Daring to hope for more
Recently I had an experience of being afraid of going back to The Bad Place.
Those of you who’ve listened to the ABC podcast I wrote, No Feeling Is Final, will know what I mean by The Bad Place. The desperately suicidal, "how do I stay alive?" Bad Place.
And it sort of scared the shit out of me.
Because here’s the thing. I haven’t been back to The Bad Place in about five years. This is the longest period of my adult life that this has been the case.
Gosh that is both an uplifting and depressing sentence. Like yes, awesome it’s been five years, but also, what a ride that this is the reprieve y’know??
The gift of “it could be worse”
This long period away from the Bad Place has been quite an incredible thing. Literally incredible. Had you asked me five years ago if I ever thought I’d go this long without another months-long trip to the Bad Place, I wouldn’t have believed you.
In fact, still to this day I will knock on wood whenever I say (or type) that it’s been five years.
*Knocks on wood*
It’s not that things have suddenly been easy or not overwhelming, but for the past five years (and I really have been counting the days then weeks then months), every day that I felt stressed or sad or confused or anxious, I could think to myself “well at least we don’t want to die”.
Which to most people would probably sound depressing, but to me honestly was a light, elevating thought.
Because going back to The Bad Place was and still is the most terrifying thing to me. I mean sure, there are other things that are also terrifying, I get scared I’m going to fall down the stairs and horribly injure myself most days, but very few horrifically terrifying things have I had the experience of them continually happening to me over and over again for much of my adult life.
So yeah, it makes sense that, even as I’ve made such progress with my mental health, I’m afraid of going backwards.
PTSD for your own brain
Which is why, after a fretful night of very little sleep from searing anxiety, I started to get worried, because that’s often how it starts… “Is this going to be another one of The Bad Times???” and then of course, the immediate panic of “no I can’t do that again! Please don’t go there!”
It is honestly a bit hard to convey this feeling to anyone who hasn't experienced this. Because it's kind of like being in a nightmare, but also being awake at the same time. You've been in this nightmare multiple times before so you know it really, really well, and you know exactly where this could go.
I sometimes call it “PTSD for your own brain”. It becomes almost impossible to distinguish between what parts of the experience are actually happening, and what parts are just your fear of going back there again.
Hoping for more (is that allowed?)
For me one of my biggest achievements has been surviving and then no longer being suicidal. I still think of this as an achievement.
I know there can be a lot of opinions about what is / isn't "resilient" these days, but boy howdy do I think all those years I lived when I wanted to die as being one hell of a firestorm to have survived.
When you don't want to die, getting up each day is relatively easy. When you do, it's a battle from the moment you wake up. If you've fought (or are still fighting) that battle, don't let anyone convince you that's not a major life achievement.
But I had started to think that "not being suicidal" was the end point. That hoping for more was just being selfish (and honestly maybe a bit entitled?). That it couldn't get better than this...
Side note : You've heard this spiel before, but if you're fighting that battle right now this minute, and want to talk to someone about it, click here for our list of support options. It's not a perfect list. Some of these you'll definitely have heard about a million times before. But we've made an effort to go beyond the usual suspects with this list, including offerings that - like Big Feels Club - are run by people who've been there too. Alternatively, just want to read more from other people who've been through the really big stuff? Click here, and here. Okay, where were we?
Frog in a pot
So I'd say I've come a heck of a long way with my mental health these last few years. But I’ve been increasingly anxious the past few months. I’ve sort of known this, and sort of been like “it’s chill I’m fine”, in that way you try to tell yourself that there’s nothing to see here. So my recent sleepless night was a real, ahem, wake up call.
I had been thinking “it’s all fine, as long as I don’t go to The Bad Place”, except well, maybe it’s not?
Like, what if I want more than that for my life? Maybe life could not just be an absence of The Bad Place, but something more than that?? What would that even look like…?
Anxiety like water
After this 12-hour sleepless night terror experience, I did not, in fact, end up going to The Bad Place (*knocks on wood again*). I was extremely anxious, for sure, but not suicidal.
Phew.
But it made me think: I need to take this seriously again, don't I?
Which if you're me, can be a bit confronting... because well, I've tried a lot of things, which ones should I try again??
This eventually brought me to a book that Graham has been raving about (as well as a very good friend of mine, who's been really struggling with anxiety), Unwinding Anxiety by Dr Judson Brewer.
The approach is essentially mindfulness for anxiety, but with a method that has not only been tested quite rigorously, but that for some reason has made a lot more intuitive sense to me than most of the other 'mindfulness-based therapies' I've done before (and I have done a few).
I'm still making my way through it, so I won't do a thorough endorsement just yet, but it’s catalysed something quite profound for me, that I didn’t know I’d been looking for.
For the moment all you need to know about Brewer's method is, you soon get a very up close and personal sense of just how anxious you really are. Which for me was a bit confronting.
Goddammit. Why does mindfulness have to be so… mindful??
