Mental Health Awareness Week

We’re coming to the end of Mental Health Awareness Week 2022. The theme this year is loneliness. 

 

As the years of my blogging have passed, I’ve become increasingly comfortable with the idea of discussing my mental health challenges. I’m cautious not to bore, irritate or embarrass anyone (including myself), but as I’ve experienced certain problems, and I’m capable of describing them in writing, I feel I should. If something I write helps one person, that’s enough. 

As the video mentions, loneliness is nothing to do with not having people around you. It’s an emotion that’s separate to your proximity to others, and your contact with them. It’s an issue of connection to others, but mostly, it’s about the individual experiencing an emotion of a specific kind of discomfort. 

Some of the worst loneliness I felt was when I was 17, in college, surrounded by my mates all day, doing a course I was genuinely passionate about. But I felt like I was missing out dreadfully. I was committing all my time to my course (then undiagnosed short term memory difficulties slowing my work rate), listening to everyone else describe their social lives, and I had nothing to compare it to. It was a feeling of inferiority, due to my condition making me different, and it was something I’d always had and has, sadly, stayed with me. 

These days, nearly 40, I’ve long finished my therapy, haven’t cried for years, have annexed whole groups of toxic friends (garnered later in life as an attempt to quell exactly that emotion) and have a much greater understanding of my own mind. It’s still there, buried away, but it’s under control. Being accepting of my memory, not just being organised enough to avoid using it, has put me at much greater ease. Having a greater comfort within myself is precisely what has kept that particular emotion, for the most part, at least, at bay. 

If I can do it, you can too.