Let me start by saying I have had real reservations about writing a mental health blog. Whilst one side of me fully supports the case that we must all come together to overthrow the taboos around mental health, the other (less developed) side of me finds it all a bit 'teenage cliche'. I am not the kind of person who suffers from 'mental health issues', much less writes about them. I am a 27 year old woman with a good job and a partner whom I am very happily stable with, nearly all the time. Yet, I have mental health issues, and now I've decided to write about it.
So what's changed? To give some background, I have long since been through bouts of anxiety and depression, long before I could identify those times as such. As I have grown more mature, and found myself a man who helps me to overcome this, rather than enabling it, I have learned to cope reasonably effectively when my 'demons' come. What used to be months of lying in bed at night, unable to breath, listening in irrational terror for unidentified noises has subsided into the odd day of unaccountably feeling that nothing will ever be right again. Even this is usually when I'm hungover.
But now that man I love and depend upon has cancer. Both our lives have been turned upside down and the 'strong one' mantle appears to have been passed to me. People say that you have to take things one day at a time and this is entirely true but what do you do when that day (or night) feels so bleak you can not bear to exist within it? Two nights ago I had the first panic attack I have had in many months whilst my partner slept next to me, and his dad on the coach. In that moment I felt so alone I knew I needed to act. So I am writing in the absence of talking. In order to try and understand and confront those feelings I do not always feel entitled to, but could very easily take me back to a place I have no intention of going.
There are many difficult aspects to taking on cancer in a loved one. Some of these are obvious. It's horrible and powerless (something I do not cope well with) to watch someone you care so deeply about suffer. The schedule of all those appointments on top of your daily tasks and taking care of the person involved can be mentally and physically exhausting. The aesthetic changes of your partner losing their hair (and mine is particularly hairy!) can be disconcerting, especially if this is the first visible sign of the illness.
Then there are the things you weren't expecting. The unwelcome sympathy of your not-so-close friends. Answering those same well-meaning enquiries on health an logistics. Although these are delivered with the best of intentions, revisiting the same depressing scenario 6 times a day has often made me wish I could hide all alone, just to escape it. Worse still is the feeling of distance between me and my partner. Hard as I try I can never really know what he is going through and, as a notorious non-communicator, he'd really rather not have to tell me. Instead we sit in many a tense silence broken only by me saying the wrong thing. Queue descending spiral with me internally swinging wildly between rage and desperation, all the time trying to keep my 'emotionally stable, appropriately positive, not-wanting-to-scream-at-all' mask in place. Finally, there's the 'everything's about cancer' issue. Of course people care, and I'm honestly so glad they do, but when your day is filled with the drugs, side effects and the constant shadow of cancer, sometimes you really do need to get away.
So here I am, sat in the chemo lounge, writing about cancer, looking at cancer and thinking about cancer. And that's how it's been for the last 2 months. And how it is likely to stay for the next 3. But after that will be life. There will be travel (my great love), there will be worry about things which are frivolous and there will be entire days where we do not talk about cancer.
