I’d be surprised if anyone ever reads this. It’s designed more as a brain dump exercise than to be read by others, but after reading what the amazing Adam Culp published with regards to his own anxiety problems, it may get published. Never say never.
For around the last 6 years, I’ve suffered quite badly with anxiety. When I say quite badly, I mean in my own life it has affected more and more of my daily life, so I mean quite badly for me. Obviously there may be people in the world who suffer much more than I with this disorder, but I can only comment on how and when it’s made my normal daily life difficult. That’s one of the problems with speaking out on a topic as sensitive and personal as this one, it’s highly likely that you’ll make people think that you’re either a sniveling whiner, or an attention grabbing dickhead. Obviously, I am an attention grabbing dickhead normally, but this topic is so difficult that I have no idea where to start.
I’m rambling, but that’s fine, because remember, nobody will ever read this anyway.
Firstly, I’d like to address the “pull yourself together” crowd. I know people with much more severe problems than mine, people who’s mental health problems effect each and every facet of their daily lives. I completely appreciate that my difficulties are nothing in comparison to what other people have to live with. For that I’m thankful, I keep reminding myself daily that I’m a very lucky man to have an amazing family, and a job that I love.
Over the last five or six year however, what started as a mild level of worry over things that I probably shouldn’t be spending any time thinking about (let alone worrying about) has escalated quite badly, to the point that now I live every day with some level of anxiousness in my head. This can range from a background level of minor stuff, to the point where I am in a full blown panic attack because of some inane thing that has gripped my mind.
The crazy thing about my anxiety is that it is never about things that you should worry about in life. My anxieties are about weird, stupid shit that nobody should ever consider, let alone lay awake at night crying about. I’m actually writing this today because I have a very bad case of anxiety right now. The 431 words I wrote before the start of this sentence have taken me about 5 times as long as it would usually take me to write that many words, because my mind keeps wandering back to the particular mind-fuck that is playing with my head right now.
Every minute of every waking hour my mind spends about 10% of it’s time minimum worrying about random stuff that you should never worry about. This may be completely normal for everyone, as this is the first time I’ve every actually broached the subject to people outside of my immediate family (read wife and parents), I wouldn’t know. But this “background radiation” of anxiety is not what most people would have (I’m guessing). I am anxious about the most random shit ever.
Current background worries include if the mild back tweak I did yesterday is, in fact, going to stop me enjoying my skiing trip next week. Will I be able to afford my flights for Lone Star PHP in Texas before the prices skyrocket. How long will it be until JetBrains realise that I’m a fruit-loop who can’t get work done consistently every day, and fire me. This is random stuff I can cope with. Notice there is no real worries about what I used to be anxious about before I became this odd person. I’m not worried about my or my families health, I’m not worried about financial stability (although judging by my ability to stay solvent I probably should be). I get worried about odd stuff that my logical mind tells me is crazy to be worried about. If I can’t afford to book flights to Lone Star I just don’t go. There is no big problem, I won’t lose my job, nobody will really miss me and I can explain to the organisers. It’s illogical, but that doesn’t stop it happening.
I can just about live with the background stuff. It results in me not sleeping properly about 50% of the time, and I can be fractious and moody when the levels rise a little (just ask my wife), but I can live with it. But every so often I get a larger problem where on top of the background anxiety, I get a huge dose of worry about something equally inappropriate.
Past problems have been very strange, the immediate one that springs to mind happened about September in 2014. As a family we very much enjoy camping, and we are lucky enough to own a nice camper van that allows us to get away when we want to with some of our close friends. If I every publish this, I’ll put a nice photo of the camper van right here.
One weekend we’d planned to go away with my brother and sister-in-law, and a few friends. We were due to leave Friday afternoon, but that entire week anxiety had grown and gripped me. I was worried about going camping for the most odd reason. I was concerned that we would go to the campsite and we would disturb the other campers because we would be noisy. That’s it. That’s the extent of what was bothering me. But over the week, it grew from being nothing into being something HUGE in my mind. When my wife came home from work lunchtime on the Friday we were due to go, she found me adamant I didn’t want to. When she pushed me to give a reason I became incredibly upset, and actually ended up crying in bed for a long time. Obviously, as my wife is amazing, she told me we didn’t need to go, and calmed me down. I ended up going and having a great time, but most of the times these stories would end up in me cancelling whatever thing was causing me grief, and taking myself out of the situation.
