Difficult

The Difficulty Of Having A Job When You Have Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 11 Comments

Oh what a week it has been! Friends gather round, because boy do I have a disaster of a story to tell you! 

So let’s go from the very beginning (a very good place to start I hear) which takes us back a few weeks ago to a time when I was feeling very guilty about the idea of applying for benefits from the government due to mental health problems. I know that technically I am entitled to monetary support but I have always struggled with the guilt over accepting it and for this reason, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to try and get a job. Ideally I wanted a job for only a few hours a week  because I knew that anymore and I couldn’t cope, so I was thrilled when a few days into my search I found that my local supermarket were looking for someone to do a 12 hour contract. Consequently I filled out an application form, had an interview and bingo! I got the job! But the problems did not end there… 

The problems started on my very first shift of 2-10pm on June the 23rd 2018. I arrived promptly to meet the manager who was lovely, and then I was placed on the till with the idea of shadowing another member of staff. When I was shadowing it was all fine as all I really had to do was stand there and try to figure out what was going on, but then it was my turn to go on the till and it was here that the problems began. You see, because of OCD I find it extremely hard to touch things, primarily money. Now you may be wondering why I thought I should accept a job where touching money was going to be part of the proceedings but hey, I will be honest, I didn’t know it was going to be as much of a problem as it was. From my very first customer I was in trouble. I not only had to touch money but I had to touch the till, and inside my head was screaming. Unfortunately though, I hadn’t told the members of staff about my problems so I had to simply do my best and soldier on as if nothing was wrong. It was agony. With every customer that came along I became closer and closer to tears as my anxiety levels rose and rose. I was making silly mistakes on the till because I was so anxious I couldn’t focus on what I was doing and the more failures I made the more embarrassed I became. Not only was I struggling with touching things though, I was also struggling with members of the public looking at me. You see in recent weeks my self esteem has taken a violent plummet to the depths of the bottom of the ocean (around the place the Titanic lies buried under a hell of a lot of water), and I strongly believe that I am the most hideous being to ever grace the planet. Consequently, being looked at by members of the public was really difficult and raised my anxiety levels further. 

For two hours I did my best, touching things and being seen, but then someone I knew came into the store and from there it all fell apart. Don’t get me wrong, it was lovely to see a friend as I was working but it was a friend who I haven’t seen since all of this alcohol induced weight gain and therefore they naturally commented on it. Again don’t get me wrong, nothing nasty was said, my friend just told me how well I looked, but this was enough for me to feel like the fattest person who has ever lived on the planet and from then on as I stood by that till, I was swallowing back the tears. I tried to carry on swiping and talking, being as good as I could be with customer service but soon I started to feel a panic attack coming on. All the touching, all the being seen, the encounter with a friend all got too much and soon I was finding it hard to breathe/hold back the tears/not faint. Immediately I realised that I couldn’t do the task anymore, so I ducked away to speak to the manager in the office where I had one of the most humiliating discussions I have ever had. 

Luckily the manager I spoke to was lovely, beyond lovely but it was incredibly humiliating having to explain that I was struggling on the till because I am completely mental. In hindsight I should have told my employers about the problems before (note to all people out there, if you are going to get a job, let people know about your problems first) but foolishly I had kept all that quiet in the foolish hopes that it wouldn’t be relevant . Thankfully the manager accepted what I said about my mental health problems and he sent me home, which was a big relief. I practically ran home in tears, anxious about disappointing my parents but thankfully they were lovely and understanding too. 

Cut to now, the next day, when I am currently sitting and writing this blog not knowing what to do about anything. I had a job, I managed two hours and then I ran away, so who knows what is going to happen next. I don’t know whether or not to quit (that is if I even still have a job to quit after my behaviour) or whether or not to try and give it another go. All I know is that that two hour shift was utterly and completely terrifying and I feel like a massive failure for giving up on my first day of work. I so desperately wanted to achieve something, to be normal, to have a job and I messed it all up. 

I guess on the positive side I have learnt the lesson that when you go into a new job with mental health problems, it is important that you tell the employer, but other than that I cannot see any good that has come from this. Maybe I should run away with the circus and become a clown. 

So that is my latest update, I had a job, I lasted two hours and then I have potentially quit the job. Like I said I won’t know what exactly is happening until I next get to speak to the manager, but it looks like this career has gone down the drain before it ever got the chance to start. In the meantime I am going to keep going, keep blogging and trying to keep myself safe at this still difficult time (I still haven’t managed to stop drinking yet and I am sorry to all those that news disappoints…still working on it though…). Anyway, that is all I have for now…

Take care everyone x

Job1

Why Alcohol Doesn’t Go Well With Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 10 Comments

Ketchup goes well with chips. Rhubarb goes well with custard. But do you know what doesn’t go well with mental health problems? Alcohol, and this is a lesson I have learnt fairly recently. 

