Bungee jumping
On Friday I received a phone call from my doctors surgery in Edinburgh (I still haven’t changed surgeries since we moved here). The woman asked me if I still wanted to be on the waiting list for counselling. This is the counselling that was offered to me when I first had my panic attacks last July. I was dumbfounded. I said to her ‘em, that was a year ago’ and she said ‘well, yes, there’s a long waiting list’ and I just couldn’t believe my ears. I thought they had forgotten about me, I thought maybe the doctor hadn’t even bothered to put me on the list, I thought maybe they had tried to contact me at my old address. But no… it just took a year. Well, saying that, she wasn’t actually even offering me counselling, she was just asking if I still wanted to be on the list. I felt like saying ‘well, no thanks, it’s too late now, I already threw myself off a bridge’ but she probably wouldn’t have appreciated that.
I’m so lucky I could afford to go to an independent counsellor. I wouldn’t have got through things as well as I did without it. Maybe I would have been okay eventually, but counselling gave me hope. My counsellor helped to bring me back down to earth and had ways of reassuring me that everything would be okay. I can’t imagine having to wait a year for that. I remember after my first session, I asked her in a voice of desperation, if I was normal and she said something like ‘you have had a perfectly normal reaction to an abnormal set of events’ and just that statement alone helped me (and still does).
A lot of the things I talked to my counsellor about have been coming to the forefront of my mind lately, now that I feel happier. Things that I didn’t take much notice of, that didn’t feel applicable to me at the time. One thing in particular was a discussion we had about when I have a baby… she asked me what else will I do? And I said ‘well I won’t have time for anything else’ and she said ‘what makes you think that?’ and I told her that everyone keeps telling me how hard it is when you have a baby, and that you have no time for yourself anymore. She told me that people just say these things sometimes, people are scaremongers. I found that quite funny. She said babies sleep a lot. What will I do when my baby is asleep? What will I do for myself?! The multitude of options terrified me back then. She said it was bound to be daunting to me since I’d had what seemed to her to be a very sheltered upbringing. At the time she said that, I was still shutting out the true meaning of what she was saying to me. I was still frightened of having too much choice. I’m not sure what really scared me. It’s like I realised for the first time that I could bungee jump if I wanted to. The bungee jump itself isn’t what scared me; it was the fact that I could just choose to do it (that probably makes no sense).
Well, now I’m starting to feel more excited about my options. I am starting to think of things I want to do. I am starting to realise that I have been seriously neglecting my creative needs!!!! I got too used to being a numb, brain-dead office worker; too tired and inspirationless for creativity. I’m not saying I’m going to do anything ‘exciting’ – maybe I’ll just look out my sketch pad and pencils and see if I can still draw – but at least I’m not scared anymore.
I never thought that not working would make me feel this way. I have never felt like this before. It’s weird – I feel like I have never really made choices in my life. Well, I can think of two times when I felt I really did make big decisions for myself. I felt absolutely empowered and ecstatic and like I was being really true to myself but other people doubted me and I lost my confidence. Other than that I have only ever felt there was one obvious route to follow whether I liked it or not. How weird it is to actually feel able to do whatever I want.
It’s nearly 2am and I’m trying to stop feeling guilty for being up this late!! I had to get this out!
Posted in Me, Panics