I'm 39 Now: My Anxiety and Autism Journey

By Phillip Ireland

You don't want to miss this journey...

 

I used to suffer in silence. I went to bed in mental pain, woke up physically hurting. I felt unwell most of the time and life was passing me by. I didn't know that my past had caused these new feelings of dread, low mood and loneliness. My past had caught up with me and it wouldn't go ba

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phillip Ireland
• Release date: Jun 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781916696303

Book preview

Section 1 – My Story

1

When you wake up in the morning and something doesn't feel right.

When you wake up during the night shaking all over.

When you drive the car and wish you had already arrived.

When you don't have an appetite but know you need to eat.

When it's dark and you want to curl up in a ball.

When it’s light but all you want is to hide from people.

When it's daytime but you're so tired it may as well be 3 a.m.

When you're at work but want everyone else to be at home.

When someone asks how you are and you just say 'I'm fine'.

When things keep piling up and your stack of things to do starts to wobble.

Most people think of anxiety as a made up 'thing' that either doesn't exist or is exaggerated beyond all proportion. After all, it’s not like a broken leg that can be seen in a cast or a wound from a cut. So, let me tell you now... They're wrong.

It is true that anxiety itself, that single thing, is very hard to spot. Our brains and bodies do some magic to heavily disguise what's going on inside. A lot of times, in our daily lives, our brains don't have time to 'catch up' on the things we do, the experiences we face or the problems we encounter. Sleeping can help the brain, and some people experience vivid dreams of problem solving, experience handling and all sorts of things whilst they sleep. The issue with this though, is that it varies by person as we're not all built the same.

Chemically, your brain needs extra time to figure things out, to settle and to understand what just happened. Think of it like watching a car chase in a movie; so much just happened in about 30 seconds, you need to watch it five more times to figure out why that guy got shot and why that one escaped. Time and energy are put into your brain and what you need out of it is an organised set of memories, feelings, emotions and events.

2

My beginning with anxiety was probably like some others’. Most of what I had to deal with originated from my childhood, moving locations and generally missing out on parts of growing up. Until this time, my brain had been carefully boxing up all of the things it couldn’t manage. The triggers, the sensations, the emotions and the thoughts all went in the box and just sat in the corner of my brain. I did know something was wrong, but I didn't know it was on this scale and what it actually was.

One day, in the middle of March, I started feeling unwell. We were due to move house in a month and I remember packing things up ready for labelling. I had to stop at some point and take stock of what my body was telling me. I felt shaky, shivery and couldn’t concentrate. I stopped packing boxes after this one until that evening, when I felt normal again.

April came, and I was still having days where I just didn’t feel right. I was worried about the house move, but we were ready, things were moving and I knew that I shouldn’t have been in this much of a state over that. In late April, moving day was upon us. Whilst the movers moved our things from house to house, I was in charge of building furniture at the