Hello everyone. Welcome to my blog!
I’m thrilled to finally get this off the ground. I have so much that I want to share with you and I truly hope I can be a positive influence in your life.
I want to take a really good look at what makes us the way we are, think the way we think, and do the things we do. A focus on our mental health will be an important part of the blog.
A lot of Why I Am Like I Am will be based on the knowledge I’ve acquired from my own experiences with mental health issues over many years, including OCD, PTSD, depression, anxiety and an inferiority complex which went barely detected for over three decades.
I think the blog is an excellent place to set down all of my thoughts and everything I’ve learnt, while at the same time sharing it with you guys who will hopefully find the information very helpful.
It’s important to point out that I’m not a healthcare professional. I will however be sharing my own first-hand experiences with mental health issues, and discussing everything I’ve learnt along the way.
I strongly believe that to have lived with mental illness gives you an incomparable understanding of what it’s actually like, the thoughts and feelings you experience and how it affects you in every way from the big stuff all the way down to the things you hardly notice.
Further – and this is what excites me most about the blog – my absence of medical training allows me to provide a fresh perspective on mental health issues including their causes, how they develop, what perpetuates them and what we can do to make big improvements in our life.
We must acknowledge that mental illness is a general term. There are many different types of mental illness, and people’s individual experiences can vary greatly. However mental illnesses do share a lot of characteristics. My goal with the blog is to provide information, a lot of which I haven’t read elsewhere, in the hope that you can take something beneficial from it.
It’s also important to realise that ‘mental illness’ is nothing more than a man-made label – and a questionable one at that – used to describe a range of human states of being which have come about because of past events in people’s individual lives. The use of the term ‘illness’ and more specific labels such as ‘OCD’ do not rely on a lot of scientific evidence in their diagnoses.
As described in The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté, psychiatrist Dr Nabil Kotbi told his client, the actor and comedian Darrell Hammond, “I don’t want to call what you have a mental illness. You have been injured.”
Words which speak the truth like these are powerful. Hearing this had a profoundly positive effect on Darrell.
Nonetheless, for the purposes of the blog – for the moment at least – I’ll use the terms we’ve grown accustomed to and which are in general use, otherwise newcomers searching for ‘mental illness’ might not find what they’re looking for, or may not know what I’m talking about when they get here!
I’m convinced that the more knowledge someone has about their own mental illness, the better equipped they are to make significant improvements in their life. By this I mean knowledge about both its origin (what made it start in the first place) and its continuation (knowing what keeps it going, often for years and years).
Problems with the Information
There’s a lot of information out there, it’s true. But there are some problems with it.
The first is that discussions on mental illnesses generally focus on the symptoms. While some articles do also look at the causes, the explanations generally come up a little short. Exact causes are often very hard to pinpoint.
I think there’s another issue which is often overlooked.
There’s no doubt that a lot of the thoughts and emotions which are experienced as part of a mental illness are actually quite difficult to put into words. Some thoughts and emotions may be lightning fast in their duration. Some may happen at a low level of awareness and be practically indiscernible. And others may just be downright difficult to describe.
Writers are therefore faced with a difficult challenge. Trying to provide a meaningful level of detail in their description of different aspects of mental illness is harder than it sounds. So typically the language used in discussions of mental health issues is broad. At least that’s how it’s been for me.
As a result, affected people, especially those with little or no understanding of their mental illness, do not receive much benefit from such articles. A reader experiencing the very issue being described often has no idea they are reading about themselves because they can’t make the connection.
Looking back, I’ve read a lot of articles over the years which pertained to various aspects of my own mental illness but at the time I didn’t realise it.
My commitment right at the start of the blog is to use language that people can understand and relate to. I’ll go into as much detail as necessary so the message is clear. And while I’ll certainly be looking at symptoms, I’ll also be taking an in-depth look at the causes.
It goes without saying that the last thing I want to do is to add to the nasty old stigma around mental health issues by saying something objectionable. If I ever do this, please pick me up on it! And when I make mistakes along the way, again please let me know!
We’ll have candid discussions about the different ways mental illnesses affects people – from the subtle and deceptive to the debilitating. I want to demystify the subject as much as I can and offer you a clearer perspective of it.
I’ll show how a deep understanding of mental health allows us to take action which leads to better lives for ourselves. We’ll discuss how I’ve done this myself by applying the knowledge from both my own experiences and extensive research.
As we move further into the blog posts, I’ll talk a little about myself and my background. Nothing will be off limits with regard to discussions about mental health – my own and that of the broader community. There’s a little about me on the ‘About’ page.
I’ll be very honest about things, and this will probably mean some difficult discussions will need to be had from time to time. If potentially triggering topics come up, I’ll give you a warning at the start of the post. These topics will of course be treated with discretion.
Along my journey to a better understanding of mental illness, I’ve asked a lot of questions of myself.
My Journey of Discovery Starts
And yet the difficult road of discovery started twelve years ago with one very innocent query which seemed to have nothing to do with mental health.
That question to myself went something like this: “Why is it that every day I don’t get done anywhere near the amount of stuff that I plan to do?” My level of output in my work and personal tasks was low – I simply wasn’t getting done everything I should have been. Over time I became more and more aware of my low output. And then a lot more time passed before I eventually started to ask “Why is this always happening?”
I started to look for answers. And as I looked – and dug deeper and deeper – what I discovered about myself and my thoughts led to more and more questions, and I became increasingly intrigued as to what was going on with me. Why was I the way I was? What made me think and act the way I did? And why did I not do things that would have been perfectly reasonable and indeed quite beneficial?
At that point in time, I didn’t attribute the problems to a mental illness. For a little while I’d suspected I had some sort of OCD, but I hadn’t thought of it as much of a problem. It seemed to rear its ugly head very occasionally but other than that, it was fine.
I was aware of some unusual things that I did, but these things generally didn’t cause any problems, and I doubted that they were caused by OCD. More often than not I attributed these things to simply being different to others. Now, all these years later, I know that not only did I have a mental illness, but that it was severely affecting my quality of life all along.
In fact, it wasn’t just affecting my quality of life. It was completely defining my personality and controlling all my decision-making – and neither in a good way. And for years and years I had absolutely no idea what was going on. It was integral in controlling what I did and didn’t do, every minute of every day.
I’ve often wondered, knowing what I know now, how many other people are affected by the same sort of thing. Are others impacted in a similar way? While many people are obviously struggling badly (as I have for long periods), are others living their lives more or less accepting of how they are without knowing that a mental illness is behind it all? Are people’s personalities being shaped by a mental illness they know little or nothing about?
And if so, what can we do about it?
Nowadays, many years after I asked that initial question, I have a lot of the answers. No doubt there are more to be found. To reach my current level of understanding and peace of mind, it’s taken a lengthy process of mental health self-discovery supported by extensive research and a truckload of determination.
In this blog, I’ll share with you what I’ve learnt and continue to learn on my journey to discovery in the hope it will provide answers for you too, and give you the head start that I didn’t have!