Mental Health & Me

I'll take you back to a beautifully warm summer evening spent drinking beer with my feet dangling in the Thames from a jetty by Hammersmith bridge in 2018. This beer signifies the end of the academic year and my work leaving party.

I had decided that London was no longer the place for me and had taken the plunge into the unknown by accepting my first international teaching role in Singapore.

That evening I caught a taxi to London Paddington to travel up to Essex as the following morning my partner's family and I were catching a flight to Croatia.

Photo by Victor Cudjoe on Unsplash

I felt a huge sense of relief - relief that the school year was finished, relief that I was about to leave the crazy exhausting hustle and bustle of London, and the relief that the insane standards I was holding myself up to in that job were done with.

The summer went by in a whirlwind of marriage proposals, packing, and a lonely terrified long-haul flight to Singapore with one suitcase. In all fairness, I did only have two weeks off due to the school year starting in August here.

At the time I thought I would be leaving all of my personal struggles with stress, anxiety, people-pleasing, perfectionism, and hyper-vigilance behind in London! And for a short while, I had. The excitement of a new country, apartment hunting, new people, and a completely different school system completely obscured my underlying mental health needs. Adrenaline can often do this in my experience.

This obscuring lasted for about a year and everything changed in the summer of 2019. I had an amazing trip back to the UK from Singapore (my only trip home since 2018), but when I got back to Singapore it felt like multiple events just completely overwhelmed me and I had entered a deep dark tunnel of unhappiness with no end, control, or light in sight.

In hindsight, I realise that I had started constructing and feeding negative spiralling pathways of thought inside my brain. Every time something went wrong I created a negative story about why it was hideous, I would obsess and ruminate over why it wasn't different and what I had done to cause it. It didn't help that the atmosphere at my workplace had turned sour and this was the place I was heading into every day!

I also realise that this construction and feeding into the negative pathways is totally normal and happens to so so many people with the same results of heightened anxiety and sometimes depression. I absolutely know that it was not my fault but that there are steps I can take to help and in some cases stop It getting as bad!

I finally admitted to my parents that I had entered a dark place during the October half term of 2019. My mum and partner had come out to visit for the first time and I had to sit them down and explain. They knew that something wasn't quite right. I remember saying to them "Some days I am absolutely fine, I still love the things I normally love and feel like me. But more often than not I am having days where I don't enjoy talking to people anymore or doing anything and I just want to hide and stop and give in!"

Absolutely HUGE respect and love to my mum and Richard for listening, understanding, and just holding space for me. My mum told my dad and this is where I think the ball got rolling with me getting out of that tunnel!

My dad's advice was:

Keep talking about it, keep doing something about it, and don't wallow (for too long anyway)!

He also suggested doing some research around the science behind anxiety and depression, saying that it might help me understand and normalise the experiences.

My dad introduced me to Dr. Claire Weekes, an Australian GP and health writer who passed away in the nineties. Her videos and words, albeit through very dated language about mental health, really clearly and calmly explain how everyone goes through the same pattern when suffering with anxiety. This was the first video I watched that evening after speaking to my dad and it just started to make WAY more sense.

In this video she describes mental health as being "an illness of the way you think" rather than an illness of the way you feel. She also says "it is very much an illness of your attitude to fear or the panic". And her reassuring voice repeating that everyone can get better really gave me hope for a change!

I subsequently spent all of my free time during the 2019-2020 academic year on a mental health learning journey. Reading and absorbing as much information as I possibly could about it.

The books that helped me:

• Matt Haig: Reasons to Stay Alive, Notes on a Nervous Planet, The Midnight Library, How to Stop Time

• Barry McDonnagh: The Dare Approach (huge thank you to George Couros @GCouros for introducing me to this one)!

• Glennon Doyle: Untamed

• Brene Brown: The Gifts of Imperfection, I Thought It Was Just Me, Daring Greatly, Braving the Wlderness

It's now the end of the 2020-2021 academic year and we have just started our summer holidays.

I've moved school's in Singapore and taken on a new role as Assistant Head of Maths, stepping back into the world of leadership after leaving my Head of Department role in London in 2018.

We've also all been living through a completely life changing global pandemic.

But despite this my mental health has completely changed. I feel like myself again and like an even stronger, more self-aware version of myself!

Photo by Halil Ibrahim Cetinkaya on Unsplash

I know that at times I will still feel that same sense of being trapped in a dark tunnel with no end but now that I have been through it once and out the other end I know that it is possible!

I now feel that whenever I head into that tunnel without the light at the end I have ways of filling that tunnel with bright colourful neon lights that will help me cope until the light at the end appears again.

These bright colourful neon lights are my strategies, my tips, my coping mechanisms that have helped me navigate that tunnel the first time.

My biggest light is remembering that I can change and help my own mental health using these strategies. That I have the power, the tools and the support to do so!

Here are some of my strategies that might help you too..

1) Find someone you are close to that you feel you can talk to about your mental health with. They don't have to have the right answers but it just made such a difference having those I love glimpse into how I was really feeling and really normalise it!

2) Seek professional help. I was so lucky that after a chance conversation with a new friend about my experiences with mental health she was able to recommend her counsellor to me.

3) Remember its ok to not be ok. I think I spent far too long believing that negative emotions were bad and scary and not to be shown to anyone! All humans have ups and downs - they are completely normal, natural and OK!

4) Build in habits that make you happy. Start experimenting with things you can do every day, week, month that truly bring you joy! My current ones are - reading, running, coffee on the balcony in the mornings, nature, exploring and "me time"!

5) Learn about it all (CBT, ACT, Self-compassion, neuroscience etc). My first learning about Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Self-Compassion all happened whilst seeing two different counsellors! Some of this learning has absolutely stuck with me and has helped me reprogram some of the negative thought spirals I so used to love diving head first into!

And last but not least!! Keep talking about it, keep doing something about it and don't wallow!

Thank you for reading!