Fears and loves

I've been pretty influenced by the Mental Illness Happy Hour recently, and I especially love the fears and loves that are read out each episode, so I thought I would do my own.

Fears:

I'm afraid people are only pretending to like me.

I'm afraid of heights, especially when I'm inside, I'm always scared I'm going to jump off even though I don't want to.

I'm afraid of having panic attacks.

I'm afraid of other people touching or putting their hands near my eyes. I'm so scared that somehow my glasses are going to break and the glass will go in my eyes.

I'm afraid I'll never find a really fulfilling job that I won't get bored of after a year.

I'm afraid my little brother won't ever be able to connect with people or be happy, and I'm afraid he will never get a diagnosis but will just be written off as 'naughty'.

I'm afraid I'll always have social anxiety, and always struggle in social situations.

Loves:

I love watching the crows playing outside of my work.

I love sitting on the sofa with a blanket, a cup of tea, and good tv.

I love that I can't even get in my mum's front door before my little sisters are hugging me.

I love watching videos of animals being friends with different types of animals.

I love Reece's Peanut Butter Cups.

I love self-care, as a concept, and the little individual acts of it I do to look after myself.

I love the blank, exhausted high that you get after dancing for ages at a gig, feeling totally connected to the music and the other people around.

I love drinking wine and chatting with my boyfriend.

I love goats.

I love that I know so many awesome queer people.

Therapy Take Three

After my disasterous experience at CBT that I wrote about in my last post I called Talking Therapies and asked to change therapists. It was writing the post, and laying my thoughts out, that helped me see how really unhappy I had been with the therapist, I don't know if I would have had the courage otherwise. I spoke to a receptionist then got a call back from a manager, who was really nice, I was able to give the real reasons I felt I needed a different therapist, something I often find hard, lying about feeling ill to get out of something is preferable to telling the truth and saying my anxiety is playing up. The manager was very nice, and basically said that if I didn't feel comfortable with my therapist I needed a new one, and that was all it took.
I've had three sessions with my new therapist now, and it's so much better! She's really nice, and totally unshockable. My notes already mentioned my being bisexual, and during the second session, when we were going through a timeline of my life, the fact I'm in an open relationship came up, she barely reacted to this, just asked if I date other people as well as my boyfriend doing so. Last session I ended up talking a bit with her about biphobia and biearasure, and how the affect me, which was awesome.
The main thing that I am liking about my new therapist is that she thinks CBT shouldn't totally ignore childhood/past issues. We spent a whole session just talking through a timeline of my life and seeing everything laid out, in order, made a couple of patterns really obvious. I have always had problems keeping friends, and I've been abandoned by a lot of friends. There have been a few big occasions where I have felt unnoticed and uncared for when really emotionally hurting, for example when I was being bullied by my sister and my dad and step-mum did nothing. I've always been the sensible oldest child, this has led to taking on a caring role at a young age, and not talking about my mental illness because of not wanting to upset people. All of this does seem to work together with being a shy quiet person to be a perfect recipe for social anxiety.
I hadn't been feeling that optimistic about doing CBT for the second time, especially after having had a bad experience with a therapist, but I'm feeling a lot happier about it now. I've been feeling like this could be good for me, I like my new therapist, and I know from past experience that a combination of meds and therapy is good for me, so hopefully things will carry on being good.

Where I am right now - CBT take two

It's been almost a year since I last wrote in this blog, I moved house to Reading and started my new job as a student finance and admissions advisor at a FE college. I was really busy, and being so busy made me tired and seemed to use up all of my brain, my job is totally different to the library work I had done before and required learning loads of new processes from scratch. Everything was pretty good, living with my boyfriend is really awesome, my new job is hard work but enjoyable, I have a better online network.

But, there are bad things. I have a daily commute of nearly 4 hours, and my job is pretty stressful. Two things that make my mental health worse? Stress and tiredness. I moved away from London just as I was starting to know people and find fun things to do, and Reading is much quieter and more conservative than London, no queer club nights for example. I've made a few friends and done some dating, some of that went pretty badly, and one good friend I made moved away.

