It's time to shut the fuck up

I have been married for well over two years now – 970 days to be precise. And for the last 969 days, I’ve had to fend off questions about when I might start a family. These questions have come mostly from other women. I never know what to say when I’m asked this and usually smile politely and invent some generic excuse.

A woman I follow on Instagram posted a picture of a negative pregnancy test this week, in an attempt to silence the many people who ask her on a daily basis when she will be giving her daughter a sibling. This woman has been trying for a second child for 14 months. And yet she constantly has to make excuses when she’s asked when it’s time for another one rather than reveal the heartbreaking truth that she may not be able to.

Last month, while doing my weekly shop, I bought a pregnancy test and a box of tampons (you can never be too prepared, frankly.) The woman on the checkout decided it was okay to comment on these items. ‘Oh I hope it’s a yes,’ she exclaimed as she scanned the test through. I was aghast. I actually posted the scenario in the famous AIBU (am I being unreasonable) thread on Mumsnet. The Mumsnet community largely agreed that it was definitely not okay to comment on personal items. Polite shit chat? Absolutely. But tampons, pregnancy kits, condoms or any sort of weight loss product; nope. Surely we should all know those topics are off limits?

When did it become okay for women to interrogate other women? Pressuring them in to an ideal that they might not want? A race to the egg that they cannot have. Starting sweepstakes in the workplace to decide who will be next. I’m sick of it. Sick of the excuses. Sick of the fake smiles. But mostly sick of the fact that as soon as I became married, my achievements were rendered null and void. I was now just a baby making machine in waiting.

Of course, no one knows the full story. I could be pregnant right now (I’m not), I could be desperately trying month after month, living on beans and toast to be able to afford the ovulation tests! I could be grieving a miscarriage. I could be worried about the implications that a pregnancy might have on my mental health. I could be focusing on my career. Or maybe I could just be enjoying life without the burden of a baby. Whatever my circumstances, whatever the reason, is it not okay for you to ask.

So the next time you think about asking those newlyweds when you’re likely to hear the pitter patter of tiny feet, you might want to just shut the fuck up instead. There’s a story behind every fake smile that's not ready to be published yet. 

Acceptance

When I started up this blog again, earlier this year, it was mainly because I wanted an outlet to write about my experiences of suffering and recovering from a mental illness. Writing has been a great way for me to process my crazy thoughts and sometimes overwhelming feelings and has helped me massively in my recovery.

I am very lucky as I have an amazing support network of friends and family and so I’ve always had someone to talk to when I’ve felt scared or overcome. And yet, a lot of the time, I have felt very alone. Although my loved ones have always been there for me, I think it has been difficult for them to understand what I have been going through. After all, they can’t see inside my head. Anxiety is a difficult condition to explain sometimes, as you can’t always articulate what you’ve anxious about. It is often just a feeling, and not a thought, and people find that difficult to grasp. And so, I turned to a support group online, to speak about my illness to others who were going through the same thing.

Just knowing that I wasn’t the only one, that I wasn’t mad, and that what I was thinking and feeling wasn’t unusual, has helped me to accept my condition and lift my mood at times. I had hoped that this blog could maybe do that for others and I have received so much positive feedback to suggest that it has helped some of you.

This week, I have been discharged from therapy and have worked with my GP to come up with a plan to come off of my medication. It’s the start of a new chapter for me, and so I probably won’t write much about my illness anymore. It may crop up from time to time, because it’s a part of who I am, but I’m past the point now where it is the main focus in my life. And although it is a part of me, I don’t want it to define me.

Yes, I am a sufferer of mental illness. But I am also a wife, a niece, a friend, a crazy cat lady, a Chartered Tax Adviser, a Law graduate, a Conservative, a toiletry hoarder, a cooking enthusiast, a clean freak and now a blogger. So I want to write about other things too, because I’ve got so much to say about the world and so much still to figure out. I hope you will still follow my ramblings and come with me on the next leg of this crazy journey called life.

