#“mental health matters” mfs when your social disorder makes it difficult for you to socialize properly

[n3felibata]

The autistic Stolas headcanon puts so much into perspective. Like whether Viv intended it to be this way or not, this can definitely be interpreted as an autistic man not understanding social cues and empathy which his neurotypical antis just don't understand.

It's not an excuse, but this is what I mean when I say everybody babies autistic people until it comes to the uglier parts they can't romanticize

[kateviic]

Taming your Demons: How I put a leash on Anxiety

If you suffer from anxiety, chances are this has happened to you - mention the A word and you’re met with eye rolls and scoffs and awkward silences from people, even friends or family, who think you’re making it all up. Worse even, that fury-inducing phrase - “it’s all in your head.”

And the worst part is yes, it is all in our heads – but so is everything else about our existence – our heads are where we live, where we store memories and emotions and relationships and dreams and plans and fears. So when your home becomes a place you can’t trust or maybe don’t recognise, everything can very easily fall apart.

I’ve been there.

I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in 2015. And while now in 2018, I can’t say I will ever be completely free of this neurological nightmare, I’m in a place where I feel confident that my experiences and tactics of dealing with anxiety might be of help to others.

For me, anxiety has been a very physical ordeal. Mine was triggered by a journey in late 2014 during which I was suddenly ill on an underground train stopped halfway through a tunnel in London. Nowhere to hide, no chances to get off, no room to breathe (just thinking about it now makes my stomach clench). At the time I thought I was just unlucky, until it happened again the next journey I took on the underground. And then the next, and the next.

You may be familiar with some of the symptoms, and they can differ from case to case. Zoning out (or disassociating), clammy hands, wobbly legs, pounding heart, tunnel vision, and cramping stomach to name just a few, mild examples. They get a lot worse.

These sensations caused so much trauma to me that I started to avoid public transport altogether. Then I started to avoid car journeys, and short trips, and social engagements, in case I was sick again in a place I couldn’t escape. Any small detour or change to any plans, no matter how small, caused almost instant panic.

This progressed to spending almost a whole year without leaving the house at all. When I got the courage up to visit the doctor (after a morning of throwing up from fear) I was shaking so badly I could barely speak. I remember sitting in reception waiting for my appointment with such intense chest pains I thought I was having a heart attack. It is a very difficult sensation to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it themselves and I think I probably did a bad job of it. I was handed pamphlets about group therapy and a prescription to manage the symptoms of anxiety and sent on my way. It was a relief to be given a diagnosis and to know what I was dealing with, but I had a feeling these things wouldn’t help. I cried all the way home.

Beta-blockers or anti-depressants work for some people, and if medication is the only way you can live comfortably then that’s absolutely the perfect choice for you and I’ll never try to tell you otherwise. However they didn’t work for me, and after a while I gave up trying to convince myself that there was a magic medicinal cure for what I was going through, and began looking elsewhere.

I won’t be so bold as to suggest I have the miracle cure, but this would be my advice to someone looking to build their arsenal against this particular mental health issue, and this is what helped me.

Back to my previous statement, ‘it is all in our heads’. Anxiety can make you feel like there’s a stranger taking up all the space in your mind. A stranger that’s constantly screaming for you to take cover, find a place to hide, and flicking the fight or flight switch in your brain at the sight of any small inconvenience. As incapacitating and to put it bluntly, potentially life-ruining as this is, when you experience anxiety, your body floods with adrenaline for a reason – fear.

Understanding your fear is the most important part of getting a handle on your anxiety. The key to this is knowing that you don’t fear, for example, getting on a bus, or leaving your house, because those things are generally not scary, and those things haven’t changed - the only thing that has changed is your reaction to them. You’re dreading the sensations that these actions trigger in you. Simply, you fear fear itself.

For me, this opened the door to beating anxiety. I had taken the tube hundreds of times with no incident before, why was it now the most terrifying ordeal I could think of? Because I was scared of being scared.

An important thing to know about fear is that it cannot spiral on and on, getting worse and worse - it will eventually reach its peak, and then it will subside. The only way out is through, folks, it’s true.

And go through it, you must. Whatever ‘going through it’ means to you, it’s unbelievably important that you do it. Every time I avoided something because it made me feel scared, I strengthened that fear exponentially, and I made the strangle hold anxiety had on my life even tighter.

Start small. Force yourself to do little things that make your anxiety rear its head. Get through them, and then move on to something a little bigger. For me, deep breathing was the only thing that would make panic subside. The second I felt tightness in my stomach, or started to get clammy palms, or felt my mind drift over to the ‘what if?’ thoughts, I began counting using the 7 – 11 technique. If you’re not aware of this one, simply breathe in for 7 seconds making sure your diaphragm expands (so your stomach sticks out, not your chest), hold it a few seconds, and then exhale for 11 more seconds. The act of exhaling in this way puts your body back in rest mode by fooling the brain into thinking you’re calm. It sounds ridiculous but it really, really works. Your brain started this nonsense, so your brain can fix it too.

I practiced this until the final nail in this mf’s coffin was hammered home – a holiday to Italy. Yes I was sick from nerves for three days before leaving, and yes we had to stop on the way to the airport so I could throw up. But I did it, I got on the plane and I had an amazing week in Venice, and now I’m not scared of traveling anymore. Now I live a life of exciting plans and amazing opportunities, and taking the tube is a piece of cake. Usually.

Sometimes my anxiety slips its collar and knocks me on my ass like old times, that’s something I’ve had to accept. But it no longer stops me from enjoying my life, and it will never control me again.

If you’ve somehow made it to the end of this post, thank you! I hope you gained some insight from it, no matter how small, and whether you suffer from anxiety or not. Feel free to message me any questions you might have!

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