Me and my shadow.

Write a blog, you say. OK, here goes. I'm not the most eloquent of people. I don't know how to structure this & it might be a rambling mess but ho hum.

Depression. Anxiety. Bipolar Disorder. Mental illness.

Scary words? Not to me. You might have a physical illness such as, I don't know, diabetes. You have to learn to manage it with diet/exercise etc.

I have a mental illness. I have to learn to manage that too.

The difference seems to be that people see physical illness as a concrete, visible thing. Whereas a lot of people think differently about mental illness. They can't 'see' it, so how can they be sure it's there. Comments like "we've all felt down now and again", "we all get stressed from time to time", and the old classic "pull yourself together" back up this lack of understanding.

People are scared of mental illness, understandably, but people have always stigmatised things they are scared of. "That won't happen to me", "i'm not a mentalist", "that guy's completely nuts" etc. This ignorance is hurtful, understandable but hurtful. Still, been there done that. Old news. Think what you like about me. The opinions of ignorant people don't mean much to me.

This Illness has robbed me of friends, relationships, jobs, and left me on benefits (a subject I'll certainly be talking about.)

Most of us know how this feels. I sometimes try to explain how I feel. When my depression is really bad, I feel empty, numb, tearful, hopeless. Pull the duvet over my head and let the world take care of itself.

When my anxiety is in full effect the idea of getting on a bus, dealing with people, or going to a new place is just terrifying. Rationally this is bizarre, I've done all of this before. When i just HAVE TO do this, and have completed the task I wonder what I was worried about but that does not make any difference the next time.

Then there are those fleeting moments of mania. When for some reason I'm inspired to do things. When a piece of music seems to jump out of the speakers, when I want to do everything, buy everything, meet everyone, fall in love and put the world to rights. I'm sure I must drive my housemate crazy at these times, full of energy like I've had a dozen espressos, darting around the house "guess what just happened", "I'm gonna do something amazing", "this band is brilliant", just manic basically.

BY FAR the worst part of my experience is not the loneliness, the isolation, the opinions of others, the inability to establish friendships & relationships, but the fact that AS SOON AS THE HEAD HITS THE PILLOW my brain wakes up and decides to run a playback of the day. What went wrong, who said what, etc so sleep takes a couple of hours to come. My relationship history is patchy to say the least. During my longest relationship I could not handle living together, we moved to seperate places and tried to carry on. I loved this person, and I wanted children but I was drinking an alarming amount, self medicating with cannabis, and eventually she had enough. I was in the wrong place (This person has gone on to show I had a lucky escape, but that's another story.) When my heads on the pillow her name just pops into my head, it feels like my brain is torturing me.

The urge to drink and drug is always there. To basically pass out into bed, to be unconscious. I do this when I cannot cope but I've gotta fight that urge because there's only one way that would end up. The words "Class A" and "dead" spring to mind!

So that's me and my black dog mate in my head. These things DO NOT DEFINE WHO I AM but at the moment they dominate my life. It's done this for most of the last 25 years, since I was 18/19.

That is all about to change...... Watch this space.