Thanks to everyone who’s supported me over the past few months. And to those of you out there who are struggling, just remember, you are not alone. xx

Practical tips for recovery

The rubbish thing about a mental illness is that you’re never fully recovered. There will always be bumps in the road. You can have a great six months and then bam, a terrible day comes from nowhere.  A mental illness is not the same as a physical injury. If you sprain your ankle, it's easy to track your progress to recovery. You spend time in crutches, maybe have some physio, and take a load of painkillers. And eventually, your ankle will be well enough to walk or run on. Recovering from a mental illness isn’t quite as easy. You have to come to terms with the fact that you may have to deal with it to some degree for the rest of your life. And that involves learning coping strategies to get you through those bumps.

After a really great few months, I’ve had a tough couple of weeks. I try to push myself to do things that are outside of my comfort zone and to not let my anxiety disorder stop me from living my life to the full, but sometimes, I can push myself too much, resulting in a bit of a slump, and some anxious thoughts and feelings.

I thought it might be useful to share my experience of the everyday coping strategies that I use to get back on track. They might not work for everyone, but hopefully, if you’re struggling, they might provide you with some ideas.

1)      Mindfulness, mindfulness, mindfulness. I cannot advocate this enough. When your thoughts are getting on top of you, focus on your breath and your senses, and I guarantee you will begin to feel calmer. It takes practice and time, but it’s well worth getting to grips with.

2)      Sleep. Not to escape from whatever’s bothering you, but to recharge your batteries. I am a firm believe that if you are tired, your body is trying to tell you something. Get an early night, sleep in or take an afternoon off and catch up on kip. (I know it’s easy for me to say that, having no children or commitments, but if you can, then do.)

3)      Exercise. The one my doctor always tells me to do that makes me want to strangle her. But it does work. If the gym’s not for you, don’t worry (it’s not always for me either.) But even just walking around the block for 20 minutes always calms me down and changes my focus, and it usually gets rid of those nasty physical symptoms too.

4)      Distract yourself. This one doesn’t always work but sometimes just focusing on something different distracts me enough to get rid of the anxious thoughts. Plan a trip away, look through some cookbooks, declutter your wardrobe, write a blog! It’s quite difficult for the mind to focus on too many things so if you’re concentrating on something else, chances are, you won’t be worrying.

5)      Try some CBT techniques. This one’s quite new to me. I’m half way through a course of CBT and still figuring out what works for me. When you find yourself catastrophising, just say STOP! Say it out loud. Put the thought in to a bubble, balloon, whatever visualisation works for you and let it go. Refuse to entertain those thoughts. Focus on something else straight away. With persistence, you can learn to stop those thoughts from owning you.

6)      Talk. To your husband, to your friend, to a support group online. Or just write all your thoughts down. But don’t keep them inside. Sharing my fears makes them seem much less scary. And actually saying things out loud helps me rationalise them.

7)      Reward yourself. Appreciate how far you’ve come. When I’m feeling shit about myself or having an anxious day, I try to remember how bad I was in February of this year. In six short months, I have went from locking myself in the bathroom and pulling my own skin off, to getting up for work every day and actually doing a good job. I look at those scars and I’m not ashamed of them. I just feel glad that I’m not that person anymore.

8)      The compulsive in me had to have 8 (I like round numbers) but I can’t think of anything so let’s just say cake. You can totally fix anything with cake. 

Love

Today I listened to a TedEx talk by a woman called Rachel Kelly who came to speak at KPMG about her experience of mental illness. The talk in itself was very inspiring and provided lots of useful tips for sufferers of anxiety and depression. However, what really captured me was a poem that she read out, which I hadn't heard before by a 17th century poet called George Herbert.