Essentially, I've been backsliding socially, and not noticing because I was happy spending time with my boyfriend, and having alone time when he's out on dates. But the last three or four weeks, for no real reason I can tell, depression just settled on me - I felt bad about myself, I had no interest in anything, getting tickets to see Against Me! made me happy for about 5 minutes. In a way this may have been a good thing, it made me realise how much I was getting back to how I was before CBT, I'd stopped even trying to meet new people and be social, despite still being lonely and wanting friends. And when I was put in social situations? Back to freaking out, including an anxiety attack in a poly-related situation that I think was much more about my anxiety than poly stuff.

So, back to the doctor, and back to CBT. I was pretty wary when offered it by the mental health team, because of already having done it, but apparently it can often take more than one lot to have a real effect. I've been really lucky, again, in hardly having to wait any time at all from being referred by my doctor to having my introductory session, which was yesterday.

My depression has finally started to lift, and I wasn't feeling too nervous before the session, but basically it was horrible and I cried nearly the whole way through. I know a lot of people have problems with CBT because of the emphasis on changing thoughts, a lot of people feel that CBT blames them for not trying hard enough not to be ill, and basically that is how I felt. I was already feeling silly and embaressed about having let myself get back in a situation where I'm not managing my anxiety. I was also struggling to explain why I feel the way I do, my therapist kept asking WHY I feel like nobody likes me, and I KNOW the way I feel isn't rational, but telling me it isn't rational doesn't change it.

These are things that I'm more able to preocess with a bit of time to think, but there wan another thing I had an isue with in the session, when I mentioned not being straight my therapist said 'Oh you're not straight? But I thought you have a boyfriend?' Now I've had people say basically those exact words to me before, but it was the way she said it, it sounded accusatory, and I basically snapped 'I'm bisexual' at her. Later in the session she was asking why I think I'm so different from everyone else, that there are pleanty of other bisexual feminists, I felt like she was accusing me of trying to invoke some kind of special snowflake status. Maybe my personality is the reason I struggle to connect with most people, but of all the people I've met and know IRL I can only thingk of one bisexual poly feminist, incidentally she's one of my very few offline friends. And of course I'm not going to tell her about being polyamorous now, because I don't feel safe to, but that's going to affect my sessions quite a lot because one of the ways I'm generally ok to meet people is through internet dating.

The more I write and think about this the more annoyed I am. Last night I was upset, my instinct was to just quit therapy, call them up and say I'd changed my mind. Then my instinct was to second guess myself, assume it's all my fault that it went badly and I just have to try harder. Now, with a bit of time to reflect I don't know what to do.

OkCupid changed my life.

