My mental health story – A brief insight

In the coming weeks I am going to be doing a series of live discussions with Katie Phillips of KDP Coaching & Consulting, talking about Mental Health wellbeing within the creative industry. With that in mind, I wanted to give a brief insight in to my mental health and some of my struggles with it over the years. I will be sharing more posts on here, as well as the live chats with Katie, being as honest as possible looking at the ups, downs and everything in between.

If I am honest I have suffered with my mental health for as long as I can remember, I just didn’t really know about it. I had never heard of mental health.

As a young kid I just thought I suffered with my nerves a lot. As I got to school I thought I was simply more sensitive than others. As a teen I assumed I suffered with hangovers much more than my friends. Entering the working world I thought I was someone that just put too much pressure on myself.

I continually believed that my life was riddled with deficiencies that I brought on MYSELF and that they would plague me until I die because THAT IS WHO I AM. I am a ‘worrier’, end of.

As I got older I obviously became aware of mental health and anxiety but I point blank refused to believe that it had anything to do with me. Instead I built a life full of crutches, which for a good while enabed me to live a perfectly ‘normal’ life. These crutches soon became heavier and I relied on them more and more until one day I broke….and when I say broke, I’m talking shattered into a thousand pieces (now I think this story can be saved for another post), but I finally accepted that I desperately needed to address my issues.

I needed to replace my crutches of ignorance, alcohol, work and ridiculous amounts of fitness with safer, more reliable strategies. I needed to take note of my true feelings and put actions in place.

Over the coming posts I will share my experiences, good and bad and offer tips that helped me. It is worth noting that everyones experiences are different and certain things work for certain people.

I will start on my next post by discussing the 7 tips I posted on social media during #mentalhealthawareness week. They seemed to help some people and for me helping others is a huge part of helping myself during this.

Thanks as always for reading.

Craig