I am not a religious person and on the face of it, the poem appears to portray a dialogue with God. But, as with most poetry, I think it can be interpreted in many different ways. Sufferers of mental illness often battle with a daily internal dialogue and as Rachel pointed out, this poem showcases our two conflicting voices - the voice of love, forgiveness and compassion, and the voice of the worthless depressed part of you that never feels good enough. I hope you can relate to it too.

Love 

by George Herbert

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack’d anything.

“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;

Love said, “You shall be he.”

“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,

I cannot look on thee.”

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.”

“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”

“My dear, then I will serve.”

“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”

So I did sit and eat.

An open letter to my Gran

Dear Gran

I’m sorry I couldn’t visit you this week. There’s a bug in your nursing home so they have closed it to visitors to stop the spread of infection. I hope you aren’t too lonely. The last time this happened, we couldn’t visit for weeks, and I was worried you wouldn’t remember me by the time I finally got to see you.

It’s not as easy to spend time with you now. I can’t just come to the house as and when I please, letting myself in with my key. Because you don’t live there anymore. I try to avoid your house when possible. It makes me sad knowing that someone else will be living there soon, sleeping in your bedroom and enjoying your garden. It’s maybe a good thing that you don’t remember it, as I’m sure it would make you upset too.

I have so many memories of that house, from playing in the garden with the dog when I was little, to living out my teenage years, when I moved in with you. We fought all the time – our most memorable fight being when you wouldn’t let me leave the house wearing a pair of tights which had one black leg and one white! And yet you were always there for me. On the morning I opened my exam results, on the day I graduated. You were the one who dragged me to the doctor when I was depressed. You were the first person I called after getting married (and I always felt a little bit guilty that you weren’t on that beach with me.) I would give anything now to hear you moan at me for not tidying my room.

You always spoke your mind and I loved that about you. You were so full of life, and even now when I hear you make a snide remark about another resident, or staff member at the home, it makes me smile, because it gives me hope that there is still a little bit of you left in there.

It was never meant to be this way. You were always so fit. So strong. You beat cancer twice. You were supposed to live a long and healthy life. And yet a part of you is gone now, and will never return. I can’t speak to you on the phone anymore and tell you about my day. I have lost a lifelong friend. And a piece of me feels dead inside, because the best parts of me were influenced by you. You have helped me to become the strong willed, independent person I am today. I am so glad that you complained about my messiness and forced me to study. I’m doing well now Gran, and the house is (nearly) always clean!

There are so many things I wish I could tell you. I knew you weren’t immortal, but I thought I’d have more time than this. I wish I could tell you what an inspiration you’ve been. I wish I could say thank you, for looking after me for all those years. And above all, I wish I could tell you how much you are loved. Because you are Gran. So deeply loved. I hope a part of you knows this. I hope long after the recognition has gone from your face, that love will still live on in your heart.

So I’ll see you next week Gran. And we’ll go for a walk, and I’ll try and get you to drink tea, and you’ll pace around and I’ll tell you about my week. And you’ll smile and talk nonsense and I’ll leave feeling sad that we can’t talk like we used to. But I’ll keep coming Gran. Because the love I have for you is unconditional. And even if you don’t recognise me, I can’t bear the thought of not seeing you.

Love you always

Laura xxx

There's no place like home

This weekend marks one whole year of living in our ‘new’ house. I’ll admit, I wasn’t always sure about moving to Uddingston. I’d spent the first eighteen years of my life living in a large town, desperate to move to the city. When I did finally relocate to Glasgow, I never thought I’d leave. I loved the buzz and convenience of living amid the hustle and bustle, but I knew it would never make a feasible family home. Moving back to a town meant finally accepting the end of my youth as I knew it. I’d come full circle, and it was a bit scary.

I needn’t have worried. A year down the line, I’m absolutely in love with the place. I haven’t always had the most stable home life, so it was important to me that when we finally did settle down, it would be in a place where we could establish roots. It was to be a forever home. And so on 19 September 2014, the day after the Scottish independence referendum (having had next to no sleep and only an Egg McMuffin for sustenance), Neil put down our deposit for what would be known over the next eleven months as ‘plot 12.’