I've written on here about my quest to get more friends, including posts about Girlfriend Social and living a more fulfilled life, but I haven't yet written about the site that has made a really big difference to me - OkCupid. I don't really feel the need to explain how OkCupid works, but I was attracted to it mostly because it's free, but also because it has a reputation for having a huge, and fairly young, number of users.
I joined on a whim, but got quite into writing my profile, and fairly quickly went from lurking on the profiles of cute people without messaging them to actually writing and replying to messages. Lots of the people who I messaged didn't get back to me, but I've found myself being much more ok with that than I'd have ever expected. I've not historically been great with rejection, this is linked to the social anxiety thing of thinking people are just pretending to like me, but it's a lot easier on the internet. So a few of my messages get ignored, or conversations fizzle out, because it's online it feels very low-stakes, there are always more cute people to message.
The next step of OkCupid improving my socialisation and confidence was actually meeting people for dates, or kind of dates, I spent a lot of time trying to work out if I was on a date or not. I met up with four people over the course of a few weeks, including a couple who I've seen since as friends, and every time it was much better than I was expecting it to be. The first time was nerve-wracking, even meeting someone for lunch was a huge deal to me, but I've enjoyed myself so much. I've been a bit starved for female companionship, and OkCupid has changed that so much. I've had conversations about make up and feminism! I've sat by the Thames talking about having a changing sexual identity and being poly! A few months ago I didn't know anyone who I could do these things with, and perhaps it's ironic that a dating site has helped me find some really good friends, but I'm ok with that.
 There have been some not so great moments too. I've spent some time not having my profile available for men to see, because I was so bored of getting either one word messages, or at the other extreme, constant requests for threesomes and long, sexually explicit fantasies. They used to upset me, but I'm getting a much thicker skin now. I've also worked out that the appropriate response is snarky reply, followed by blocking the guy, and it is always a guy.
Not all of the men who have messaged me have been like that though, many have been perfectly nice and it is not their fault that I've been generally uninterested. I have met up with one guy from the site, and it's was the most date-like date that I went on, so I have been using it in it's intended way. I've had a couple of conversations where people have expressed surprise about me using a dating site mostly for friendship, but I've found it pretty easy to carve out my own little niche. Not only have I met plenty of people who are interesting in pursuing friendship if nothing more comes out of the date, but I've also met people interested in more, despite the fact I'm in a relationship.
Though I didn't know when I joined there is quite an impressive polyamorous community on OkCupid, possibly helped by the fact you can set your relationship as 'seeing someone' while still using the site to meet people, and I've seen quite a few couples who both us the site, and link to each others profiles. Not only that, but it's fairly LGBT friendly (though could do with more sexuality and gender options) and with users able to add questions there is the oportunity to show a preference for ethic non-monogamy which affects your matches, increasing the chance of meeting like-minded people. It's because of OkCupid that I've met other poly people, been more confident in talking about my own polyamoury and been to a poly-friendly club night. Again, more unexpected, but amazing, benefits.
I know a lot of people who read this post won't be surprised by anything I've said, I'm preaching to the converted to some extent, and there will probably be people reading this I've met through OkCupid. That just provides more evidence of how great the site has been for me, it has changed my life, and for the better, in expected and unexpected ways. So, OkCupid, I love you!

A natural progression.

I have been in a relationship with my boyfriend for four years. We've not lived in the same city for most of that time, I've has two distinct periods of mental illness, there's been family problems and deaths, we're both had periods of unemployment or being unhappy in our jobs. Despite that we've been happy. We hardly argue, we talk all the time, he really is my best friend. To be honest we act more like a lovey-dovey couple who have been together a few months.
However, in the past few months there has been a big change in our relationship. It's never been a jealous relationship, in fact it has never been explicitly monogamous and one of us checking out another person is by no means a big deal. In fact, it often leads to jokes about how my boyfriend has a 'type', it's very easy for me to tell in a room of people who will catch his attention, he can do the same about me. Early on in our relationship he made out with another girl, when my boyfriend told me he was really worried I'd break up with him, but I really didn't mind. I can get jealous, very occasionally, but was not at all in this case, it just isn't really something that happens to me.
Although this incident was not repeated I think it stuck with both of us. A few months ago I turned 26, marking 10 years since I had any kind of sexual or romantic contact with a woman. My boyfriend has always said he wouldn't want to stop me experiencing this side of my sexuality, but for some reason this began to seem more urgent to both of us. Our relationship was clearly not going anywhere, but neither was my desire to be with a woman. I had also said I wanted my first time having sex with a woman to be just me, not a threesome, which my boyfriend respected and understood. With some discussion we moved from an implicit agreement I could have sex with a woman to an explicit one.
I joined OkCupid, which has been a revelation. I met up with a couple of people, meetings that turned out to just be friendly but also made me feel a lot more confident about what I wanted. It was around that time that my boyfriend and I had a discussion about fairness, about how I could sleep with another person but he couldn't. We also talked about what would happen if I met someone I really liked, who I wanted more than friendship or sex with. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but suddenly it seemed like the obvious thing to open up our relationship, to stop being at all monogamous.
He also joined OkCupid, both our profiles are very honest about our non-monogamy, and discussing people we're talked to or met through it has become part of our regular conversations. I've also done a lot of reading about polyamoury and non-monogamy, the internet is excellent for this, and it turns out I know a surprising amount of people who are ethically non-monogamous. One of these is possibly my closest female friend, she has a husband and a boyfriend, and is a real inspiration to me. We've talked quite a lot about her non-monogamy, and mine, and it's been really interesting and helpful. In fact everyone who I have talked to about non-monogamy has been, I feel like I've learned so much in the last few weeks.
This is the part that is hard to write, because I am very aware of respecting other people's privacy. All I can say is that my boyfriend and I's non-monogamy is no longer theoretical, and the whole experience has been both better and easier than I was expecting. There is no jealousy or insecurity, and for everyone involved there has been good communication.
I understand that my boyfriend and I are at the start of this journey, and though it has been overwhelmingly positive so far there are likely to be bad times. Already things have happened to change the dynamics we thought we would have - I mentioned that there is an explicit agreement we can both sleep/ have relationships with other women (he's straight, I'm not). This was because he didn't think he would be able to cope with me having sex with another man, this has been tested to destruction and disproved.  So that's changed, in fact I have a date with a guy this week. It works because even before being non-monogamous we're very honest with each other and we communicate well.
I feel very positive about the way things are going, excited even. Non-monogamy is not for everyone, but I think it is for me, and I think it is for my boyfriend. I'm beginning to feel like a recent convert trying to get everyone else on board too, that's not what I'm doing, but I do want to talk about my experiences, and I'm just lucky they've been so good so far.

