I won’t lie to you, I haven’t really felt like sitting down to write lately. It’s been a real mixed bag of a week. On the one hand, I have been super productive, but on the other hand, my anxiety has been through the roof.
The beginning of the week started with a nice dollop of insecurity. I randomly started to question my own likability. Did people actually like me? Or did they just pity me? I worried that I had upset someone, not one particular person, just anyone and everyone.
Did they look at me funny? Are they ignoring my message? Not satisfied with the thought of other people disliking me, I started to join in with the fault finding and began to think of all the reasons people would have to not like me.
Despite feeling this way, I was determined to continue with my week as planned, firstly by going on my morning walks. This was the number one priority as I know this is really good for my mental health and I can thrash out any intrusive thoughts in that hour.
My goal is to get out first thing each day, which is usually between 7 & 7:30 am, however, after a terrible night’s sleep on Sunday night, I got myself up and out of bed at 5:45 am, thinking I would get up early and squeeze more time out of my day.
Halfway through my walk, as I went to turn the corner, I was greeted by what can only be described as a giant, snarling wolf with its “owner” struggling to keep it from attacking me. The bin men were also out collecting the bins and I think they had also had a close call as one of them was shaking his head at the man grappling with the hairy beast, he wasn’t much bigger than his dog.
Now I adore dogs and have grown up with them, but this really shook me. Already sensitive, from having less than 5 hours of sleep, I tried to keep the tears at bay as I continued on with my walk. By the time I got home, I had managed to walk off my emotions and this solidified to me how important doing this is for me.
I had also decided to do a 30-day kettlebell challenge, which my friend told me about. You do 100 kettlebell swings each day, broken down whichever way suits you, I was doing 4 sets of 25 and managed to get this done.
On Tuesday, I had an even worse night’s sleep, laying awake for hours until finally falling back to sleep around 6 am. After waking up at 8:30 am, I knew getting out for a walk was needed, purely to clear the tangle of thoughts and feelings in my mind. The problem was, this would completely mess with the schedule I had planned for my day.
Rather than give up and stay under the covers, I decided to reframe my day. I knew that throwing the towel in would only make me feel worse, so I decided to prioritise my tasks and do what I could. By the time I sat down in the evening, I felt a lot better and pleased with my resilience.
Making those small changes to the beginning of my week really helped me get through the rest of the week, some planned tasks had to wait but it didn’t have an impact on my life. I even had a spring cleaning frenzy in my kitchen on Wednesday and Friday.
I promised myself that I would have a well-deserved full day off on Saturday, no walk, no kettlebells, no work. I was going to just rest.
But, when Saturday came, I realised that I had filled my week full to the brim, I hadn’t really given myself a moment to sit still and just be and now I had nothing to do, I only had myself and my thoughts and it left me feeling empty and inexplicably sad.
I am in my luteal phase, so I know that this does go some way towards my mood but why after a busy week, was I not happy to have nothing to do?
I decided to rewatch some old episodes of Sex and The City but this wasn’t helping and of course, scrolling social media didn’t either. I got in the shower, got dressed and took my laptop into the garden to write, hopefully, a bit of sunshine and pouring my thoughts out of my head will help.
But when I came back indoors, with red arms and legs after exposing my pale skin, I realised that I had just continued to distract myself, why couldn’t I just stop and relax?
Finally, as evening began, the husband and I put on one of my favourite horror films, Insidious and I gave it my full, undivided attention. I realised that even though I had seen this film many times, I had never really given it my full attention.
Did I ever really give anything my full, undivided attention? My brain always feels like it’s planning for the next eventuality. It’s like some crazy picture of a tree, with the trunk being my initial thought and then big branches of thoughts growing in all directions, with smaller branches growing from those. It feels never-ending.
I don’t have the answers yet, but I do plan to address this in my counselling session later in the week so stay tuned!