We had to trample through bushes to catch the first glimpse of our half-built house, and only then did it start to feel real. 

However, it would be another four months before we were finally handed the keys, having never stepped inside. I fell in love instantly, and that feeling has only grown over the past year as we’ve added the finishing touches to turn an empty shell of a house into a much-loved home.

We have a new weekend ritual now. Every Saturday morning, we clean. And despite moaning about it, those few hours hoovering up cat hair and scrubbing the toilets make me feel very content. Because I know that I am very lucky indeed. Not to have such a beautiful house - it wasn’t luck that paid for that - but to have a home where I can be happy being me. That is a gift that not everyone can know.

To some, home may mean the place they grew up, or the place where their ‘things’ are. But to me, home is not a place, but a feeling. It’s relief when I step through the doorway after a long day at the office, and it’s safety when I lock the door behind me. It’s comfort when I dive into bed at night (or more often discomfort when the cat jumps in beside me.) It’s belonging when the neighbours say hello, or warmth when I snuggle up in my favourite chair to read. It is my sanctuary. My soft place to land.  And above all, a place where I can take off my bra. It’s just… home. And as Dorothy so eloquently put it, there’s no place like it. 

The cult of celebrity - the 2016 edition!

In 2013, I wrote a blog about celebrities (which you can read here if you’re in the mood for a rant.) Of course, times have changed and we now have shows like Love Island and Ex on the beach (not to mention TOWIE and KUWTK and the like, which did exist back then but maybe didn’t have such a cult following as they do now.) These types of shows mean virtually anyone can be famous for doing pretty much nothing, so long as you are willing to have your arse hanging out or have sex on the telly.

Instagram has a lot to answer for – you can now follow the highlights of your favourite celebs’ lives at the touch of a button. But this is not just limited to the rich and famous. Anyone can be an Instagram star, so long as the right filters are applied, hashtags are used and followers flock. Case in point, my cat, Jess. Jess has her own Instagram account (itsahardmoglife.) I would love to say the creation of said account was some sort of social experiment but I would be lying. She’s just a really adorable ball of fluff and I knew that my own Instagram account would end up being filled with pictures of her posing or hiding in drawers etc., so I created an account for her, and try to keep my own posts cat free (although the odd snap does sneak in occasionally.)

Jess has more than double the amount of followers I have, and yet, her pictures are generally a variation of a theme – her looking cute and fluffy. She is followed by other cats all over the world and cat lovers from all far flung corners of the globe. Her pictures receive tens of likes within seconds. And yet, on an average day, Jess does nothing but sleep, eat, play (if she can be arsed) and look cute. Her life is the definition of the everyday.  

When you think about it, Jess really isn’t that different to some of the celebrities that exist today. The stars of TOWIE were on the whole, normal people living mundane lives, working as hairdressers or receptionists until they were thrust in to the limelight. And perhaps this is why we love them (Lauren Goodger has 671,000 followers!) Because as much as I envy the life of Victoria Beckham, I know that kind of fame and fortune is unattainable for people like me. But women like Lauren, well, normal folk can relate to her, in a way that they could never relate to any of the Spice Girls.

We are living in a country (and world) which is more divided and unsettled than perhaps ever before, and so we turn to social media to escape the dismay and sadness that exists in our minds and hearts. I can understand why people avoid the news. Who wants to be faced with another day of new atrocities, of unimaginable horrors? So we scroll through Instagram, looking for a happier interpretation of today. And on those particularly bad days, where we hope for a better future, we might skip Posh’s perfectly framed images and settle on photos of the Jess’s of this world. Because we can’t all have millions in the bank, but we can all hope to own a fluffy cat. 

Mindful or mind full?

