Guest Blog: Free to be Unhappy

Hi all,

I have asked my network of fellow bloggers for their take on their own mental health journey, either of themselves or of those they support. My good friend Nick Mance has offered the following blog post. Please welcome this as a 'Guest Blog'. Any feedback or comments welcome. You can contact me at mentalhealthadventuresuk@gmail.com

Cheers

Tom Exelby

"A few weeks back I took my gloom for a walk, trying to shake it off. It’s hardly a reliable solution. Sometimes by escaping the four walls of responsibility and drowning out my thoughts with music I find myself released. Sometimes, if I can find a patch of wilderness somewhere and break free of the imagined gaze of “society” I can truly break free and dissolve into a weeping, snot-flowing, shoulder-shaking ball. Those are the moments I feel most real, as though I’ve been playacting life and the mask has finally come loose. Those are the moments I feel closest to God.

On the evening in question, I found no release. I returned still hounded by the black dog, dragging its muddy paws back into my house. Disheartened, I sat down at the dining room table and … the gloom disappeared. The effect was so sudden I was utterly taken by surprise. Before I had been all hopeless and despondent. Afterwards I was lit up, pumped with a sudden enthusiasm for life again.

Mysterious. I could find no causal explanation for my sudden liberation.

It felt like a gift. A sudden, unearned, unexpected moment of grace.

But as with all such gifts it didn’t last. Not long afterwards I plunged into the most tumultuous mental health spiral I’ve had for a long time. Panic became a frequent visitor, rushing upon me throughout the day as my focus slackened enough for an invasive thought to fly in. Future events and responsibilities began popping off like firecrackers, snatching at parts of my brain in a tug-of-war for my attention. Tasks and problems swelled in my mind’s-eye, bloating to unnecessary proportions. My calendar became a pinball machine of obstacles I was ill-prepared to face.

To say I pride myself on my ability to maintain composure would not be entirely true. I have no idea whether to feel proud of this or not, because comparison isn’t possible. I have learned an instinctive composure, I naturally arrange myself to facilitate others, as best as I know how. If I sense that people need me to express happiness and light-heartedness, then this is how I present myself. I can smile and laugh even while I panic on the inside.

Sometimes I try to be a bit more honest with people. It is my instinct to smile at people, but I might choose not to if I’m feeling bad enough and the pretence feels too fake. Sometimes I try out answering the small talk “How are you?” with a “Ah, not great at the moment,” before following it up with a diffusing, “Just stuff in my head.” Thus I can be a bit honest, while also communicating: “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

I don’t want a fuss. Fussing makes me feel worse. But I don’t want to hide either. Sometimes a much craved listening ear is opened to me but even as I splurge out my inner convulsions, I find myself unconvinced by what I’m saying, critical of what seems in that moment, to be a crazed overreaction. I don’t like what I hear myself saying.

So having tried the “being honest” routine, I quickly revert back to a “I’m fine, how are you?” mode and often find relief in the distraction of the other person’s reply. Oddly, play acting as the person who has got it together sometimes helps. What seemed unmanageable reveals itself to be manageable when I’m pretending to manage. But that is managing, not healing.

This latest attack mounted to a skull-throbbing exhaustion. Embattled from the moment my eyes opened, I called in a mental health day to free up space in my head for the thoughts to wear themselves out. At first, I felt a euphoric relief. Suddenly I had time to breathe. I went and raked up the leaves on my lawn – one of those I’ll-get-round-to-it-one-day jobs. I went to a café to read, but that’s where the anxiety stole back upon me. That prickling alertness which will not allow me to lose myself in something else. That message flashing through my body telling me that something is wrong.

Want as I might for a moment of divine deliverance, it was not forthcoming. God left me in it.

I am not one to complain. I have a trust of God that has not yet been shaken to the point of dismay. If God is who I believe him to be then no sum of pain or difficulty is a disaster. He will turn it for good, if not now, then in the restoration of all things. If hardship of some sort prevails I default to the assumption that there is some lesson in it somewhere that I’m meant to be learning. My frustration then, is not targeted at God, but at myself for my continued inability to learn the lesson that will end my mental chaos. Having discovered in counselling that emotional reactions result from hardwired patterns of thought, I set out on a mental crusade to find the faulty neurotic pathways or uncover the lie I’m believing that has caused my anxiety and depression.

In all my straining to learn the lesson, in my exhausting attempts to fix the problem, I didn’t realise it was staring me in the face.

Unwittingly I had become the friends of Job, attempting to diagnose my suffering by seeking out the faults in myself that had led to it. Woven seamlessly into the bouts of anxiety and depression was a noxious guilt. I was blaming myself for what I was feeling.

The instinct was not without grounds. No effective lie is. I’d already identified an addiction to social media and had linked various mental spirals with negative and contentious content that I’d absorbed from it. Social media had become a lucky dip, where a delve could provide a rewarding rush of dopamine, or a painful trigger for obsessive thinking. The solution would be to replace this habit with a more productive one, but for all my attempts to pray and Bible and apply myself to constructive past times, the plague of gloom did not relent.

And then a thought occurred to me. Perhaps it’s not my fault that I’m feeling this way. Perhaps there’s nothing I can do to fix this. Perhaps there is nothing I can do to make myself feel better.

This made me feel better.

The Western world is somewhat obsessed with the pursuit of happiness. It’s talked of as though it’s a human right, a baseline that we should expect. This reinforces the idea that, if you’re unhappy, then there is something wrong with your life.

Yet the world is, on the whole, an unhappy place. If we look beyond much of the Western comforts we cottonwool ourselves in, we see a very, very broken state of affairs. This, the Bible would infer, is what we ought to expect.

Struggle is the norm. Difficulty should be our expectation.

That doesn’t mean we ought not seek happiness. It just means we shouldn’t be surprised if we don’t find it. Where we do find happiness, rather than seeing this as a return to normal, this should celebrated as a bright glimpse of how the world should be, not how it currently is.

In accepting my dour and fraught disposition I freed myself from the need to escape it. None of my emotions changed, but my interpretation of them did. Anxiety and depression became experiences happening to me, rather than the unhappy consequence of my confused thoughts or bad decisions. Gradually, their hold on me began to recede.  

These moments will come again. They probably always will. I will be better prepared for them when they do."