Notes from a tricky brain

I’ve been living with complex mental health difficulties for most of my adult life.  Depending who you ask, I have Generalised Anxiety, Depression and Anxious/avoidant Personality Disorder (the latter meaning that, if something makes me anxious, I just plain refuse to do it).  I’ve also tested borderline for Autism Spectrum Disorder twice.  If you ask me, I just have a ‘tricky brain’…it’s less of a mouthful!  Never having been much of a ‘talker’, I started this blog about 6 years ago to chronicle my day to day existence at the hands of my mental health, but also to help me make sense of the million thoughts per minute (this should have it’s own SI unit of measurement, now I come to think of it) that like to race through my ‘tricky brain’.

In the years since the birth of this blog, I’ve had periods where I’ve functioned well and been productive.  I’ve been working my way through an Open University degree (combined STEM), I’ve travelled, exercised and kept fit…heck, I even ran the Glencoe Marathon.  But these times I speak of have been peppered with bouts of mental illness (I’ll call it that because that’s what it is, in my eyes).  I’ve attended A&E countless times, been hospitalised and spent months at a time indoors, withdrawing from life and hiding from the World.

Today, you find me in what I call ‘limbo’, somewhere between a full-blown mental health crisis and a period of recovery.  The World is turning to shit around us – we are dealing with a global pandemic, the climate crisis is at a critical point and there is civil unrest everywhere as marginalised people across the globe finally decide that enough is enough.  Despite this, I plod on.  I’m slowly starting to look towards a new academic year after a bit of an unplanned gap year and I’m attending a course to become qualified in Intentional Peer Support, to help me find new ways of thinking about my own experiences but also in an effort to use these experiences for good.  Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be able to help just one other person and if that person can then pay the help forward at an R-rate of more than one, I’ll consider the whole thing a success.

I’ve always tried to write exactly what I feel, keeping this blog open and honest, a true insight into what it’s like to live with a tricky brain, and I’ll endeavour to continue along this theme going forward.  You can follow me on Twitter (link on the right), where I’ll post notifications whenever I write a new post…or don’t, it’s up to you!