I’ve touched on mindfulness in one of my earlier blogs, but felt that it deserved an entry all of its own. Mindfulness has become, I suppose you could say, somewhat ‘fashionable’ over the past year or so. With mindfulness meditation classes popping up all over the place and mindfulness colouring books being sold in every bookshop, it’s pretty hard to escape it. And yet, so many people have the wrong sort of pre conceived ideas about what mindfulness actually means.

There’s no concrete definition of mindfulness, but it generally relates to living in the moment or focusing on the present day (as opposed to living in the past, a common complaint among depression sufferers, or worrying about the future, an equally shared side effect of most types of anxiety.) This can be developed through meditation by focusing on the breath, but it doesn’t have to go any further than concentrating on the pressure points on your feet as you walk, or simply paying more attention to your surroundings. It all comes down to personal preference and you only have to click in to one of Google’s 40 million search results on the subject to explore what might work for you.

To me, mindfulness means listening to my own thoughts. I am prone to having conversations in my head before meetings, interviews etc., playing out all possible scenarios in my mind. I didn’t realise exactly how often I did this until I started really paying attention to the thoughts that popped in to my head. And what I found were two things: 1) My thoughts were so terribly negative, and 2) the thoughts were also completely transient – as quickly as they appeared, they were gone again. Mindfulness made me realise that I had a choice – I could let those thoughts take over, sending me in to a spiral of unhappiness and unease, or I could try to let them go (visualisation helps – I like popping ‘thought balloons.’)

Anxiety suffers are extremely prone to negative thinking. We have hundreds of thousands of thoughts every day and yet no one really knows why the negative ones stick with us. We’re always imagining the worst case scenario, and the way we feel on any given day will impact how we interpret different situations. The logic of mindfulness is that if we learn to recognise the negative thoughts, we can, in time, start to distinguish these from facts and work at letting the negative thoughts go. Less negative thinking equals less anxiety. Simples right?

Well, not quite. Mindfulness is hard work. You can’t really do it wrong but that doesn’t mean you start seeing the benefits straight away. It takes some practice and it’s often very difficult to find time away from our busy lives to just take a minute to notice what we’re thinking! I find that small steps to a mindful life are the easiest ones to make. Just start noticing more. Look up. Look around. When you step away from the negative hovel that is your brain, and really see the world around you, you somehow start to find a new appreciation for the beauty in the world, amidst all the darkness and horror. 

Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's an Instagram filter...

After writing my last blog, I started to wonder if I’d shared too much. On the whole, the blog has been really well received and has been read by people all over the world (including 3 people in Australia, 4 people in Thailand and 3 people in the UAE, amazingly.) However, I was very open (perhaps too open) about my struggles with mental illness and I’d be foolish to deny that there is a chance this might impact me negatively later in life. Unfortunately, there is still a massive amount of stigma attached to mental ill health and with 80% of employers now apparently googling potential candidates, it does open me up to the possibility of being turned down for opportunities based on one person’s negative interpretation of my public image.

There is a fine balancing act that must be adhered to when ‘exposing’ yourself to the general public online. Social media can be the best marketing tool out there. After all, no one else posts on your blog/twitter/Facebook/Instagram/misc. other social media that I’m not cool enough for, but you. From a potential employer’s perspective, this makes everything you write a much more accurate portrayal of your personality than anything you could possibly say at a job interview.

Of course this isn’t quite true, as we all know that social media content is highly censored. And by censored, I don’t mean posting less expletives! I mean the filters we apply, the perfect selfies that we post that took 19 attempts to get right, the images of the perfect family, the pictures of the date night at that fancy restaurant, the photos of an epic shopping spree. This is what we, the general public, get to see. What we don’t see is the unedited pictures with our three chins (dare you venture to the dreaded recently deleted photos folder), the children who cried for the whole family day out and sat still only long enough for the picture to be taken, the fight that took place before the date night because she took 3 hours to get ready and he’s raging, the bank statements that are hiding in a drawer to avoid confronting the crippling debt that that new Michael Kors bag is the product of*. We only see what others want us to see.

