Mental Health

I’ve been sat here for over an hour now starting new blogs, taking a breath, then deleting them and it’s really doing my head in… So why not write a blog about that? Something that’s always there. Something that stops us doing what we want to do. Something that gets in the way of EVERYTHING!

Since I started this site a couple of years ago a lot of stuff has happened, not bad stuff, but stuff nonetheless, and in the back of my head I keep thinking “Ooo, I’ll write a blog about that” or “People might be interested in this” and it’s got to a point where I’m crippling myself mentally. So let’s delve into how my mind works… If you’re not interested by this point then this blog isn’t for you, but for me it’s extremely necessary…

In terms of a history of my own mental health, throughout my twenties I was crippled with clinical depression, sprinkled with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder… For me, letting people know that there was more than one thing “wrong with me” wasn’t acceptable. Hell, having even one thing wrong with me didn’t make me happy, so it was ironic that it was depression. I was down about the fact that I felt down… Bonkers… I was often told by people (even though I’d been diagnosed by professionals) that I was “fine”, like it wasn’t acceptable to be like that, like I had a choice… I’ve always grown up with the mindset that I could do anything that I put my mind to and that I was always good (but not perfect) at everything I did… There was no reason why I couldn’t be the best at something if I stuck at it, that was how my brain worked. To be fair, it did bring results to a degree, I succeeded at everything I put my mind to (other than becoming a professional footballer, but that was covered in the last blog).

Nowadays, I don’t have depression, I no longer take the maximum dose of anti-depressants just to get me through the day, and I will never know what happened in my head for that to even be a thing to start with… That ended several years ago and I’m glad it’s gone, but I ended up hurting people close to me, especially girlfriends, because I felt like I couldn’t put them through it anymore and they deserved better, they deserved someone that wasn’t “broken” and I knew that they could be happier with someone else. To feel like you’re not good enough for someone that loves you unconditionally for who you are… that’s tough… They will never completely understand and will never read this but I’m tired of apologising for who I was, even if that’s not who I wanted to be… As long as they’re happier now, that’s all I can ask for.

The anxiety is still there, and I overthink everything. I actually have to convince my brain and train it to not think about something for me to be able to do it, isn’t that a crazy thought… I know I’m not alone, and I know that some people reading this might be able to relate. I could be sitting there for hours not actually doing anything, convincing myself to be able to go out somewhere because if I didn’t, then it wouldn’t happen. I touched upon this in one of my earlier blogs when I said “just don’t think about it”… And the overthinking side is the main reason I don’t blog all the time. I’m always worried about what people would want to read and whether it would be good enough. It’s easy saying “Just write what you want, it’s your site” and “If they don’t want to read it then they won’t” but they’re just words… That’s like telling someone who’s got depression to just cheer up. I appreciate the good intentions but when you’re at war with your own brain 24/7 then there’s no amount of words that can help.

I’m sitting here now and my brain is repeatedly thinking of deleting this entire blog and the battle to keep going with it is very real… I can’t begin to describe what it feels like…

So to cut a long story short, no one is perfect. Very few people know what I’ve been through in the past in terms of mental health, and I can imagine that this will be a shock to people close to me if they were to read this, but it is what it is… That’s life… Everyone has their burdens to bear and it’s definitely possible to feel several conflicting emotions about anything and everything, to the point where all you can do is nothing…

If you’re worried or concerned, don’t be. I’m not sad, I’m not depressed, and I’m not in a dark place. This is just how my brain works and my daily battles are my battles, no one else’s. I’m actually grateful for everything in life, especially my health and wellbeing.

As for everything else, I set such a high bar for myself and I know that won’t change. I can push myself to a point where it’s not considered healthy but it gets results, and I can better myself as a human being. You just have to look at my American Football career. I watched it and thought “Yeah, I can do that!” at 30 years of age, without any prior experience and limited knowledge of the game. I started playing it, got the hang of it, ended up being a starting Wide Receiver and grabbed a few touchdowns. I set myself targets, smashed them, then felt I had nothing else to prove to myself, so I stopped playing. I’ve taken that into the “flag” version of the game, I set targets including playing Quarterback, and after playing three games in one game day and throwing several touchdowns (even with a broken finger for two of them), I can tick that off and reassess whether there’s anything else left for me in the game.

Does this mindset stop me from enjoying anything I do? Definitely... If I don’t set targets then I’m more likely to enjoy it, but it’s finding that balance that I’ve always struggled with. I’ve found in life that if I set a target, I will smash it, no excuses, but god knows what would happen if I didn’t… That’s what scares me…