It's 6.12am on a Monday morning and I should be at work. I have spent the last fortnight doing my utmost to get my head straight, to stop the stressy, anxious feelings and have myself back to work today.
I've failed.
I wish I knew the reasons behind this backward step, I wish I knew why anxiety grips me when I contemplate returning to work. I WAS back at work, I was getting back into the swing of it, I was (just about) coping with the shifts and was getting to know my new workmates and making friends. Yet now I find myself going back to the days of feeling like I'm letting everyone down, the days of being in tears due to the sheer frustration of feeling so damn useless.
I'm still on my medication, even my sleep seems to be getting a bit better (earplugs FTW!), but I feel trapped inside my own head, trapped by my own inability to cope with the simplest task of just going to work in the morning.
If you have never suffered from a depressive illness, you're probably reading this and thinking "Oh pull yourself together for goodness sake", and I wish more than anything it was that easy. When you are trying to cope with a mental illness the effects are just as crushing as a physical ailment. This morning I literally could not get myself ready for work. I even got up early as I knew it would be a bit of a hurdle for me, but when you are still sitting in the bathroom after twenty minutes, telling yourself in so many different ways that you NEED to go to work, you NEED to at least get yourself dressed and the only achievement you manage is to reduce yourself to tears the barrier might as well be a brick wall rather than your own head.
I'm not sure why I'm sharing this, I'm in tears still as I type, wondering what it will take just to get me back to where I was a few short weeks ago. I want to be me, I want to be normal, I want my life back - but right now I feel like I have a mountain to climb, and despite having support, in reality only I can drag myself back up, a task that right now might as well be an actual mountain soaring over my head :(
I've failed.
I wish I knew the reasons behind this backward step, I wish I knew why anxiety grips me when I contemplate returning to work. I WAS back at work, I was getting back into the swing of it, I was (just about) coping with the shifts and was getting to know my new workmates and making friends. Yet now I find myself going back to the days of feeling like I'm letting everyone down, the days of being in tears due to the sheer frustration of feeling so damn useless.
I'm still on my medication, even my sleep seems to be getting a bit better (earplugs FTW!), but I feel trapped inside my own head, trapped by my own inability to cope with the simplest task of just going to work in the morning.
If you have never suffered from a depressive illness, you're probably reading this and thinking "Oh pull yourself together for goodness sake", and I wish more than anything it was that easy. When you are trying to cope with a mental illness the effects are just as crushing as a physical ailment. This morning I literally could not get myself ready for work. I even got up early as I knew it would be a bit of a hurdle for me, but when you are still sitting in the bathroom after twenty minutes, telling yourself in so many different ways that you NEED to go to work, you NEED to at least get yourself dressed and the only achievement you manage is to reduce yourself to tears the barrier might as well be a brick wall rather than your own head.
I'm not sure why I'm sharing this, I'm in tears still as I type, wondering what it will take just to get me back to where I was a few short weeks ago. I want to be me, I want to be normal, I want my life back - but right now I feel like I have a mountain to climb, and despite having support, in reality only I can drag myself back up, a task that right now might as well be an actual mountain soaring over my head :(
