#although actually i think episodes four and five were swapped after production

[gaiatheorist]

“This Anxiety Thing.”

I’m now 2/3 of the way through the NHS ‘Introduction to Anxiety’ course, that it’s taken over two years to be allocated onto. I hate it. ‘Hate’ is a strong word, what I mean to say is that there are many elements to the thing I actively dislike. It’s a stepped process, and if I don’t complete next week’s session, I’ll be bounced out of the system, and have to wait to go on the waiting list again.

The lovely ladies that run the course invited 20 people to each of the two 90-minute sessions they run on a Friday. They only laid out 10 chairs in the room, and they knew that they wouldn’t fill them all, at the end of my first session, a couple of people said they might not come back, and I volunteered to swap into the earlier session, to make the numbers easier. That would have made four participants. One of the facilitators was watching the waiting-room before she did the photocopying, and she guessed-right the number of us that would actually show. Three. (Side-slant, about the NHS not being able to afford photocopying wastage, they probably run this course multiple times, but can’t ‘save’ any spare copies for the next run, in case the budget needs to be trimmed again, and it’s cut.) That’s the level of damage, or disengagement, or just not-being-able-to they’re working with, by the time ‘we’ get our appointments for the ‘Introduction to’, ‘we’ are already at a stage where some of us can’t sit in a room for 90 minutes with other people. Have that, ‘Minister for Loneliness’ and ‘Community Prescribing’, it takes so long to get into the system that some of us are already beyond sitting in a room watching YouTube clips.

I’m finding it very challenging. Not the content, I could have written most of it, but the process. There’s a snarky mind-loop of the very lucid priest sitting in the Hairy-Hands-Hospice in the Father Ted episode, the one who says “I really shouldn’t be here, you know.”, while the other priests are yelling “Feck!” and “Girls!” and “Drink.” There’s also a niggle in me that I mustn’t go all ‘Randal P McMurphy’, and be an obstacle to the progress of the other two participants. That’s not to say that I’m ‘faking it’, just that my anxiety-behaviours, like most things about me, are atypical. The control-behaviour in me, when I know a situation is not under my control is a massive strand of my anxiety-thing. Hyper-vigilant, I watch and listen, and then I usually either show off, or clown about. (There was a bit of ‘tears of a clown’ after last week’s session, I just crashed and slept after this one, I’ve been ill most of this week, I was exhausted.) The other two participants are VERY quiet, I don’t think the girl spoke at all, other than to confirm her name, and the man only spoke when addressed directly. I tried to keep a lid on it, and not answer every question. I deliberately dedicated a bit of my conscious awareness to making sure I wasn’t the only one talking, that’ll be why I greyed-out part way through. My ‘executive functioning’ can be patchy when I’m distracted, profoundly ironic, because when a thing has my full attention, I’m still highly functional. I should have been focusing on JUST the course content, but I had a backing-track of “Don’t act the goat.”, with a chorus of “Let the other participants speak.” and a pervasive-thought bridge of “This is not the right place for me.” Oh, and the projector was knackering my eyes, everything smelled fusty because of the rain, and I was simultaneously regretting eating a McDonald’s on the way, and wondering what nonsense I’d be able to buy the kid from town and still catch the bus home before dark. 

This course is a sifting process. We’ve passed the stage of random individuals telling us to pull our socks up and just get on with it, we’ve negotiated past the doctor’s-receptionist-dragons, to be patted on the head and told to get on with it. I was eventually lucky with the third GP I saw at my practice, the first one said “No, lass, you don’t need ‘that’, you need ‘this’.”, and two years later, it transpired that I did indeed need the ‘that’. The second one was worse “No, I can’t write you a sick-note for stress for ‘that’, that would stress anyone.” Erm, Hello, I’m someone, and it’s stressing me to a point where I can’t function. I followed protocol, that’s what I do. I filled in all of the right forms, and ticked all of the right boxes during my ‘descent into Hell for a bottle of milk’, it took all of my cognitive capacity just to stay afloat, I’m still scrubbing the metaphorical flood-stains off the walls.

Natural attrition, and human collateral, some people will sink, I’m a kicker.