You see there is something I have been leaving out of my most recent blogs, partly because I didn’t think it was a big deal and partly because I thought it was an issue that would resolve itself fairly quickly, but it turns out that that is not the case. Basically, over the past month I have become dependant on alcohol to get through life with my mental health problems and it is causing a lot of issues. 

It all started five weeks ago on a jolly evening out in a rather sunny April, when I was at a concert by my favourite singer. The concert was brilliant, the music exceptional, but In between each song my favourite singer would pause to talk to the audience and on one of these occasions she stated how much she wanted a drink to help her to relax on stage. Obviously I have known about alcohol before this moment in my life, but as soon as she said about how it would relax her, my anxious brain got all excited and I decided to try drinking myself to see if I could relax too. Cut to today, five weeks later and I have not been able to have a day sober since.

Naturally, I have been trying to stop drinking for multiple reasons. For one thing I know that it is not good to spend your entire life totally off your rocker on vodka, but I can’t help it and it is now that I am realising how silly it was to start drinking in the first place. Obviously I never intended to get addicted to it but come on, we all know I have a rather addictive personality (actually I don’t think I have a personality at all, just a thick blob of addictive in its place) so maybe I should have seen this coming, but I didn’t and now I am left to try and deal with this extra problem on top of all the others and that is why I am writing this blog, to tell people out there with mental health problems that alcohol is not going to be a solution to your issues, rather it will add another issue to the pot. 

It is like making a cake. When you have mental health problems you have all the ingredients of insanity swirling around inside you, anxiety eggs, depressed flour, paranoid sugar and melancholy vanilla extract. Then comes alcohol which you think will wash all of those ingredients away and leave you free of all problems and to be fair, temporarily it does. When I drink alcohol, my anxiety goes way down, I laugh rather than cry and suicidal urges become a thing of the past. For once I am happy, dare I say merry to the point of feeling pure joy. If you could see all the things I have done in the past month you would be shocked at how much I have “achieved” under the spell of alcohol, from touching a door handle to eating out in public and for this reason you may think that alcohol therefore goes well with mental health problems. It takes the pain away so surely it is a great combination? Wrong. Instead, as I have learnt, alcohol only masks the problem by placing a big old blanket on top of all of your mental health ingredients so that you can’t see them, but underneath that blanket things are getting worse. The more you drink the more the mental health problems blend together, the closer they get to the oven and then BOOM! Before you know it you have sobered up and instead of finding your problems gone you find that whilst they were covered up things have got a whole lot worse and you are suddenly left not just with all these nasty ingredients to deal with but a giant three tiered cake covered in icing and cherries, and that is where I am now. 

I think alcohol is very sneaky that way and to be honest I wish I had never started drinking in the first place. It was just so easy to get addicted to it. When you are anxious and depressed all the time and then find a magic potion that takes all that away, why wouldn’t you drink it and then keep going? Even if the relief from your problems is temporary and the potion is actually creating more and more problems, wouldn’t you keep drinking it? Now I am sure some of you out there are reading this and are saying “no Katie, no I wouldn’t” in which case I have to congratulate you for being far more sensible than me! 

Like I said I am trying to give up alcohol right now and I have managed two days sprinkled in amongst the five weeks of drinking, but it is far harder than I ever imagined to go without alcohol, even though I have only been using it as a solution to my problems for five weeks. I don’t think one can become an alcoholic in that time but you can certainly become pretty damn addicted and that is why my team have referred me to alcohol services to try and nip this problem in the bud before it gets any bigger. Alcohol certainly hasn’t solved my problems, it has just added to them and that is why I wanted to write my blog about this today because I fear that other people out there are likely to fall into the same trap as I have, the trap of seeing alcohol as a quick fix to all the nastiness in your head and therefore becoming reliant on it for life, which seems good in the short term but in the long term will only create bigger problems and lead to more addictions and issues than you ever imagined. 

I can’t offer any advice to people like me who have already fallen into this trap, because like I said, I am still in it but what I wanted to do in this blog was to warn about the fact that mental health problems do not go well with alcohol and alcohol is certainly not a solution to your demons, it is instead a new one of them poised and ready to make itself at home with the rest of the insanity family. 

So that is my confession for the week, a jolly one I am sure you will agree! Still, at least in the past five weeks I have learnt something and hopefully in writing this blog maybe I can use that lesson to benefit someone else out there who was maybe on the brink of turning to alcohol but now realises that it is really not a good idea…I can only hope! In the meantime I m going to try and give up alcohol myself before services have to get involved, but considering how hard I have been finding that, who knows how well that is going to go.

Take care everyone x 

NoVodka

Suicide And Shame

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 14 Comments

Cabbages, sprouts, kale, broccoli, cauliflower. 

