You Can Call Me El

Written on Tuesday 27 October I haven’t written a blog post in a while, which I suppose is a good sign, as I normally resort to this when I’m not feeling okay. I have been feeling better recently but today I’m not again. I felt tired and run down yesterday and I still do today, and my throat feels a bit scratchy, and I can’t stop thinking about whether it’s Covid. For a brief glimpse yesterday I managed to attain a normal, non-anxious, fact-based response to this ‘what if’ situation. I thought, I hope it’s not Covid because I don’t want to be ill because being ill is at best unpleasant and at worse horrible. This was quite a refreshing change from the feeling of, I hope it’s not Covid because then I will die. It's true that Covid is to an extent unpredictable, yes, and it’s not certain that I won’t die if I get Covid. Nothing is certain!!! Ever!! But it’s also not a probable outcome. I’m not in a high risk group, I’m young, I’m female - if I asked a clinician what they thought the ...

It’s so important to tell people when you think their stuff is cool. That's what this post is about. Because of who I am as a person, apparently, when I was thinking about this concept I framed it in the context of death. It seems to be a constant of funerals, or at least the ones you see in media, or the imagined funerals that I go to in my head (it's super fun in here!), that people have things they wish they’d said to the person who's died. It's to be expected, maybe. And in these cases, it never seems to be things like, I wish I told them how annoying I found their style of washing up, or I wish they'd known how much I hated it when they left their shit all over the house and didn't tidy it away. It's usually more along the lines of I loved you in this and this and this way. I know this sounds bleak, but bear with me. Think instead of the pure peace to be found for someone who lived on purpose and knew exactly how loved they were. When they die, there’s ...

Something insidious about anxiety that I'm only beginning to realise is the way that it creeps up on you. Your thought patterns change, you're filled with fear and dread - yes fine, we know. But the particularly weird and not always noticeable part of this is that it makes you think that this is the normal way to be. You think these are normal responses to events, and there's no option to think any differently.  I must have seen mention of this in various self-help-y things online, but I sort of ignored them in the way you do with things that don't resonate. 'Name your anxiety', and 'remember this is just something that's happening to you and not who you are' and so on. I understood the concept, but I didn't really see why this helped. And then I had a holiday! For the first time since March, I left London for longer than a day and spent three and a half weeks in Norfolk with my family and various family friends. The term cottagecore is new to me...

I wrote the below post on 6 August, which is now over a month ago! September already, eh. I didn't post it at the time for superstitious reasons and because I was in the thick of it and everything was all way too much. But I'm posting now, for non-superstitious and full-disclosure reasons - it's not by any means a fun post, and writing it didn't feel as though it helped me at the time. But I like the intention behind it, and maybe it did help after all, because I do feel differently now. And for anyone worried: Marc was fine, and he didn't get ill. People are often fine! Not always, but often. That's the lesson I'm slowly trying to learn. ----------- It's about 2 o'clock in the afternoon and it’s been approximately one hour since Marc said he thought maybe he wasn't well. In that time, I’ve cried for about ten minutes, panicked, and done a bit more work. Marc is now watching a YouTube video. Nothing much has changed. It’s not normal, when your pa...

I've conducted some scientific research recently. My methodology was as follows: I thought about the time I spent volunteering on the mental health helpline, and I thought about how many times people had said they didn't want to open up about their mental health to their friends or family, and I thought about what proportion of these people had given the reason, "because I don't want to be a burden."  The results are in: it was A Lot. A lot of people said this. This leads to the conclusion: many of us are worried about being a burden! This is probably true of many areas, but talking about your  mental health shit is a dead cert. It's heavy and difficult and people just don't want to lay it on their friends, their family, their loved ones, their colleagues, their acquaintances - anyone! They don't want to burden anyone. And sure, b eing a burden suuuucks! No one wants to do it! So a cool solution is to hold it in and don't talk about it.  The diffic...

Last weekend we went to Norfolk and stayed by the sea. My whole family was there and some family friends too and Marc, of course, and it was like being in another life. The entire week beforehand I was in a state of fear and stress. It just seemed ridiculous that we would be allowed to go. I was certain we would contract Covid that week and not be able to, or that something would happen to stop us. I just didn’t think it would happen. Note, please, that there was nothing concrete in our way; it’s not that I was worried about the train being cancelled, which could have happened, or missing it, or not being ready in time. It was nothing very specific. I just thought the universe would conspire to stop us from getting there. I think this is because I think I’m not allowed nice things . And I’m wondering if part of this might be because it’s been so many months without nice things that I can’t remember what it’s like to have them? Or that I just don’t think I’m allowed? Let me ex...

