog. The blog is my chance to utilise my introspective nature to do some good for those around me. I chose to blog because 1) I can use my proclivity for writing to try to do some good for those around me and 2) I’m an introvert, doing my bit from the comfort of my own room is fucking perfect. I’m just an over-sharer with access to the internet. I started the blog mostly with the intention of sharing parts of my story and to add my perspective on aspects of mental health. I didn’t really realise people would actually come to read what I have to write and the feedback that started to come my way and still finds its way to me is absolutely mind-blowing. To think me documenting my experiences with mental illness whilst sharing some ways in which I try to improve my overall wellbeing would actually impact other people is absolutely crazy to me, yet this weird little blog of mine has started to make an impact. A pretty huge milestone in this journey was being given the incredible opportunity to talk in front of a rather large number of fellow students about my experience with anxiety at University. The feedback from the talk was instantaneous, people approached me afterwards to share their own experiences and that really cemented for me the value of fostering conversation around mental health and mental illness. So I write these posts because I enjoy writing about mental health but mostly I write these posts because I hope that the people who take the time to read what I have to say can take something away from all of this.

So that, in a nutshell, is why I write. Sometimes I write with a clear purpose, sometimes I don’t. I’ve written this on the back of several recent journal entries because I’m experiencing some weird changes of late, some good and some not so good, and I thought “I could turn this into a blog post.” I really didn’t have a plan with this one, I’ve just sat down and free-written for a while. I suppose you could say this has been cathartic in its own way. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading!

-Nick