so… That whole blog thing started well, didn’t it!?
I’ve had a bad few weeks. I managed in August to get out and do a couple of lovely things which included trips out in London as well as back home to visit my best friend who I have been friends with from school.
“Eat Errythang Saturday” was a day spent with my lovely sister – seen here on the right:
We left our homes in East London sickeningly early for a Saturday and headed down to Borough Market where we made a beeline for Bread Ahead to get out mitts on a disgusting (but delicious) amount of donuts.
I opted for vanilla and salted caramel. We left laden with our Bread Ahead bags and headed for a stroll down Southbank. We found a Starbucks tucked just enough out of the way that there was no ridiculous queue for such a tourist hot spot and grabbed some iced coffees. We sat outside the Tate Modern for all of two and a half hours. We ate just one donut each which were obviously incredible.
After that we took a walk back up to London Bridge and hopped on a bus to Shoreditch where we headed to the Diner for even more deliciously bad for you food.
We have a tradition of having a competition to see who can clear their plate at the Diner. I am so far unrivalled champion of this infamous accolade (and actually quite proud of it)
I opted for the buttermilk chicken burger with hanger fries (burger sauce and fried onions on top of French fries) and my sis had the same burger but with poutine.
The onion rings are always epic so we opted to share a side of those because nobody likes to be greedy or indulgent. Ahem total jokes. We love it.
I am proud to say that despite needing the waitress to bring over two jugs of ice cold water to stop the meat shakes, I took my crown home with me!
A few weeks later I headed back to deepest darkest Essex to see my best friend. We’ve been best friends since we were 10 years old and have remained so ever since. We talk on the phone two or three times a week but unfortunately due to conflicting work schedules, we only get to see eachother once every few months.
She always makes tracks to come to London for me so this time I decided to be brave and go to Essex. Not just anywhere in Essex… But Tilbury. It’s like Essex’s version of Chatsworth from the program Shameless. I’ve seen kids driving cars. And by kids I mean 7 or 8 year olds. Every adult has cap skin on their head because they all wear tilted hats. Dogs are tied up on chains outside the houses, if they’re not just wondering the streets without supervision much like any child old enough to walk.
When I woke up I was on edge. My friend is a tricky one for my anxiety because she can’t really do definitive plans. We can set a date but she will never really know a time. Even the night before I will be hassling her and even when she pins one down I know there’s a 95% chance she will change it the next day.
She didn’t give me a time the night before. So I texted her bright and early to try and put myself at ease. We agreed on a time and I immediately started getting ready to ensure i could deal with any black dog issues early. I felt ok. My main nerve is always the first step of actually leaving the house. I’m usually fine so long as I can get to the tube station and then I can usually manage the rest.
I made it ok and despite there being no set plan we had a lovely afternoon in her garden with her chickens (which are the weirdest but cutest chickens I’ve ever seen in my life)
We then headed down to a local pub which was – to my surprise – actually rather delightful. We also got to feed some donkeys on the long marshland walk there!
We sat next to Tilbury Fort and sipped some ciders and she threw up some interesting (though perhaps detrimental to my progress) queries about my CBT therapy.
One thing I have come to realise is that I need to be accepting of the people who are not accepting of me. I have to understand that some people simply can’t fathom why I can’t kick myself into gear. Unfortunately, although always supportive, this friend doesn’t understand. She had a very practical confident can-do mind and is hard working. If I had an ounce of her can do attitude I’d probably be a millionaire.
I went through my “panic attack” with her by showing her this sketch from my therapy:
She was fascinated by this and said it really put anxiety into a different light seeing the science of it like this mixed with my emotions.
The curved area at the bottom is to show what happens when I’m hyperventilating (happens a lot during my attacks) and its to show that I actually have too much oxygen in my body, so contrary to my body feeling like it doesn’t have enough air, it actually has too much.
She did question how much I am encouraged to rationalise thoughts. I explained that it’s about identifying intrusive thoughts and the difference between them and a real threat.
But she -interestingly- caught me off guard and asked how you compare that to instinct. She used the example of when her partner had cheated on her in a previous relationship and that she knew for weeks through intuition and instinct that he might have been despite their being no change to his behaviour and no proof. She took weeks to tell herself she was being silly before one day taking the chance to look at his social media messages and found out he was indeed cheating. The only explanation I could come up with was that there must have been subliminal signs with him that gave her the inkling that something wasn’t right. But she told me very sternly to never shut off intuition.
I tried explaining that sometimes it’s ridiculous. I said how when she went on holiday last year I spent two days convinced she was dead. For no reason, of course. She asked me which holiday it was. When I clarified and explained the thought process throughout that week she pointed out that the day that I started feeling like that was the day that her partner got rushed to hospital with poisoning and she had no way of contacting anyone at home and was scared and alone.
I’m not sure I believe in supernatural things or the occult etc. I’m open minded but I couldn’t explain that as anything other than a coincidence. But it really made me question how I can separate intrusive thoughts to intuition?
This past week has been a bad week for anxiety. Three days off of work in the past week. I just have that dark cloud over me that says it’s not ok to go out. I’m working through it slowly. I seem to have these peaks and troughs and I think I just have to start accepting that.
captainspangles 