Apologies for that rather random start to a blog post, but to be perfectly honest I had no idea how to start this entry after last week’s post and after a suicide attempt it is so difficult to find the words to comprehend the world, that it seemed as fitting a way as any to start this blog by listing my top five favourite members of the Brassica oleracea plant species. 

So yeah…Hi everyone, I am back and I must say a little at a loss as to what to say. First off though I really must take this opportunity to thank you all for your support after last week’s post because I really was very worried about posting it and you were all so kind and lovely about it that it made me feel all of the warm fuzzy feelings inside (as warm as fresh bread out of the oven and as fuzzy as one of those little dogs that looks like a ball of fluff with legs, to be specific.)

Secondly, I guess I should address the elephant in the room (no not that trunked creature in the corner, Frank, he does not deserve to be addressed. He has been very badly behaved stealing cookies this morning…that is why I put him in the corner), aka the fact that last week I attempted suicide. Now I am not going to go into the details of how it happened because I do not think that is helpful and the last thing I would want to do is trigger anyone, but what I wanted to write about was the feelings that came after the attempt because all in all this experience has taught me some very interesting lessons that I think might be of use to some other people out there. 

You see, something that surprised me after this whole incident occurred is the level of shame that I felt after this whole suicide extravaganza. When I woke up in hospital and realised that all of my efforts had been in vain I felt terrible, not just physically, but mentally in terms of what I had put my family through and that is something that I doubt many people expect to feel. When you are all caught up in the moment of a suicide attempt, you cannot think about anything else. There is no logic, no rational thought, all you can think about is the big black hole swallowing you up, the level of intense pain and the desperate need to make it stop. As selfish as it may sound, you cannot think about family or friends, not because you do not care about or love them more than anything in the world, but because the pain is so loud that it drowns thoughts of anything and anyone else out. It gets to the point where the black hole is so dark that you wouldn’t notice whether or not someone turned the lights out in the room you were in because everything is already pitch black and you cannot see your hand in front of your face. The world is a blur, colours turn greyer than they are in the first ten minutes of the Wizard of Oz and sound or voices in the real world become the incoherent bumbling of voices underwater. When you wake up however and it hits you as to what has happened and you see the faces of your family there and hear their worried voices clearly for the first time, that is when the shame kicks in, and that shame only got worse as I heard the phone calls and read the texts of worried family members trying to reach out to me and my parents. It is that shame  that I wanted to raise awareness of in this post initially, because I wanted to warn anyone else who is suicidal out there of how much people care about you even when you don’t believe it possible and don’t care about yourself. 

Then again, at the same time, whilst I want to rase awareness of the shame that comes after one attempts to take one’s own life, I want to remind anyone out there that suicide attempts are in essence nothing to be ashamed of. Don’t get me wrong, they are nothing to be proud of either which is one reason as to why I nearly didn’t write about this event on my blog, but after reading your comments I have learnt that the shame that comes with suicide, though real, is not justified. That isn’t to say you can’t feel ashamed, for who am I to tell people what they should or should not feel (as if that would make a difference to those feelings that tend to creep up on you unannounced anyway). Still, feeling ashamed about a suicide attempt is very much like a person with kidney stones feeling ashamed that they have little pebbles lodged in one of their vital organs. Suicide attempts are, like physical health problems, a sign of illness and I truly believe that nobody who seriously attempts suicide ever does it by choice, rather they do it because they are driven to it through that level of pain they feel, just as a mother in labour may beg for pain relief and slap her partner across the head without really meaning it. 

Suicide is not a choice, it is a consequence of severe mental pain and it is being reminded of that by all your lovely comments last week that I wanted to spread the message of today to other people who may be out there suffering with the shame of suicide. If this is you, please know that I am so sincerely sorry that you are hurting and I do not condone your actions in any way, but I want you to know that if you’re struggling with the shame of what you have done, it is no way unusual, neither were these actions your fault. Instead they were the actions of a mental illness that is driving you crazy and in these circumstances rather than shame, the key thing is to reach out and ask for help and support to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again. I will admit, getting that help and support is a struggle (as someone who has been desperately asking for help from people for months, trust me, I know getting the help you need is no easy task) but it is that which you must do. Suicide may not be a choice but seeking help when you are struggling often is and if there is one message I want to get across in this post it is that if you are ashamed after a suicide attempt, please give yourself a break but more importantly seek help. 

Other than that, today I can honestly say I do not know what words of comfort I can offer to you all but I wanted to thank you from the  bottom of my heart for the words of comfort you have given to me. My dear readers, you really are so important to me and, as it turns out, vital to my survival in this game of mental health. Hopefully next week I will manage to talk about something a little more jolly or at least a little less depressing. In the meantime…

Take care everyone x 

Elephant