Inspired

My emotions are all over the place today. Things are literally changing moment by moment. The main states I seem to be oscillating between are motivated/hopeful and frustrated/despairing - extremes as usual. I am also having difficulty concentrating and am very easily distracted so writing this post might be a challenge! I do hate feeling so ‘twitchy’, it’s exhausting and draining before you even add in the activities of the day. 

The week has pretty much followed this typical EUPD pattern. I have been really anxious and unmotivated sometimes, much like last week but have been trying to frame things more positively and do what I can to calm things down in my head too.  I managed to drag myself out for a run after getting a pep talk on how important exercise is to maintain good mental health from my GP. He’s right, I know that I feel better after exercising and yes, the days where I least feel like it are the days I most need to do it. Must try harder! I also put some work into another goal that I have been working on with my MH team; to treat myself more kindly and show myself that I am deserving. Both of nice material things and also care and attention - from myself as much as anybody else. So, I did a spring clean of my wardrobe and then bought a couple of new clothes for the summer. (You can tell I did because just days later the weather is now back to rainy and cold rather than sunny and hot!) 

I had wanted to start coming off some of my meds that I take to help me sleep when I saw my GP but he quickly picked up that things weren’t as good as they have been and said that now wasn’t the right time. As if to prove it, sleep has been very difficult to come by every night this week and I feel rotten so I guess I agree with him.  It always surprises me how much I can be affected by not getting enough sleep. Both my EUPD and my PoTS are exacerbated if I don’t get enough of it - apparently some experts say that if left to their own devices and without external pressures, people with PoTS would sleep for up to 14 hours a day due to the extra work that the body has to do to combat the problems with the autonomic nervous system. People have often assumed I’m just lazy but there is science behind my constant tiredness!

I have done a lot of writing this week, which has been a good thing and helped keep me focussed. I started a non-fiction writing course at a (not so) local adult education college and it looks like it’s going to be useful.  I was so caught up in the mammoth expedition that was getting there and back as well as the social anxiety of having to meet new people and talk to them like a normal human being, that I totally neglected to think about the writing aspect until I got there! It turns out that I muddled my way through all three challenges though and came out relatively unscathed.  In the introductions, we had to say why we were on the course and what it is that we want to write about. For the first time ever, I told a whole bunch of people who I am going to have to interact with that I have a mental health condition and that I have been through quite a lot due to it. I said that I want to write about that journey. I didn’t dare make eye contact with anyone whilst I spoke and spent the first half of the session worried sick that I’d made a fool of myself and stupidly shown my vulnerability. However, when we had a break, two separate people came up to me to talk about mental health matters and how they’ve seen people in their lives affected by mental illness. That made me feel a little bit proud - just by being open about my mental health difficulties, it led to a dialogue about mental health in general. I felt like what I am doing, even on a very small scale, is worthwhile and it spurred me on to continue in my journeys both of recovery and raising awareness.

This post has indeed taken me most of the day to write - alongside getting up to do about 150 other things every line or two.  But I’ve made it to the end and doing it has enabled me to hold onto that motivated/hopeful end of the extreme for just a little bit longer at a time.