And this is why I decided to post my blog. Because if you scroll down my Facebook timeline and flick through my Instagram photos, what you will see is a largely happy and comfortable life. And those images are not a lie but they certainly don’t tell the whole story. So maybe I have shared too much, and perhaps one day that will come back to haunt me. But isn’t it a refreshing change to know the truth? To see the harsh, unfiltered, uncensored reality in all its glory and to know that maybe, just maybe, you are not alone in this model perfect, contoured cheeks, selfie filled world. 

*These do not apply to me personally. I have no children, my husband is surprisingly patient when it comes to my beauty regime and the closest thing I have to a designer handbag, is the Fulberry (fake Mulberry) I bought for 20 euros from a 'looky looky' man in Marbella. 

A mindful life

It has been a long time since I last posted a blog (almost 2 years in fact!) Lots has happened in that time -  the biggest change for me being a move from our beautiful flat in leafy Langside to a brand new 3 bed home in Uddingston. I now live in the suburbs and am officially old. Life became very boring and very busy. As of January 2015, I am now CTA qualified which means no more studying (I do keep threatening Neil that I might go back and do my diploma in legal practice or a masters one day but I think he may divorce me if that were to happen and he’s quite useful to have around so I probably won’t.) Studying has been replaced with dusting and Saturday morning hangovers have largely been traded for hoovering and taking the cat out in the garden.

Although lots of things are different, there are a few things that have remained pretty static, and not all of them are necessarily good things.  I’m still (much) heavier than I should be, the cat is still a little shit, Neil is still messier than I’d like, my family still has more issues than vogue, and I’m still battling a mental illness.

I’d never really spoken publicly about my anxiety disorder until earlier this year, when I gave a talk at work on mindfulness for mental health awareness week. This was really well received and I had so much positive feedback from people, some of whom I’d never even talked to before. I’ve been thinking about writing about it ever since but had never quite gotten around to putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, as it were.)

I’ve suffered from a combination of depression, anxiety and panic attacks since I was 20 years old. The first panic attack I remember having was in the now defunct Somerfield on Byres Road (now Waitrose for anyone not familiar with the continuing gentrification of Glasgow’s West End.) It came on out of the blue and I was terrified. I honestly thought I was going to die. I went through a phase of having frequent panic attacks for about a year after that but then didn’t have any for another 8 years. Until February of this year when my world was turned upside down.

I became ill very suddenly with crippling anxiety. A day off sick quickly turned in to a week, and before I knew it, I had been off work for almost 2 months. I could barely function enough to brush my teeth, let alone leave the house. I was so afraid of everything and became overcome with obsessive thoughts that completely engulfed me, to the point where I had to be sedated by a doctor. The awful thoughts (these varied from fears of the house falling down to worries about the cat being kidnapped – sounds ridiculous and it was) were coupled by the terrible physical symptoms I was plagued with. Headaches, numbness, chest pain, muscle tension, upset stomach, nausea, palpitations, insomnia, trembling, dizziness. I had them all. This culminated in a particularly awful episode where I locked myself in the bathroom, convinced bugs were crawling over my skin, and set about scratching off all the skin on my hands (queue hideous scars that not even the miracle bio oil could make disappear!)

Luckily, through a mix of medication, counselling and mindfulness meditation, I gradually began to get better and returned to work, on a phased return, at the end of April. My employers have been incredibly supportive, which has aided my recovery greatly.

It’s not been the best few months and I’m still not completely better: I don’t know if I ever will be. I still have days where the anxious thoughts come, my body dyed with the colour of my own thoughts, and nothing is clear to me. I have other days where I feel sadness for no apparent reason, or worse, feel nothing at all. But practising mindfulness has encouraged me to make peace with my obsessive thinking. Because as powerful as they feel, they are just thoughts. I am not having a heart attack, I am not dying. I am not crazy. I am just me. And that is okay.