Mrs Helicopter Writes

What the heck is META anxiety? It’s anxiety about anxiety (also known as Generalised Anxiety Disorder). And up until a little while ago, I was suffering from a big fat dose of it. It’s not fun. If any of you have experienced episodes in your life where you’ve had anxiety or panic attacks, you’ll know it’s one of the worst feelings you can experience, ever. I wrote about it here . As I say there, it’s hell. But usually when we suffer from episodes of anxiety, there’s an underlying cause that’s definable. E.g. grief, stress at work, post-natal depression etc. Usually when I have experienced anxiety it’s linked to events or circumstances which I could identify. I had generalised anxiety when I knew I needed to change my job in 2001. I changed jobs and within 6 weeks my anxiety symptoms disappeared. Previous Periods of Anxiety In 2004 my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, just as her mother, my beloved Nana, was in hospital with secondary cancer of the womb. 7 weeks late...

This week we have World Mental Health Day, so I thought I’d write a bit about my experience of anxiety and panic attacks. I know that when I was in the height of my panic disorder it was a great comfort to me to talk to people who knew what I was going though. It’s a pretty unique ordeal and for fellow sufferers: I feel your pain. Or more specifically, your fear. And for those of you who have never had depression or anxiety, it can be quite difficult to understand how it feels. Why you can't just "pull yourself together" or "cheer up". Logic and common sense have absolutely no bearing on mental illness.  So if you have never been in receipt of the delight that is a panic / anxiety attack, let me attempt to describe what it feels like to the uninitiated: Imagine you’re just going about your day. You’re doing something fairly innocuous like sitting on the bus or doing the washing up. You’re not thinking about anything in particular, nothing sad or happy o...

A Year On from “Drugs Saved My Marriage”. It’s been a year since I wrote and published one of my most definitive blog posts to date. It was an emotional rollercoaster to write and after reading and re-reading and editing and making Emlyn read and re-read it, I pressed publish . I had some amazing feedback. It really seemed to resonate with people, especially mothers and I had some amazing comments from all corners: friends, family, strangers, even people I hadn’t heard from in years. I can’t believe how much difference a year makes. I could never have predicted that 2015 would have been so full of so many brilliant times with my little Helicopter family and so many great opportunites. In fact, 2015 was a fantastic year for me both emotionally and physically. And I put a large part of it down to that post. I think it marked the start of a really exciting chapter in my life.   I’ll pick up where I left the post in Feb 2015 to explain why I think it had such positive rep...

We are always told that failing is good for us . It teaches us. It helps us grow. We learn from our mistakes. But what if it doesn’t? What if it just makes us feel really, really bad about ourselves? What if constantly failing damages us psychologically and emotionally for a very long time? How is THAT good for us? And even if we do learn something from our experience, what if those lessons don’t outweigh the oppressive feeling of low self worth? Failing to look at the camera I don’t think of myself as a failure in life. Even I’m not that dramatic. I don’t think I’m a particularly negative person either. In fact quite recently I read an article about how optimistic people are always late....that MUST mean I’m an optimistic person, right?! But I have some big fat failures under my belt. And as they stack up over the years I am finding it increasingly difficult to shake the feeling that I am pretty shit at a lot of stuff. And that’s not great for anyone’s self worth. ...

The internet is a wonderful way to present a heavily edited version of yourself to the world. Online I try to be funny and ranty and entertaining but if you know the real me, you’ll know that recently the ranty has been more prevalent than the funny. I have also had periods of depression and anxiety. Not just anxiousness about something tangible, like a driving test or 10 (ahem, sore point!). The anxiousness i have experience is known as free-floating anxiety. It permeates everything and leaves me paralysed with fear for NO reason, rendering me incapable of concentrating or functioning other than on a very basic level. Thankfully I haven’t experienced too much that since Gus was about 15 months bar a few wobbly days.  I am always aware, however, that it has the capacity to come back at any given moment if things start to overwhelm me emotionally.So, say for example, if I was in a permanent state of anger for NO reason at NOTHING and then as a result I was constantly explodin...