Two Year Anxiversary – Riding the Unplanned Life Diversion

Like what I did there??!

So I’m sitting in the office pretending to work, whilst counting down the minutes before I can get the hell outta here and get on a train home to the Devonshire countryside where my parents live! Woooooop!

And I thought, in the reflective way we all do around Christmas time, how am I doing in life and general health, and how am I compared to my Life Diversion two years ago? (This is what I’m now calling it instead of ‘mental breakdown’, as of 10 seconds ago…). I think Life Diversion is quite fitting because I think when your body steps in and tells you to Stop, Stop and Stop again, you have no choice but to take a different direction. It’s not even a choice, the choice is taken out of your hands.

Up until that point, I was living a life, prioritising things that I thought mattered (they didn’t), ensuring I ticked the social boxes, dating men with the expectation of eventually settling and getting married, doing well in a career in order to achieve a certain status / pay check ?, saving a weird thing we call money so I could buy stuff, and acting in a way we are taught is socially acceptable. I was so buried in these concepts I had not looked up to see what it was doing to my mental health, my happiness and my wellbeing. Nature, the natural spin of the earth, the truth of what is, whatever you would like to call it, will never let you get too carried away without alerting you to the way you are hurting yourself. Whether it be immense physical pain, mental pain, suffering in some way, you are being notified of what is hurting you, the wrong direction you are taking, the pressures you are building for yourself that do not exist anywhere but in your mind.

Now I am on a new route, a total road diversion. I know nothing about this route, it scares me, I don’t know where it’s heading and I don’t recognise the scenery.

But all I know is that it’s the right one. That’s all I know, because my gut tells me. And my God, I had to do a lot of reading, seeking advice and sharing with others to learn and understand. But slowly it’s become very clear to me that the old controlling route hurt, and was making me hurt more the further along it I went, but this new route feels right on a health and happiness level. Scary but right.

I have no idea what my future holds anymore, I think I’ve almost completely stopped caring, and do you know what, it changes nothing. I just feel healthier. I genuinely don’t care if I meet a guy to settle with, if my career moves up (I have enough money for everything I need), if I recover from anxiety completely, none of it matters, I have everything I need in life and more. If I feel like shit today or tomorrow, or even over Christmas, who cares? I’m here and alive. I always thought I’d get to a point where everything would come right for me, that everything I wanted would come to fruition, that my anxiety would go, that I’d put loads of weight back on and that external things would come to me. But that was never the way. I have none of what I thought I wanted, but I realised I don’t need any of it to be happy. In fact I’m happier than I was before the Life Diversion.

Happy Driving All…

P.S Don’t put pressure on Christmas time. It doesn’t have to be good. It’s just a day.