Living a more fulfilled life

I have spent a long time doing nothing but going to work and chilling out with my boyfriend. Occasionally I'll go to Brighton and see my family, in the evenings I'll watch tv or read, at the weekend I'll watch tv or read, outside. My boyfriend and I go to museums quite a lot, or walks around London, but I haven't been to a gig in over 6 months, and it's only in the last month that I've very slowly begun the process of making new friends.
In a lot of ways I like my life, I'm an extreme introvert, one day at an unconference makes me want to sit alone in a quiet room for hours. However, it's not the most fulfilling type of life, especially at the weekends I feel like all I do is look at a screen all day, then go home and look at a screen in the evening. I don't have a huge amount of online friends, so it's not like I'm even being social in that way, though I am getting better thanks to XoJane.
When I was little I wanted to be a doctor, I spent years assuming I'd be doing something that would be helping people, and that doesn't seem to be happening. I'm in a bit of a career rut at the moment, I don't have the money I need to do an MA and so increase my job opportunities, and I don't get much fulfillment out my current role. Because my boyfriend and I live in different cities I don't want to give a regular weekend commitment to anything, because then I'll never see him, but the weekend is the only free time I have, especially as I work odd hours, starting late and finishing late. However, things may be changing. It's looking more likely that I'll be able to move in with my boyfriend in the next couple of months, this will free up my weekends, for the first time in 3 years we'll live in the same town!
I'm looking at volunteering at the moment, I like the idea of being a mental health advocate a lot. It ties in nicely to what I've been interested in recently, and seems a nice way of 'paying back', I feel like I've been very lucking with my experiences of doctors and therapists, helping someone who is not having such a good experience would be nice. I would also love to do reading with children, or any kind of literacy work. The problem with these schemes is they tend to be week only, so not very practical as I work monday to friday. Ideally I'd find a job in a lovely public library and reading with children would be part of my job, but the way the library job market is now that won't be likely to happen.
The other thing that is beginning to make me feel more fulfilled is online activism, something I've only been dipping my toes into so far. I'm really enjoying twitter at the moment, I've learnt a lot from reading other people's tweets, and I've started to have some interesting conversations as well. Through Twitter I have also found a lot of good blogs to read, including The Fementalists, which I am in the process of writing an article for. This will be the first thing I've submitted to something organised, rather than just typing my ramblings onto this blog. It seems like a good first step though, after all a blog about feminism and mental health is right up my alley, and raising awareness for this blog would be good too.
I am starting to feel like I am actually accomplishing things, even if they are very small things. I've got two book groups to go to next week, which will be fun but exhausting, and I'm going to work on the article to submit to The Fementalists, and other articles for this blog. I'm also going to try to engage in more conversations on Twitter and XoJane, it's may be mostly online, but socialising of any form is good, and it all makes me feel more confident about doing it in real life.