I wrote this in January 2018 and found it the other day. Unfortunately nearly all of it is still true so here it is, pretty much unedited. For all of you who think yoga's not for you... I'm now one of those people and I think it's great and I have nothing but the deepest respect for those who practise it and are good at it and urgh I KNOW. Anyway, here's the post. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I struggle with yoga. There’s something about it that just infuriates me. I don’t know if it’s my impatience with a form of exercise that’s just holding different positions for ages and paying uncomfortably close attention to your breathing, or my resentment that this is actually really hard and I can’t do it at all. It could be the smug righteousness of people who talk about their own yoga-induced spirituality and outstanding mindfulness, or the superiority and smoothly glowing thighs of the many indistinguishable...

Written on Wednesday 17th June Hi pals, guess who it is! Your favourite (surely) anxious bitch! I keep coming back to this blog only when I feel like shit! What’s that about! I guess it doesn’t give a very representative idea of what my life is like at the moment, but then who wants that anyway??? Let’s curate this shit!!  Yes this is a weird energy, I know. I’m currently in a new phase of anxiety, which I thought was worth mentioning because it’s an interesting one. It doesn't happen that often but when it does it sure is fucking annoying! The phase is this: I Feel Anxious But I’m Also Furious About It.  For the sake of comparison, usually it’s more like, I Feel Anxious And I’m Too Scared To Do Literally Anything. Usually there’s a bit of anger in the mix as well, at the fact that it’s stopping me from doing Literally Anything, but it’s too buried under all the helplessness and fear and certainty of death, so it makes a change.  The furious phase is, I’d say,...

It's hard to write something without a satisfying narrative. For a proper story, you want a beginning, a middle and an end. For example: first I felt okay. Then I felt terrible for a while. But then, after lots of trials and tribulations, by the end I felt better. This is what stories should look like.  The trouble is, real life usually doesn't have a satisfying narrative. This is why I stand by my theory that films based on real events are often in some way disappointing. Consider the Sound of Music. It'll surprise no one to hear that we watched it numerous times when I was growing up, and it was a formative part of my childhood. But, there was an issue. The happy ever after wedding scene was, for some reason, in the middle of the film! This must have been some sort of error. Instead of finishing there, the film continued with some awkward, unnecessary singing of Edelweiss again , the family singing in front of a gigantic crowd for literally ages, and lots terrifying cre...

That's right, this week is Mental Health Awareness Week! Look at their website: the theme is kindness . It’s really nice that this exists, especially at the moment. I encourage you to dive in. I didn’t know what I wanted to write about this week. Mental Health Awareness was a ready-made theme, but… I’m tired. It’s obvious that Mental Health Awareness Week is good, CLEARLY. It’s fab that we have it, and that we have World Mental Health Day (on 10 October). But I’m just… so aware already, you know? Thinking about mental health is crucially important and it’s also BORING and I do it ALL THE TIME. I’m sick of it!!!! So I came into this feeling vaguely annoyed, and then I spent some time on the campaign’s website and felt guilty, because honestly they’re doing great work. Of course we should be focusing on kindness, the most important character trait anyone can have, and of course we should be trying to spread it. It’s reassuring that there are compassionate, diligent people w...

There’s an interesting tension between the wish to do something and the wish to do nothing. I’ve been thinking a lot about how appealing it is, when you’re busy and stressed, to dream of a time when you have nothing to do. Thinking about finally putting your feet up, watching endless TV or films, the trashy kind you’ve seen before, playing computer games, lying around. I think lying around is the main thing, really. It’s the main component part to chilling . But… is the dreaming about it nicer than the doing it? I have a guilty secret, which is that I was glad to be put on furlough. I felt close to burning out in January and February, and I wanted to do something about it but didn’t. I’d just started a new job and was worried about asking to take time off and I didn’t know if I’d have the confidence. And then I was furloughed, and I was handed the time and space I needed to rest and think and recover. Or this is how it might have felt, if it hadn’t been prompted by a pandemi...

Hello again. Here we are still in lockdown! Isn’t it interesting that in the UK we seem to refer to it as lockdown, while other countries are calling it quarantine? Right?! Lockdown rather than quarantine! What’s that about! I know this is using quite a loose definition of the word ‘interesting’. But I thought it was, or at least a tiny bit noteworthy, and on balance, I think that’s partly as a result of one of the many annoying new habits I’ve picked up recently. This habit is one I like to call ‘being furiously observant all of the time’, and it leads me on to the subject of this post, which is Mindfulness and Gratitude Oh My God. In this new observant state, I notice so many things. I see specks of dust on the bedside table. I hear the clatter of a mug onto a table. The vibration of a phone is excessively loud. I can hear birds singing, even though there’s nowhere for them to live near this flat so I don’t know where they can be. The tiled floor feels smooth and hard and t...