Tag: anxiety

A Positive Start

Well, it’s just past midnight on January 2nd. I am pleased, and actually quite amazed to say that I managed to survive New Year without dissolving into a ball of anxiety, depression and self-loathing like I have done almost every year since I graduated.

If anything, I’m more motivated than ever.

It’s also my birthday. 27 years ago today I shocked (and probably panicked) everyone by deciding that I wanted to take my place in the world 14 weeks ahead of schedule. I got cerebral palsy for my eagerness.

I wish I could say this level of punctuality has followed me into my adult life, but I’d be lying.

For the past few years I haven’t wanted to do anything special for my birthday.

I never really gave that much thought when I was a kid, but now I’m older it feels pretty darn weird. I think it always will now. I mean, why would/should/do I celebrate a day that was probably awful for my family?

This year though, I’ve had a bit of a change of heart. I survived. My mum survived. It was touch and go for a while, but we made it. My dad also managed to come through the whole ordeal too.

My parents were told I’d need speech therapy. I didn’t.

My parents were told I might not crawl. I did. Within two weeks of them being told that.

They were told I might only be able to ‘walk around a supermarket at best’. I think you all know how wrong that turned out to be.

Not only did we all survive, but we stuck two fingers up to every expectation along the way.

And we still do that last part. Every. Single. Day.

I think that’s pretty freaking amazing.

I’m off to celebrate. Who’s with me?

Blogging about your own life is hard

This might seem like a really obvious thing to say, but blogging so openly about my own life with cerebral palsy is hard.

One of the most important things about this blog for me is that I keep as honest as possible. It’s not easy for me to admit that getting on buses scares me because of the disabled access, that I can’t tie my own shoelaces, or, that on occasion, I have fallen over and wet myself on the way to the toilet. And yet, here I am, doing just that.
People who read this blog now will probably have a very different opinion of me from those who have been reading since the early days.
This makes me sad.
I worry that people will see me as someone who can’t, rather than someone who can do and does do.
When I first started this blog almost a year after graduating from my multimedia journalism degree, I worried a lot about how this blog would look to potential employers. I worried about whether or not my inability to tie my shoelaces might come across as an inability to perform work-related tasks, like sending e-mails. I worried about whether or not I should mention that I like to go to the pub with my friends.
Then people started to read it. People with CP, loved ones of people with CP, or people who just found my blog interesting. These lovely people left comment after comment and I realised that a lot of them had to deal with things that I do.
I started talking about my bad days, my pain management  (which I’m pretty good at most of the time) and the surgeries I’d had as a teenager. People responded. People related. People cared.
Worries about what employers would think faded away, I stopped paying attention to my stats. I was being me. I was having fun.
People were grateful for my posts, especially parents of children with CP. Even if the posts weren’t always happy ones, people kept commenting. Your comments and support have kept me going over many a bad CP night.
Talking about my mental health was harder. The day I came home from the doctor with antidepressants I cried. I was so very ashamed. I’d struggled with my mental health since childhood. I felt like I had truly failed at life.
I didn’t talk about it for a while. I didn’t think anyone would read or understand-  but they did.
They still kept coming back. You still kept coming back.
My posts have not been regular lately, I know that. People still keep subscribing to it via WordPress, even though the mood of this blog has changed.
I’m going through a rough pain patch and a rough mental health one too. I’ve recently upped my meds again and I’ve just had a x-ray to see if that will tell us anything about my pelvis pain.
My long-term physio has just retired so I’m on the waiting list to see a new one.
My therapist has just referred me to another  one because he felt that I needed to ‘step up a level’. Yup, that means I’m on another waiting list.
My circumstances have changed a lot in the last four years. I’m still looking for permanent work. I have freelance work, but nothing full-time, which is what I want, need and am capable of.
I was apparently written off when I was younger, but got a first in my degree. I was born at 26 weeks gestation, 26 years ago and still survived. My parents were told I’d walk around a supermarket ‘at best’.
I walk round supermarkets for fun. While using a walking frame and carrying a basket of shopping.
I’m both sorry and not sorry that this blog isn’t showing the best me at the moment, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be that again.
With a job to distract me from my pain, a good medical team, and understanding people around me, who knows what might be possible.
Thank you for all your support,
Nic

November was indeed crazy!