I’m pretty sure that isn’t healthy.
I don’t tend to tell my friends or family about this stuff. In South Wales (where I live) there is still a big stigma around mental health issues. A few of my friends follow me on Twitter and might read this. One or two will be pissed off (rightly so) that I haven’t mentioned it to them, because some close friends will want to be able to help me. But it’s hard. It’s a testament to how hard it is to speak about this stuff for me that nobody really knows. It took 5 years and seeing a talk by Ed Finkler before I even spoke about this openly to my wife, and got some professional help from my GP. I’m getting help now, slowly, but if anything, it’s getting worse.
Right now, I’m anxious as hell because my wife is going out for a drink with some friends on Saturday night. Today is Thursday, and I should be laughing at myself for being so pathetic. My wife has been out with friends many many times before, and sometimes, like me, she enjoys having a late night of drinking and (unlike me) dancing. This is excellent, I’m glad she has good friends and a healthy social life. But the last few times she’s been out and I’ve had the kids, once they are in bed, I find that my mind paints horrible pictures in which my wife is the victim of some of the horrible things you read in the papers. Each time, she’s come home safe and sound and the anxiety problem never really gets to panic attack stages.
Today, however, my awesome brain is slowly climbing the walls because I’m anxious that on Saturday night I will get an anxiety attack. I’m fucking anxious about the fact I may get anxious later in the week. This is the second time this has happened to me in the last 3 weeks. It’s freaking me out badly and I’m close to a panic attack just thinking about it. My only hope at the moment is that we can get a baby sitter on Saturday and I can spend the evening with some friends, hopefully taking my mind of things, but even that isn’t guaranteed to work. My wife will feel guilty, and that’s so unfair. She deserves to be able to have a night out with friends without feeling guilty.
When I say I’m “worried” or “anxious” I don’t mean the way I felt when I was worried about something before this whole mindfuck started happening. When I was worried about exams, or when in my late teens I had a millions debt collectors chasing me because my financial sense has always been from the “buy now pay much later” school of thought. When I’m worried because one of my daughters is ill, or because my wife’s car broke down with her in it. Those are what I would count as normal worries, which are horrible but can be rationalised. When I am inappropriately worried or anxious it’s not so much in my mind, it’s all in the gut. I have physical symptoms that manifest themselves in increased toilet activity (let’s leave it at that), and I find myself clenching my gut muscles for so long that I start getting cramps. No matter what I do, it always comes back to the worry. I can watch a film for maybe 20 minutes, then something in the film will break the immersion and remind me that I have a package that is supposed to be delivered in two days, and OMFG WHAT IF IT’S LATE!!!
This is a lot of words, many of them nonsense, and I still can’t decide if I should publish this or not. Weirdly, writing this down has helped me a lot, so maybe reading it will help someone else. It seems like it’s all the rage in the PHP community to have a mental health issue at the moment (I don’t mean that to be offensive, I apologise if it did offend you), but I really don’t want to be looking for sympathy, or for anything else really. I suspected writing all this shit down would help, and it has, so don’t feel sorry for me. I have a great life, a great family and many of the material trappings that I always wanted. I get to fly around the world for a job for fucks sake.
I’ll only publish if I think that it might help someone else to not feel alone, or to get help. Counseling has been hard for me, I haven’t found someone I really trust yet (you can’t get counseling on the NHS unless you know 2 years before you need it that you’ll need it), but accepting I have what my GP diagnosed as “anxiety disorder” is a step in the right direction I guess.
I decided I am going to publish this after having it review by a friend. They added some very valid points, but I’m going to resist the urge to edit this post much, because honestly, for better or for worse, this is actually how I feel about this stuff at the time of writing, and I think that’s important. I’d like to add a disclaimer, however. I’m a little worried that people will stumble upon this blog and see all my self-deprecating shit and think that’s the correct way to think.
It absolutely is not.
One of the reasons I’m seeking help is that conversations with people who suffer from a similar problem have made me realise that by trivialising what I suffer on a near-daily basis, I’m not helping anyone. So part of me improving my life is accepting that what I have is real, is non-trivial, and I shouldn’t be embarrassed by it. If I say it often enough I might at least sound like I believe it myself (it’s incredibly embarrassing for me to speak about this stuff still).
