Don’t be an ostrich

Know the signs that your brain is about to tank

This piece is free to read. If you enjoy my writing, please consider subscribing. It’s £4 a month and allows me to write regularly.

I’ve had many therapists over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to have the finances to get help when I’ve needed it. Some have been great (Barry helped me put my life back together when my first husband left me and I was becoming increasingly agoraphobic, an Irish legend) and some have been absolute chancers (the man who told me he’d waive all fees if I wrote a book with him about therapy). Mostly they’ve been fine, and sometimes fine is as good as you’re going to get when you’re looking for a stranger to help you figure out why your brain obsesses about ladders/spiders/death. A couple of them said things I still remember years later. The first was a woman who referred to the hospital as ‘the concrete mother.’ A place where, when I was racked with anxiety and fear, I felt safe. I thought that was a fantastic name for it. Safety even in a place of sickness.

The second was a therapist who told me I behaved like an ostrich when it came to my own mental health. When I was better, I ignored all of the things I should do to keep myself well. And when I was low, I was always surprised as if it had crept in with no warning. This week I’ve felt incredibly anxious. I’ve been tapering off Sertraline very slowly - it’s always a good idea to taper much slower than official guidance - going from 100mg down to 12.5mg over six months. With every lower dose, I congratulated myself on having no symptoms and feeling no new anxiety. I see now that I was crowing. One should never crow when it comes to anxiety (first an ostrich and now a crow. Let me see if I can conjure up a third bird reference to complete the trilogy*).

Anyway last week I had bad heartburn, a side effect of both anxiety and sertraline, which is fun. I ate lunch and it felt as though the food was just sitting in my throat. My chest hurt. It happened again on Monday and Tuesday. By Wednesday, I was certain I had cancer. The GP scolded me for drinking wine and vaping and prescribed me omeprazole. I went away feeling very chastened about my unhealthy lifestyle but not much better. When I complained to my long-suffering sister about my week, she gently asked me to look at my wider circumstances. I am tapering off SSRIs. There’s some crappy family stuff going on. Was anxiety creeping back in? I didn’t want to see it. Acknowledging it would mean I’d fallen back down the hole and lost all the progress I’d made. I’d be a fraud to myself, I’d feel foolish for thinking I’d cracked it. In other words, I’d stuck my head in the sand for months because I felt better and refused to countenance the certainty that I would at some point have a wobble again. It’s me, the ostrich.

I am seemingly incapable of learning this important lesson: I will never be ‘cured’ of anxiety. Nobody is. I tell other people this fact all the time but some small part of me is still hopeful that I’ll be the exception. Six months of HRT has allowed me to wake up in the mornings and not feel the dreaded rush of adrenaline zing though my body, so I had somehow decided it would never happen again. But it’s happening as I write this. No fair!

If I could have left my body and hovered over myself, I think I would have been forced to see that there were some signs that anxiety was creeping back in. I have been obsessing about things again - namely the hot weather. I’ve been checking the weather forecast multiple times a day in the hopes that it’ll be cool and cloudy with no luck. The heat has been making me panic, catastrophise, a worry cloud has been growing over my head and threatening to explode. The amount of time I’ve spent thinking about it should’ve been a tell. I ignored it. I have been wondering why my jaw is so tense, my teeth constantly knocking against each other in a faintly unpleasant way. I wondered why, without once ascribing it to…anxiety. And I have found it almost impossible to write. I spent three days this week writing over a thousand words on the Bezos wedding only to hate every single one. That should’ve been a huge honking alarm bell but I didn’t hear it. Lastly, I’ve been getting songs stuck in my head. Snippets of the most annoying tunes I know, going round and round in a really jarring way. Why didn’t that tell me definitively that I was in a dip?

I didn’t listen to any of these warnings because to do so would make me a failure. Because despite how often I tell other people not to see mental health troughs as an indictment of them as a person, I still somehow see such troughs as personal weakness in myself. When things are good, I decide they always will be. When they are bad, I cannot see a way out. Somewhere out there is a mindset which recognises that neither state is permanent but I do not possess it. Even when life’s circumstances suggest that some anxiety would be natural (like right now for me), I feel like I should be able to bat it off with willpower. Which is ridiculous because I really have no willpower at all. I vape like a teen, ffs.

Don’t be an ostrich. When you’re feeling good, make a mental list (or even better, a physical one) of the warning signs which signal you might be sliding down into the pit. Keep it nearby and check it regularly, assessing how you’re doing so that you’re not surprised when you have a low moment. What are your warning signs? Do you know what to look for? Do your loved ones notice before you do? And if you have any tips on how to beat horrible heartburn please do let me know.

*I couldn’t sneak in another bird reference without hating myself but here’s a piece about the history of pigeons, a forgotten friend to humans. I always feel so sad for pigeons. We did them wrong.