Life lately

It’s been a few years since I’ve written anything here and initially that was because towards the end of 2020 I had my baby (J) and we began adjusting to life as a family of 4. I had a great start to motherhood the second time round, such a contrast to my experiences with H and I was able to breastfeed J for an extended period of time. Something I am incredibly proud of myself for. I returned to work and although I had a few issues we settled into a good routine with help from family with childcare and looking after the dog. We’re very lucky that we have family around us to enable us to work the shifts we do and not have to pay out for childcare.

During this time my mental health was at an all time high, I had bad days as we all do but I felt on top of the world. I was no longer taking sertraline, I had continued to use what I had learned in therapy to manage my OCD and my anxiety was much more manageable. Overall, life was great.

Unfortunately towards the last few months of 2024 I began to experience really low mood. This was something I hadn’t really experienced by itself before. I stuck my head in the sand and convinced myself it was just a bad day, a bad week, a bad month. I’d come out the other side and all would be back to normal. I was able to cover it up at work for the most part no one knew how I was feeling. I plastered a smile on and got on with my job. I worked extra shifts and I just pretended everything was fine. At home I was quiet, snappy, impatient and in my opinion hard to live with. I’d managed to get myself into such a deep dark hole I couldn’t see any way out. Cracks began to show at work and I started to have some really dark thoughts and was harming myself more than I ever had before.

It was at this point that a friend and my husband made it clear how worried they were about me (neither knew about the dark thoughts or self harm still) and insisted I go to the doctors which I did the very next day. I saw the mental health nurse who I will be forever thankful to for helping me in my moment of crisis. I started taking sertraline again and have found the dose that works for me and I referred myself to talking therapies again in my area. The mental health nurse took the decision to sign me off work (I have recently returned) and things I could do immediately to help myself. Talking to someone and admitting I was not coping was the biggest relief. Even though I felt absolutely mortified that I had been signed off work deep down I knew I needed some time to get back to being me.

Fast forward a few months and the medication is helping, I have way more good days and I have my first therapy session in a few days time. I plan on writing again, it helped me massively before so I’m hoping it will have the same effect this time. I’m going to sign off there and hopefully write up another few posts so I can get back to regular posts about my mental health, how I got to this point and how I have been managing it.