I bed-blocked 16 sessions of IAPT counselling. A chirpy-chap telling me week after week that he admired my resilience, that some people wouldn’t be so tenacious, determined, focused, driven, brilliant, intriguing, able-to-survive. I don’t respond to praise and platitudes, I hit a plateau, and neither of us could shift me beyond that. He eventually ‘let me go’ when it looked like I had a referral for more appropriate intervention on the horizon. That mirrored the experience of trying to access meaningful therapy 2 years ago, Workplace Well-being didn’t want to take me on, because they’d made a referral to Neurology (which was never acted upon), my former employers weren’t going to pay for therapy for me, and their suggested alternative was wildly inappropriate. NHS-general mental health didn’t want to take me on because my employers were advised to buy-in therapy... that was ‘juggling a hot potato’ episode 1. Episode 2 was the Community Mental Health team saying they couldn’t take me on until the Neuro-Psych assessment had concluded it wasn’t entirely a physical-brain issue, and then Neuro-Psych giving me four agonising pages of reports on which bits of my brain didn’t work properly, and deciding that it WAS a mental health issue. It’s to be hoped that the gruesome game of pass-the-parcel I am doesn’t have any chocolate in it, I’ve been bundled hither and yon so much it will be melted. 

Unless you’re in absolute crisis, you have to wait for NHS mental health intervention. I’m not going to lie, I’ve been pretty close to that at various points over the last few years. In my case, it’s a combination of missed opportunities, and my stubborn streak. I can ‘appear’ functional for short stretches of time, but it’s bastard hard work, I go into my ‘emotional overdraft’, and tend to have to write-off the next day. (Due to having mental health issues and brain damage at the same time, my physical brain is no longer ‘playing with a full deck’.)  It’s very difficult, but I CAN do it, apart from that worrying grey-out yesterday, one of the facilitators asked me what phrase I’d used in an earlier answer, and it was just gone, no recall at all. (It was ‘graded exposure’, I have a phenomenal recall when I get something wrong, in 1988, I scored 99/100 in my secondary school entry spelling test, I’d transposed letters, and spelled the word ‘health’ as ‘helath’, the teacher was Mr James, nobody in the entire class scored 100, I was siting next to Gill, and she’d had a cough, so Mr James had given her a drink of water in his nasty old coffee mug.) 

I know I have some anxiety-behaviours, I know I’ve effectively ‘closed down’ very large parts of my world with my various resistances and aversions. Next week’s session is going to be the hardest one, covering the cognitive aspects of anxiety. It’s going to highlight how incongruent I am, how atypical, because, although I have some traits consistent with anxiety, the ‘anxieties’ are symptomatic of a deeper cause, we don’t need to ‘fix’ (most of) my anxiety. I ‘can’ do big, horrible, scary things, I can do things that other people can’t. This tiny, insular, closed-down world I live in is not because I can’t do things, it’s because I won’t. I have the ‘skill’, I just don’t apply the ‘will’. A cumulative toll of very challenging circumstances have led to me almost totally collapsing in on myself, and I’m beating myself up for ‘taking up a space’ on the anxiety course. I’m stupid-fearless, your original Pound-shop Wonder-Woman, there are very few things I CAN’T do, but about five billion things that I find difficult, so either avoid them, or find some mad work-around that works-for-me.

Linear-logical, I need to complete the anxiety course, because that’s the only way I’ll progress to the 1:1 ‘evaluation’, where I’ll apologise for ‘taking up a space that would have better served someone else’, and reveal the truth of me. (Mad analogy, there, about which of the kids in the Chocolate Factory I’d be, what’s my flaw? I have Charlie’s good-natured poverty, but I also have traits of the others, I don’t watch as much TV as Mike, my obsessions aren’t quite as entrenched as Violet’s, but I am absolutely adamant about what I want, like Verruca. I don’t want the world, I want to be as functional as I can be within it.) The anxiety course was a best-fit alternative from the options offered to me ‘off the peg’. I have a massive, pervasive anxiety about   harming other people. It’s not new, and I don’t think any amount of graduated exposure is ever going to undo it. It’s very easy to unpick, I’ve had a chain of people in my life do me significant harm, and I don’t want to be them. A snowball rolling downhill, I’ve picked up scars, and slights, and scandals, and slurs, and carried them with me, determined not to pass them on. I try very hard not to deliberately hurt others, to help and heal where I can.

That’s why I’m so strung-out wrung-out, I know I shouldn’t be on that course, but I also know it’s my only way in to productive intervention. I’m using up too much brain-space ‘guarding’ other people from me, because I’m an absolute nightmare. All the while, in the background, I have the conditionality of the Universal Credit and PIP systems drawing on the resources I should be using to ‘get better’.  The ‘safety net’ has me well and truly tangled.