Hello! This is a little things I wrote last week when I found myself having a 'good'-ish day, its rough around the edges and I doubt it'll make much sense but its just a few thoughts. I hope I can have more of these days soon...
I thought I'd write a little about this feeling I seem to get when I have a good day. So often my days/weeks/months have been pretty shit and it feels like there hasn't even been a single good or even mildly positive day in a long while. Each day for the past few months has in some way ended negatively or something not great has happened. It's been like this for so long, my anxiety and depression haven't seemed to ease or let up, so it has kind of become the 'norm' for me. I've come to not expect anything good happening during my days. I've developed this thinking that the day will always be bad because that's just how it is now. And maybe that is a reason why the days have been bad? Has it been this thinking that has just made me have more bad days and has prevented me from making the day better. I think maybe sometimes I just assume its going to be a 'not good' day so I let myself slip into familiar destructive patterns and habits that characterise bad days; even when maybe the day could've have been a positive one?
And when I have a day where things are kind of okay, a day where my anxiety isn't too bad, a day where my ED isn't screaming as loudly at me or just a day where my mood is a bit lighter - it feels alien and weird. I think I reject it because its so unusual for me to feel good, and this can inhibit me experiencing what is good in that day. It makes me not appreciate when good things have happened.
And I also believe I don't deserve to have good days, that I'm not someone worthy of feeling happy. It's kind of miserable really, and frustrating. Why brain can you not let me experience this happy feeling? And it even takes me a while to recognise that what I'm feeling is maybe happiness - I'm reluctant even now to call it 'happiness' because the potential thing I'm feeling could be false, or not even a fraction of what happiness could actually be.
And it scares me to have a good day sometimes. I get scared that this means I'm no longer ill? For some reason my brain convinces itself that because I've had this one instance of lifted mood, I'll no longer be considered ill. Consequently meaning that I'm no longer in need of the support I''m currently waiting for, that the mental health service will think I'm no longer struggling so they'll discharge me. That's just one of my anxieties at the moment, surrounding MH services and my current position in the system. Right now I'm in limbo, they are aware of my situation but its taking an awful long time for them to figure out or allocate the support I need. (I could do a big old rant about MH services, pressure on the NHS and how support is allocated and often denied or delayed - but I'll save that for another post).
Anyway, I think what I'm trying to get at today is that I had an alright day (I don't think I can bring myself to say 'good' or 'great' yet). My day has been labelled as good because:
- I've enjoyed a ballet class at uni,
- I've done some interesting reading on Gustav Klimt,
- I had a really interesting lecture all about research (research = library time = me geeking out about dance stuff)
- I've managed to not give into a destructive coping mechanism
- I'm going to bed feeling tired but positive and excited for future learning.
Yet still I'm scared. I'm scared for this feeling not lasting. I know that inevitably, things won't always be okay, I might go right back down the spiral again, I'm nowhere near recovered or anyway out of the deep spiral. But I could take this as a brief blip in things, a moment of respite. I need to understand it's okay to have ups and downs. And I guess its good that even without professional psychological and psychiatric help I've managed to regulate my mood at a slightly elevated level for just a day. Maybe I should be proud of that? And maybe I should be hopeful that with future support in place and by working with MH services, I'll have more of these days, until eventually I work things out enough that things level out to not be as low as they are right now.
Its an odd thing feeling an emotion, a state of being, a mood and yet, not being able to fully acknowledge or experience it because you are so scared of its existence and find it safer to deny and suppress it.
Anyway, I'll leave this here for now, sorry for the rambling but it helps me to document how I feel and what I'm experiencing!
With love and light,
Lily
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