175 - A detour into mental health 😕🧠
Hey there, ! A longer, more serious note this week - I wanted to share a part of my own mental health experience 'cos I thought it would be interesting to document, as well as a form of apology if I have seemed more reticent in seeing you in the past year or two.
Shall we begin? :)
The first appearance
I was on Paramedics, the tv show. Did I tell you?
I tried going back through my newsletters to see if I had talked about it, and realised I had only alluded to it a few times about feeling tired, having some health problems and exhaustion, but never going into much detail about it.
I was definitely trying to underplay it; I don't necessarily see you that often, and I don't want people to worry.
It was Dec 2021 when I had 'the incident' at work; I shan't help you find the episode for the long version, but to cut it short, I thought it was exhaustion / a lack of sleep / general tiredness that made my body give up on me, overheat and trick me into thinking I needed to take off my shirt and pants at work, and become a reality tv star (my 5 minutes of fame!).
I had a fun ride to the hospital, a grueling two days of just pain and sleeping in bed and not being able to keep anything down without feeling nauseous, and then it...kind of subsided. A bit.
It was just before we broke for summer holidays, so I took the break to rest and recuperate, prioitising my health by seeing GPs, even went to get some chinese medicine, getting rest at home - and it all seemingly helped.
To paraphrase a great Will Ferrell movie, Stranger than Fiction, "Little did he know..."
It keeps going
The next time it would hit me severely was a day I was supposed to be the MC for a friend's wedding, a few months later. I still regret that I couldn't be there for them.
I was feeling tired in the morning at the wedding, and I was able to get through it...but as the day wore on, the exhaustion felt like bricks being loaded on to my body, constantly, every hour that we were out. I tried to sleep, but it wouldn't come; my body cried out for respite that I couldn't give while out in public in the city.
By the time we were about to go into the reception, it was absolutely overwhelming. I could hardly walk, hardly stand, and it was everything I could do to keep the nausea down. I felt panicked, and was extremely scared that it would overwhelm me again - I would have to go to hospital yet again where they wouldn't be able to tell me what was happening, and it would become a big deal, again.
For some reason, it subsided after I found a corner to sleep in for an hour, and I was able to go in later, having passed on the MC position on to someone else, but at a much lower energy level. I tried to be me, but I could feel the titanic effort that was needed to just keep on a brave face.
Just exhaustion, right?
And going
I had a date, very soon after the wedding, where I was still thinking 'wow okay that wasn't great but let's just keep going with it' - I again felt the rush of nausea, the sense of impending doom, the tingling sensation in my arms and legs and the welling up through my chest that told me shit was going to go down.
I nearly cancelled the date - I turned back around on the M3, went home, rested for a bit, felt better, and then sped back out to try and salvage what I could from the date. We had booked in a comedy show, and instead of being able to sit and listen to the whole show, I spent half an hour outside pacing - the only way I knew how to deal with the nausea. We spent the whole date just walking; she was absolutely lovely and understanding about it, which I appreciated, but I was still kinda embarrassed.
I mean, we ended up dating for a bit after that, so it wasn't all bad.
And going
In July, I had an opportunity to fly up to Brisbane and run a workshop that I had been preparing for the days prior.
I had to wake up at 5:30am to get a car, and take an 8:20am flight from Melbourne, and I was already nervous that I would collapse again. I tried to sleep early, and make sure I had enough food and drink in the morning so that I was physically good to go on the trip, but I knew that the lack of sleep was likely going to do me in.
In my nervousness, I went to the wrong gate, and had to rush to the plane for a last boarding call. When I finally sat down and had put all my stuff in the lockers...
Nausea. Tingling. Welling up of panic. Doom. FIGHT OR FLIGHT.
I got up and ran to the back of the plane where some flight attendants were just about to get everything ready for take off. I nearly asked them to stop the plane and let me off, but sat down heavily, closed my eyes, and tried to go to sleep, trying to calm down and feel better.
It worked for the plane ride up. I got to Brisbane fine, but...
...problem was that it didn't go away ENTIRELY, and I was so nauseous and weak the whole time I couldn't get any food down during lunch, I couldn't really set up the workshop, and I had to rush home on the next available flight, hoping not to be stuck in Brisbane and be on their version of Paramedics instead.
I remember sitting in the taxi after being dismissed, and being able to finally calm down and sleep more fitfully, that I felt much better, and the stress of the day had cleared. I put it down to exhaustion again (I had woken up so early!) and got home safely.
It, of course, did not stay that way.
And going...
It came to a head one morning in October last year - reading through some of my Life Updates around this time it is so apparent that I was exhausted and tired, both physically and mentally.
I didn't know it myself, but I was just done.
I woke up, and I didn't want to work.
Not only that, I couldn't easily pull myself out of bed to even face the world.
My energy was spent and my brain refused to continue. I felt tired, languid, lethargic, and useless.
