Reasons to stay alive - life after anxiety

Just finished reading Reasons To Stay Alive by Matt Haig and had to get my thoughts out. If you or anyone you know has or is struggling with depression, please read this book. You won’t regret it.

It got me thinking a lot about my own journey and how only a few years ago I sat in a bath thinking about how I could take my own life without hurting the people I loved. The answer was, I couldn’t. After years of gruelling therapy and putting myself in situations that were my biggest fears, I’m here and for the most part live anxiety free.

It also got me thinking about how I used to share my most vulnerable thoughts through my blog, and get so many messages from people who had been helped in some way just by my words. That was until I let people in real life make me feel silly for what I was doing and I’ve since been dealing with a bout of ‘post anxiety’ but fuck that. If it helps, it’s worth it.

The crazy thing about mental illness is that it can creep in when you least expect it. It’s been in what should be some of my happiest times, that I’ve felt the most disconnected and in times of disarray, the most together. Those who know me personally know the last couple of years have held some serious weight and yet, my mental health has been in check. So I honestly believe that by overhauling your attitude completely, like Matt mentions in this book, drastically improves your life as a whole.

So if you are having a down day, week, month, or are feeling completely overwhelmed with anxiety. Know it gets better. There IS light at the end of the tunnel. I found it. In the mean time, surround yourself with people who accept and love you as you are, read the books, meditate, buy the damn shoes. Do what you’ve got to do to get from one day to the next, because one day you’ll be sat just as I was, about to do the next thing on my to do list and you’ll realise it’s been a whole hour since you had those intrusive thoughts, that hour turns into days, then weeks, then months. Until you can barely remember what it felt like to feel the way you do right now.

If you told 22 year old Soph that she would be flying to Barcelona to see Billie Eilish after just spending a month backpacking through Europe, she’d have panicked just at the thought, but here we are...