Make Banana Pancakes | HELP, RANTS ETC.

life update: slightly fucked up but okay

Yeah so basically the overall message of this is that I'm not at my best right now mentally but am overall okay, I think. I don't want to worry anyone as I'm not in any danger and I have a good support network of friends and family that I can talk to regularly and am on the waiting list for therapy but I've just been feeling off lately. 

So some of you may have noticed I haven't been very active since about last September and although I usually just say I'm busy when anyone asks that hasn't always been the case, it was more that my mental health had dipped quite badly and I didn't have the motivation to do much other than lie in bed. I would still do uni work but would find ways to kind of trick my brain into doing things that my parents or friends would be annoyed if I didn't get up and do it and a desire to pretend I was okay so the Uni wouldn't 'check up on me' but all my self motivation had gone. I wanted to write but just couldn't as every time I tried, I just felt grey and apathetic towards it so just didn't.

I've never been the best at talking about my mental health mainly because I just thought everything I was feeling was normal because everyone around me also had some form of  untreated mental illness. I love the town I grew up in but it did lead to me normalising my own mental health to an extent as we all tended to repress and just joke about things instead of ever actually solving it. Uni along with several of my close friends from home getting help definitely did help as it kind of helped me escape this bubble a bit as everyone at uni was very different a lot of them made me realise that I wasn't feeling how everyone did.

Like a big problem of mine was jumping to conclusions like someone would say one small thing, be slightly off at dinner or take a few hours to reply to my message and I would instantly assume they were done with me yet would never tell people this and would actively say how I hated when people jumped to conclusions like this in an attempt to mask how I was feeling so everyone would think I was okay. I assumed that everyone felt this level of paranoia and would end up missing lectures just to stay in bed and dwell over things so didn't say anything about it until finally I did and my friends from uni just seemed quite concerned. I felt like it was normal for everyone to feel apathetic and just kind of grey inside all the time when it really wasn't. There were some more extreme examples of this of things which I'd normalised and don't really want to share here but like, my mental health was actually really quite bad.

I began to just kind of accept that this weirdly apathetic, unmotivated and paranoid mood I felt was just how I was going to feel forever. I could get temporary relief from it but it would always settle in again and everything felt like effort and in all honesty, I'm still not quite sure how to cope with it but I'm back home with my parents for a very long summer now which should help. 

Although being at uni and being in a completely new environment was probably a big part of this, I don't actually regret it at all as I've made some really solid friendships here that I'm ridiculously grateful for. Them and a lot of my friends from home finally encouraged me to get help which I actually did and got officially diagnosed with Depression and Anxiety so it didn't just feel like that was my brain and I had to push through. I also finally opened up to my parents about how I was feeling and they've been really supportive about it and are helping me feeling more structured whilst I'm on the waiting list for therapy. I don't feel completely better but hopefully am getting there!

So yeah, that's a very brief summary of what I want to share just to kind of explain why I've been so in and out recently. I'll try and write a bit more but I'll see as I'm just going to take things day by day and keep myself safe until I can start some sort of therapy. Being home definitely helps as I can work down in the living room and be around people without feeling oddly alone and abandoned which I'd sometimes feel at uni where there was a lot of pressure to talk to people if you went to see them

This is a very summarised version of everything mainly because I don't really want to share everything that I felt and happened as it has been a hectic year really but hopefully this acts as a kind of explanation for what's happened to me - E x