Facing the demons...again...

Doing the right thing...

It’s been a difficult time for me recently, which has today ended with me off work with stress/depression.  Yep, the positive, optimistic author of this blog has succumbed once again to those demons that will seemingly just not lie down and die.

The one difference this time is it's definitely stress-induced.  Which is new.

Some may ask why I am writing about this in such a public forum.  It’s a fair question, and the answer is that I’ve always tried to be honest on these pages – I said at the start I would write about the struggles as well as the victories.

And, also, there is one positive insight to offer. 

At about 2am this morning, having awoken from another fitful sleep, I realised that, no matter how hard it was for me to ring my GP and to take time away from my employment, it was the right thing to do.  I didn’t want to do it, because it ‘lets people down’ at work, because it perhaps means I’m not as reliable an employee as I’d like to be, and it means I’m officially ‘not well’ and so have to try and figure out what in hell is going to make me better this time.

But I knew I couldn’t go on like I was.

So, at 8am this morning, I picked up my phone, almost against my will, and rang to make an appointment. 

Naturally, this being the British NHS, I couldn’t get an appointment until Monday.  (‘Is it an emergency?’ I was asked.  I would like to know what the definition of an emergency is.  If it were an ‘emergency’, would I not be attending my local A&E?)

This meant I then had to do another ‘right’ thing: go to work, and speak to my boss.  I really didn’t want to do this.  But it had to be done, again, if I was ever going to make any progress from this place I’m in.  She was understanding and supportive; I guess that’s one of the perks of working for an organisation with extensive experience of helping vulnerable people, including many with mental health issues.  And together we came up with a way forward in the medium term, and an agreement that, in the short term, I needed to be at home.

So here I am.

Doing the right thing is not always easy.  Sometimes we might want to bury our head in the sand, keep on running, hide away from the problems we are facing, perhaps even distract ourselves with other skirmishes, rather than fight the true problem.  And maybe I’ve done that for a while.  But, in the long run, it’s not going to benefit anyone – least of all ourselves – to keep doing that.

Far better to stop, turn around if necessary, and face the real battle.  In this case, for me, it’s the battle within...

Which is possibly the hardest one of all.

Yes, it's Switchfoot again...'The War Inside'