Mental Health (And a welcome back!)

​Mental health is a funny thing.

This last year, mine has been very up and down. And it has affected my writing (you may have noticed this blog went dormant).

This is new territory for me – writing has been an outlet for me as long as I can remember, and I’ve never had a block like the one I’ve experienced this past year. I either can’t write at all, or anything I do write feels subpar and my anxiety overwhelms me and I can’t post it.

This last year, I moved out of my parents’ home and started renting in Wimbledon with my best friend. I started a new job at a marketing agency, taking a break from journalism to regroup after a string of rejections throughout the pandemic – it’s a job I never saw myself doing but I enjoy it and have now moved into a senior role. I threw myself back into dating and started a relationship. The last couple months, it feels like everything is coming together again and I’m finally starting to find my peace.

Writing feels good again. I feel good again.

Part of this is down to learning how to take control of my anxiety. Before moving, I was in counselling for a year, and it really helped me to nail down where my anxieties came from and what would trigger me into a spiral of anxiety and depression. I learnt some tools to help me work through the spiral and not end up feeling overwhelmed by my thoughts. However, putting this into practice has been a challenge. For the first six months of 2022 I struggled using them and was still trying to figure out how to even recognise the spiral was starting. Once I was able to recognise the pattern and notice how I would feel at the beginning of a spiral, it then took a couple more months to know how to use these tools effectively. Now, I can (mostly!).

There are still times where I can’t quite pull myself out in time, but those are becoming a lot less frequent. I have also learnt when I need to let myself feel those feelings and just take a day to ride it out – sometimes this feels a lot better.

I’m only at the beginning of this journey, and I know it will take a long time to fully be in control of my mental health, but it feels good to know I’m progressing instead of standing still.

It also feels good to write about it.