Hey, remember how I wrote that blog post before November even started saying that it was going to be a crazy month, what with NaNoWriMo going and all my appointments and stuff? Well it turned out to be an even crazier month than I thought, what with NaNoWriMo going on, all my appointments, going to see one of my favouriate authors doing a talk, and my family re-homing a dog from some of our friends who couldn’t give her as much attention as they would have liked any more. Yup, you read that right Little Miss Turns-Into-A-Ball-of-Anxiety-Everytime-a-Dog-Even-Looks-At-Her now shares a home with a dog. And I love her. Well, I never.

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? My first day of NaNo was awful, and it didn’t get any better. It took me about two days to get what I affectionately call ‘NaNo Neck’ this year. That is what I call it when my neck, back and shoulders all hate me for pending too much time hunched over my laptop, which happens every year sooner or later. My plot was virtually non-exsistant (and still is.) I had several days where I didn’t write anything, but I dragged myself over the finish line with a few hours to spare. Here’s a YouTube video I made about the whole thing, if you’re interested.

 

Needless to say the month was a tough one in terms of my cerebral palsy, what with all the extra pain and the cold (omg the cold) but I did have my botox and they’ve ordered me some new boots to go with my calipers, which I needed as my old ones were getting holes in. Oh, and everything went fine at the dentist, which is always nice. Apparently I don’t have to go for another nine months now instead of six months. Yippee!

So, let’s talk about the dog now. She’s a six year-old shi tuz called Tallulah and at first I was really, really nervous about getting her. I’ve never had a dog before, and don’t know a lot about them, and the ones that I have been around have generally been bouncy or yappy or too playful for me to handle, and then of course there is my whole ‘cats are clean dogs are dirty’ thing that my brain thinks for some reason.

There were a few teething problems so I kept things quiet about her online until we had them a bit more under control in case it turned out that we weren’t the right family for her and she wasn’t the right dog for us. Anyway, things have settled and we’re keeping her, although things still aren’t easy because the poor little thing is undergoing a phantom pregnancy (she’d just had her last season a month of two before we got her) and the poor thing is very sad and confused about why she doesn’t have puppies yet.

So, that was the hectic month that was Novemeber. Hopefully I’ll be back a little more regularly now. How are you guys?

Being Honest with Myself About My Mental Health – again

Okay, I need to confess a few things.  Mental health things.

If you’ve been hanging around this blog or my YouTube channel for a while, you know I have problems with anxiety, my ‘mood’ (doctors don’t seem to like using the word ‘depression’ these days, it seems) and what I like to call OCD-type tendencies. By this I mean that I wash my hands a lot, change my clothes a lot, worry constantly about germs and sometimes, I even babywipe my clothes WHILE I’M STILL WEARING THEM.

I’ve had therapy on and off for a lot of my life, and have been on pills for a couple of years now. Things were okay for a while. I was almost considering coming off said pills, and then things went downhill. Of course, I should have done something about this as soon as I started slipping but I didn’t.

I tried my best to ignore it, not wanting to admit that I was ‘back here again’ as I describe it to people, but as I stood in the bathroom a couple of weeks ago, wet-wipping my jeans so that I wouldn’t get bathroom germs around the rest of the house, I knew I had to do something. It hit me that I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t felt like an emotional wreck, couldn’t remember the last time I felt like something wasn’t a bit broken in my brain, and couldn’t remember the last time I’d woken up feeling content.

I told myself that I’d sleep more because that would make everything better, only it turned out that the more I slept the more of a failure I felt, then the more of a failure I felt, the harder it got to get out of bed, and the more the thought of having to change out of my PJs and into ‘real clothes’ to face the ‘real world’ filled me with dread.

One day I just sent my mum a text while she was at work. I hadn’t been planning on it and felt guilty, but she told me to go to the doctor too. As much as I didn’t want to, I forced myself to do it. He’s doubled my dosage of my pills and is sending me back for CBT.

As much as I hate that I’m ‘back here again’, I need to admit it, and get on with trying to overcome this.