I think my colleagues could see some of this in the weeks beforehand, and I wasn't putting my all into the things I was doing, so when I told my partner (i.e. boss) that I might take a mental health day, he seemed to be expecting it, and told me to take the whole week off instead to refocus.
I was very grateful for this, and took the time to prioritise my health; I went to a GP who gave me a mental health plan to get on a waitlist for bulk billed psychologists (10 free mental health sessions), and prescribed an anti-depressant in case it would help. I was skeptical of taking it (and ultimately didn't) because I stubbornly still thought that it was mainly a physical affliction, not a mental one.
I had already been to a psychologist through his recommendation, and that guy was bad - looked like he was looking up my symptoms as we were talking which is never a good look, especially over telehealth, or at best, was distracted by other things. Didn't love him, but knew I had to persist to find a psych that I would connect with.
So, I contacted the EAP (Employee Assistance Program) through Deloitte, and had a session set up.
...Until you know what's happening
It was panic attacks.
I was scared the first time about...something medical, perhaps, but after that, it was being worried about having panic attacks, because I didn't know why it was happening, what would happen when it occurred, and how I could control it.
The nausea, the sense of impending doom, the tingling in the hands and arms and legs, the chest pain and welling up, the seeming shortness of breath; it was all because of the panic attacks.
When I was triggered for whatever reason, I worried about the attacks taking over, I worried about the lack of control, I worried about everything, and that took over my every conscious thought.
The psych that I got through EAP helped me uncover that the thing I was most fearful of was that all the experience I was having would lead to my dying, which I am (forgive the pun) deathly afraid of. I read a lot about death trying to get over it, essentially.
He helped me work out how to breathe better under conditions of stress, how to de-stress and relax and let go when your body wants to tense up, and breaking the loop of overthinking by throwing my awareness externally and essentially 'distracting' myself from the things happening inside my brain.
None of these things worked instantly. I still had attacks while I was trying to learn how to not have them. I had them at futsal, I had them at work, I had them at the end of the day. These things took months to get right, and it has been through fairly conscious effort that I've been able to make sure they work.
It just took time.
So you can fix it
As you've seen in my Life Updates, I have also changed my sleep habits, started to drink a lot more water, and started doing more exercise through the week. I had completely cut out alcohol for a bit, as it was leading to precursors of panic, but I've slowly come back to it. I feel like I'm re-learning all of the normal experiences one should have while growing up for the first time, but this time conscious of what might happen.
It's only now, just over a year since that incident at the office, that I feel kind of normal again. Even through the last summer break, I was not sleeping well, waking up dead tired, and just zombie-ing through my days - until suddenly one day I just snapped out of it and woke up refreshed; bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
I don't know what it was, or why it happened, but it did. I moved house, I changed a lot of my habits and...it was fine. I haven't had an attack since, and even if I had, it was extremely fleeting.
I'm hoping this normality stays for a while.
What's changed, then?
If I look back, I think I know the signs of when I need to take a break, and when to prioritise my health. I'm aware, now, of how I can stop the panic from overwhelming me, and the conditions that help me be my best self.
I always thought that leave was something to save up to take big holidays for, when in reality taking smaller ones more often during the year is probably a more useful way to keep an even keel.
I'm so grateful to my support networks who have helped to keep me sane, be understanding about my foibles, and working around them. The understanding has been helpful as I slowly become myself again.
I hope you can understand why I haven't been me - I'm just happy I've returned for a bit.
Chat soon :)
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Ted Lasso - I watched this over the summer break and saved it as a recommendation for this newsletter because it's one of the most psychologically healthy sitcoms that I've ever watched. It deals with a lot of issues (panic attacks included #relevant) in what I think are very healthy ways, and has an eternally optimistic main character that I love. If you're worried that it's all about soccer, it isn't - that's just used as a scaffolding for the relationships between the extremely fun characters and how they play off against each other. Highly recommended!
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A Quiet Place, Part II - if you liked the first one, you'll like the second one. It's got all the beautiful silence of the first, punctured with the blood-pumping thrill, the desperate horror, and occasional calm moments. The child actors are great, and the story helps to fill in the missing gaps of the world from the first movie. It's a wonderful sequel - so here's your push to watch it if you haven't already!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI - alternately, man uses AI to find bugs / weaknesses in another AI and uses those techniques / strategies to crush it. A fantastic arms race to keep the AI overlords on their toes!
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BuzzFeed Infinity Quizzes - using chatGPT, BuzzFeed has now created a madlibs-type prompt generation machine, letting you create your own Rom-Com blurb, generate a break-up text, find your soul-mate, and creating your own cinematic universe. Even BuzzFeed content can be outsourced to AI now!
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Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” - a fascinating piece about Bing's new chat AI. Just like the early days of chatGPT, Bing's conversational bot has a lot of leaks, and interestingly, seems to be able to talk with a bit of a personality. Really really interesting - can AI's be trained to speak in particular tones? Or have different personalities in how they speak? I'm fascinated.