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Daring Creativity
Five minute magic pt. 47 - Normalising mental health from the wrong direction
00:10:14
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to five Minute Magic from the Mindful Creative Podcast, a short bonus episode sharing tips and insights from the pages of the book of the same title. Every week I'll be sharing one or two ideas that can give you an actionable takeaway for your creative process, your work, your business, or just food for thought for the weekend ahead. These episodes share content from the audiobook and you can find the link to the full version in the show notes below, below hey, this episode from the section Help is very much a few minutes of storytelling. How I've gone from never understanding what was happening in my younger life, going through various drawbacks and twists and turns as we do as kids and teenagers, all the way to actually finding help and finding peace in my life and kind of making sense of the things that were happening in a younger age. Because sometimes we just don't know exactly what's happening. So the three sections that link together are titled let's Start at the End, A Familiar Backstory and Normalizing Health from the Wrong Direction. Because I'm starting this storytelling from very much a recent event. Well, recent to the book writing event where I was standing at delivery yard holding onto a pony and just crying openly in front of absolute strangers, which is something I would never thought I would do. And the reason why I'm telling you this because it's all these stories that I wish that people shared more openly. And I've kind of decided to share it in the book. Decided to say, you know, how it is and what it can do for us. Because we all, once upon our lives, have a, you know, pt personal trainers in our lives. We have various other people helping us do various different things in life. But we don't always look after ourselves, especially our mental health and you know, how to unpick where we get given in the years when we don't necessarily have control of what happens in our lives. And when we do, we should take reins and actually look after it. So yeah, three part storytelling in this episode today. Yeah, let's get in.
- [02:08]
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Let's start at the end. Just over a year ago, I was standing in the paddock of a livery yard holding a lead rope attached to a Shetland pony called Abel. A therapist was asking me questions. I was a few meters away from the other people looking after the yard, topping up water buckets and mucking out stables, etc. Despite their presence and my usual reticence about public displays of emotion, tears were streaming down my face and there was no part of me holding them back. It was my first equine therapy session and I didn't care where I was or what was happening to me. I was finally feeling my feelings and making peace with what happened in my past, helping me to become more at ease with my current self and enabling me to move forward in my life. It may have been my first equine therapy session, but it had taken 10 years of other therapies for me to reach this stage, a place where I felt a sense of long term progress. There had been a lot of work and there was still a long way to go. Just like us, therapy comes in different shapes and sizes to fit our individual needs. It doesn't necessarily mean lying on a leather couch in a sterile office telling a Freud look alike about your father. It can be in person, online, with your partner, and even with horses. Furthermore, it doesn't necessarily have to probe your past. There are coaching based therapies to help you with specific issues in the here and now, such as nutritional therapy. There are therapeutic apps available. There are YouTube channels, TikToks and podcasts. Many of these, including this book, might not be substitutes of therapy itself, but they can act as a gateway leading you to find the best kind of therapy for you and the load that you're dealing with. However, from my experience, I strongly suggest engaging in in person sessions, even just to get started and navigate the next step correctly. Amazing things can happen when you open your mind and allow the right person or pony to have a look in a familiar backstory as I've mentioned, I was brought up in the 1980s. Even for those who weren't born, it's a decade that evokes heaps of nostalgia as a simpler time when it was great to be a child. The cartoons, the movies, the early computer games, even the sugar rush inducing breakfast cereals. It easily conjures up feelings of security and innocence. It feels like a world away from the intense algorithmic head fuck of the social media age. Yet for me, and I'm sure for many of my millennial readers, being young at that time also meant growing up in an emotional vacuum. There was a lack of warmth and encouragement from parents and a lack of conversations about how we as children felt and how the world around us worked. If we asked questions because I said so or don't be so stupid were often the answer. But we were also perhaps the last generation for whom excessive physical punishment was generally deemed acceptable. Some countries have thankfully managed to outlaw such practices, although they are sadly still prevalent in others. This might sound familiar. I grew up in a single parent household with an orbiting stepfather showing up now and then from an early age. When I was seven years old, I suffered what I now know to be my first panic attack. I got unexplainable stomach cramps during a gym session, and I thought I was being swallowed by the ground. Also, like many others, I learned to cope with my uncomfortable feelings by being on the go at all times and constantly keeping myself distracted. I joined my local ice hockey team, who had a busy and demanding schedule of training and regional league games. I loved the game and dreamed of a possible professional future. For the most part, however, it simply kept my mind occupied and my body moving. Then, When I was 13, a teammate died suddenly during a game. He was 14 years old. None of us on the team, including those who witnessed the tragedy, received any counseling. No one checked if we were okay or how it might have affected us. My teammate's death made no sense to me, and although I couldn't share it with anyone, I became very worried about the briefness of life and the abruptness with which death could strike anyone, even healthy teenagers. This event triggered my next bout of panic attacks, and this time they were much stronger. Although everything appeared fine on the outside, my mental health continued to erode during my teenage years. And once I started college, this began to manifest itself in further physical symptoms. I still had panic attacks, particularly around social situations. And then I began getting heart palpitations that left me convinced I was having a heart attack. I sought help for my extreme physical symptoms. GPS sent me to have ECGs and CT scans. No one could find anything wrong with me, but I still felt locked into a constant state of danger. In my mid teens, I started playing in bands, and then I started DJing. This was a great period of my life, but it was also exhausting. I would DJ anything up to six nights a week, and this, of course, entailed a lot of late nights, loads of drinking, plenty of partying, and just about getting through my higher education. This was, of course, balanced out by constant hangovers and fatigue that I would drink and party my way out of, eat, sleep, feel like death, rave, repeat. Normalising mental health from the wrong direction. It would be another 25 years before I worked out that throughout my childhood and all the way into my late 20s, I was in fact suffering from panic attacks and acute anxiety. Neither I nor the world around me were in tune with mental health, let alone how to fix it. When issues arose, any feelings that there was something wrong were quickly beaten down, and I certainly had no sense that anyone else could have been going through the same thing. After a while, it simply became a normal part of life. And this is what we so easily do so much of the time. We get used to the aches, we adapt to the pain, we keep papering over the cracks. But it doesn't have to be that way. The socially accepted form of self medication, that is alcohol, was my vice and helper for many years. It helped mask my issues. All of which would make me uncomfortable in social situations. A few beers and I'd soon relax and feel a little more validated and accepted. Not to mention funnier. But there are never any answers at the bottom of the glass. When I started seeing my friends graduate to self medication through their noses and veins, I knew I had to distance myself from their presence. I had enough on my plate already. As my creative business took off, that too became a means of escaping reality. As you've seen, I worked long and hard and I kept it up for many years. It was gratifying. And through it I built a strong reputation and financial stability. But I did it all by turning a blind eye to the damage it was doing to my mind and body. Again, it didn't give me the answers I was subconsciously seeking. My issues were still unresolved.