Cause basically yeah, it turns out, I feel anxious. All the time. As soon as I wake up. When I go to sleep. When I'm making coffee. When I'm on the tram…
I sort of half knew this, but in that way that you get so good at hiding it you manage to hide the truth even from yourself.
And the thing is, I feel so anxious, so often, I don't really even think of it as anxiety. Like the fish who doesn't know what water is, I am a person swimming in anxiety, not thinking that's what's happening. And then wondering why it's so much harder to move than it seems to be for other people, or why I'm so out of breath, or why my clothes are all wet. (Okay we may have now pushed that analogy too far but you get the point.)
Jokes aside, really what I mean is. Fuck. I really am *this* anxious. No wonder I find life so hard sometimes?
Do I dare to dream?
Honestly it made the "am I going to The Bad Place?" question make more sense. Ummm, you're anxious all the time, no wonder this feels awful.
But what's curious is, I think that when you’ve seen such obvious improvement in your mental state (five years of not being suicidal! Put that on your CV baby!) you can start to get, dare I say, complacent? Maybe complacent isn't the right word. Maybe you can start to think, this is all there is. All I can hope for (to not want to die regularly). There's a part of me that thinks "how would I dare even dream for more?"
Which is honestly, quite a tender place to be. People might think "but of course you can hope for more! Dream on you crazy diamond! Take life by the whatevers!"
But the truth is, if you're someone for whom your brain has not been your best friend, and you find some genuine, lasting reprieve as I have, it can feel greedy, and even dangerous to want for (or dream of) even more or better.
Because hoping that there's another chapter beyond this one, one in which maybe, just maybe, I am actually less anxious, means being fully alive to just how anxious I am right now.
And it means accepting that maybe instead of feeling like I'm on the home stretch of a journey to working this out, maybe I'm still closer to the start line than I’d like to admit, and there's a whole lot more to learn.
Which is (another) scary thought, for sure. But this time around, it’s not just fear. It’s intrigue too. Intrigue that only grows after what happens next.
What if, what could be?
I’m lying in bed. It’s 5.30am, and I’m wondering if it’s worth trying to get back to sleep having been woken by the usual anxious thought spiral. I reach for my phone, to do what I normally do in this scenario, put on a podcast and pretend I can half doze until it’s time to actually get up. Whilst knowing that I am already so scared. A tense ball of flesh awaiting the sunrise. No more sleep will happen today,
But for some reason, today, I don’t grab my phone. Instead I do a body scan meditation from the Judson Brewer book (I’m not getting to sleep anyway, may as well do some practice). At this point I’ve been reading the book for about a week, and doing the exercises in it multiple times a day.
After I finish the body scan, I then do a loving kindness meditation, also from the book. I think of a friend halfway across the world. I remember his laugh. Gosh what a great fucking laugh he has.
The anxiety is still there, but so is the memory of my friend’s gorgeous cackle. (He really has the most incredible cackle I swear). I realise something curious, for a glorious moment my love of his laugh feels bigger than my fear.
The intrigue grows, just a little. Where might this go?
A glitch in the anxiety matrix
A few days later (or maybe it’s the very next day - time gets a bit stretchy when I’m this anxious) I wake up with an anxious thought again. I’ve become especially well acquainted with just how these thoughts feel from all this mindfulness practice… these anxious thoughts, I don’t just think them, I feel them: and how it feels is like being cut in half lengthwise with a very sharp knife. It feels physically painful and runs all down my body. No wonder I’ve been trying to distract myself from these feelings, with podcasts and phone scrolling and the like.
Yet this time something strange happens. This time, before I can even begin to try one of the techniques from the Unwinding Anxiety book, the anxious thought just… stops. Like it’s an app on my phone that crashes before it can fully load.
I try to even remember what the thought was then go “hang on, why do I want to remember that thought?? It’s not helping me” and weirdly… I just… let it go.
Recounting this to you now, I still can’t even tell you what the anxious thought was going to be. How weird is that?? I cannot begin to describe how strange this is. It’s literally never happened before.
Usually an anxious hot-knives-through-my-body thought sets off all the bells and whistles, sets my worried what-if thinking spirals into full gear. Which in turn leads to more and more hot-knife thoughts.
Instead, I get out of bed. Still a bit dazed as to what just even happened.
I think, well now this is getting *really* interesting…
Veteran of the hope rollercoaster
All this might sound suspiciously positive - it certainly is for me. After all the methods and trying and approaches and treatments, I am honestly deeply suspicious of anything that feels like “The Answer”. I am a well seasoned traveler on the hope rollercoaster. I know how hard-won all the bits and pieces of recovery are.
So I won’t get ahead of myself and proclaim anything major here. But what I have found for sure is a glimpse of something different. Something new to hope for. A glimpse at least of what that new chapter might look like, after years of ‘just not being suicidal’ being my main metric for a good life.
*Knock knock knock knock*
But it’s scary to hope for that too. If recovery is a slightly wonky staircase, never quite built to code, and therefore always looking just a little bit in danger of collapse, do I really want to climb onto that next step?
Well right now, yes, I think I do.
-- Honor xx
