"What Will People Think?!"

I've been reading a lot recently. For the first time in ages I'm reading a book per week. It's great, I'm really enjoying it.

In one of the books, a character's mother won't let her do anything that she deems inappropriate for fear of What People Will Think. Parts of the book were set in 1950s Hong Kong and the mother was afraid of the views of her white, middle-class peers.

I live in 2017 in a lower-middle-class life with a liberal family background. I have lots of friends and acquaintances of similar persuasion and live in a fairly progressive country. Life is vastly different to that of a 1950s ex-pat in Hong Kong. But I, too, spend an unreasonable amount of time worrying "what will people think?"

Why am I telling you this? Because I've neglected this blog, and several other parts of my life, after getting a case of the "heebie-jeebies" in March. I posted three instalments of my short story in quick succession then I had a busy week or two and, when I sat down to write the fourth instalment, nerves kicked in. The questions I asked myself were all toxic: "what if people were just being nice and it's no good?" "What if no one's interested after too much of a gap?" "What if this is a bit of a let-down after the others were good?"

So I ran away from the whole blog. After writing 20 blogs in four months I've written nothing in the last two months because I was scared to put something different out there. I stepped out of my comfort zone then promptly ran back in and locked the door, shut the blinds and refused to answer the doorbell when the world came looking for me.

The good thing about being a certifiable lunatic for several years is that you begin to recognise the signs of lunacy creeping up on you. And I did recognise the gradual shrinking-away from "scary things," the old habits which would eventually drag me down and overwhelm me with depression. So I decided to do something about it. I got a therapist.

After three weeks of playing Chicken with myself - looking at a counsellor's website, picking up the phone, entering the number and then deleting it - I actually pressed the green button to make the call one Thursday afternoon in April. I decided to find someone privately for a variety of reasons, mostly relating to a desire for control over the situation. I left a voicemail (which I hated, obviously) and half an hour later she'd called back, we'd had a chat about what I was looking for, and I had an appointment for the Monday morning, four days away.

I'm not going to go into the details of our sessions so far, but it's been really helpful and interesting. It's also been very challenging. Since I started seeing her, my therapist has encouraged me to go swimming for the first time in well over a year, do some gardening, not rely on food for comfort (small but significant!), and contact a group I've wanted to join for ages. She's also given me the confidence to go to the deep end of the pool and now to get back on here and write again, although they weren't direct challenges from her.

I'm sharing this for a couple of reasons:

1) I needed a topic for my return blog!
2) to help explain my absence and return
3) to de-stigmatise "talk therapy"

Talk therapy has a bit of airy-fairiness (!) around it, but with a professional counsellor, it's a valuable method of allaying and working through innate fears and anxieties. I love the NHS, I don't criticise it at all (although I regularly criticise the people who cut its funding), but I'm in a fortunate position to have access to private help. Nonetheless, having a platform to notice, analyse and understand my thought processes has been amazing and I'm slowly working on altering my internal script to free me from my anxiety. In doing so, I'm hoping also to remove the triggers which have led me to depression in the past.

In the meantime, I'm not making any promises but I will try to be more regular here again. If you see me around (and you want more blog posts!), please encourage me. I will try to listen!


Peace and love.

FG xx