Care

I - hm.

This is a little weird.

I started a cognitive behavioural therapy programme this week. It’s difficult to write about this sort of thing, not because it’s hard to admit that I have issues (remarkably, it isn’t), but because it’s strange to give those issues a sense of structure. Words like “anxiety” and “depression” can have wider, general meanings, so to think about them as active conditions is still something I’m getting used to.

It’s also odd, because there are factors - particularly of depression - that I can’t affix to myself, but have previously affixed to most of the people in my life. That’s not an exaggeration. The rough figure that’s given is that a third of people suffer from some form of depression or anxiety-related condition on a recurring basis, and I think I’ve hung around more often than not with the sort of crowd who are more susceptible to stuff like this. Sitting here, thinking about it, I can count seven people offhand to whom I am or have been extremely close, and who have suffered from this sort of thing worse than I currently do.

Having said that, I’m an anxious person - or, at least, a person with anxious periods. I fixate on small details. I spin social nightmares out of an off-the-cuff remark. I sit, stewing, thinking that the people closest to me might secretly hate me (or, worse, just not care). These are crazy things to think. Common, but nuts.

It took me a long time to get into any kind of therapy. What this country makes up for in freebies, it brings its reputation down by making you wait, and because cognitive behavioural therapy at this level is considered a non-emergency service (it’s not suitable for recurring suicidal cases), those waiting lists can be long.

It’s too early to say if it’s going to work (and, if it doesn’t, I’ll still continue to function - I’ll just have more dramatic low points than people who are well), but I can feel a few cogs turning. Anxiety, for me, has always been a mess in what I otherwise consider an almost obsessively structured mind, and the contrast has been tough to deal with when it appears. To begin to compartmentalise these feelings is useful, but I’m not sure yet if I’ll manage to bring the theory into practice in every case.

I probably won’t post about this again. It just feels like a small achievement. Regardless of its eventual efficacy, I’ve taken a step to get better.