It’s Okay to Ask For Help
It really is okay to ask for help, and this is coming from someone who never, or very rarely does ask for it. Now, I am not talking about asking for help with mundane tasks like opening a jar or asking for help to reach something off a shelf that is too high. I am talking about help with trying to fix your mind, for help with the overwhelming feelings of worry and dread. For all the intrusive and self-sabotaging thoughts. For help with traumatic experiences and inability to physically function because your mind is working in overdrive to make you feel like complete shit.
In the last few months, I have begun to talk about my own mental health a lot more openly because to be quite frank with you it was in the shitter. I began to lose control over my body because of how bad my anxiety had gotten. It was then I knew I had to try therapy, especially when the medication was only providing a temporary release from the feelings of constant fear because at the end of the day the medication can only stop my body from reacting, but it could not stop my mind.
I only really had the courage to talk about it more because I have a few of my close friends that are so open with their mental health with me, and their use of therapy that when I was in states I had never seen myself in that I needed to try it because I was worried the stress my body was under that I would not make it to the end of 2020. There is one friend in particular that really encouraged this and she knows who she is, and I will forever be indebted to her.
My memory of the first therapy session is hazy because it really was just a lot of crying, and I mean ugly crying. The phone call really focused on my responses to questionnaires and what I wanted to get out of the six sessions I was going to get. I only remember what they are because yesterday, my therapist and I went over them to see the progress after a month since we last spoke because of Christmas and new year.
The second session had me really, really crumble. I hadn’t been able to sleep for weeks because my mind would create nightmares fuelled with my worst insecurities and doubts, and then sprinkle in a little past trauma and I would not be able to do anything or I would overwork myself just so I would be distracted enough and tired enough that I would hope I wouldn’t dream.
It was incredibly scary because the one time I hoped to be safe and away from my mind was being asleep, and even then I couldn’t escape. Then waking up in the dark, body completely out of control, shaking, sweating, and muscle tension, just fuels that feeling of being unsafe.
I felt unsafe in my own body.
One of the best things for me was having logical explanations as to why my body was reacting this way. Why each physical symptom existed so I could attribute it to the anxiety, and not to me. There are several Instagram accounts including the notsosecretdiaryofanxiety which talks about physical symptoms that you may not necessarily know about or just go hidden or unnoticed. Seeing the loss in vision, extreme nausea, body aches, and the multitude of other physical ways your body reacts when it is under a lot of worry helped. It allowed me to attribute a reason to why these things were happening, why my body was acting the way it was and then I could begin to gain a little control back.
The other was learning relaxation techniques. I know I did bang on about meditation a lot on Twitter, but it did help. Now it isn’t easy, I have tried in the past and failed miserably because I couldn’t switch off my thoughts, and even now it is still hard. But, I found guided meditations help, especially because subconsciously they have helped me see myself in a better light with self-love affirmations and have taught me to let go with affirmations in that realm. It had real effects, because now when I do get my nightmares and the physical symptoms are there, I am able to pick myself up a little better instead of surrendering to the negative thoughts completely.
Dedicating a specific time to just worrying and putting all my thoughts in my journal, usually before bed has given me the time to feel the worries and put them away. Now, that doesn’t mean they won’t come back, but they have been addressed, they have been taken out of my head for that moment and I can go to sleep a little easier.
Now, these things are not a cure, but they can help. And I don’t do them every day, sometimes I am too tired, sometimes I forget and sometimes I have such a bad day I can’t bring myself to do them. But, that is okay, it is okay to slip up and forget things, it is human. Just trying something new, something different, putting that effort in to try and better your mind is enough somedays.
Therapy was one of the better decisions I made in 2020. It was the one true decision I took for me because I was giving and giving, but this giving was coming from an empty cup. And you cannot give the best of yourself, you cannot be there for your friends and loved ones if you can’t even be present for yourself. Now, I am closer to my cup becoming full again, I give more and still have enough for me. I can give and not feel exhausted, I can enjoy giving again and it feels good to feel good in myself and be present for the ones that need me.
I can’t talk about therapy without talking about why I was so reluctant to begin in it in the first place. There are several reasons, but overwhelmingly it was because I felt like I would never truly be understood. The profession is overwhelmingly white, and that doesn’t mean white therapists can’t help people like me, Pakistani women, and a Pakistani woman who left faith and faced a lot of emotional trauma because of it. But, it means there is a lack of understanding because people in my own community don’t know the complexities so how can someone so far removed from it begin to understand it. There was also the worries of an impression of my community that would be made and then there is also the lack of mental health awareness and openness in Pakistani, and South Asian communities in a broader sense.
It wasn’t until my friends from the same background, but also all of them being women talking about their mental health issues from borderline personality disorder to ADHD and depression, and their ventures into therapy, that I felt like maybe it could work for me. And that was incredibly important, to have desi women talking about therapy and mental health, instead of the habits in our culture to keep things repressed or take the attitude of other people have it worse, or even that it’s just made up sometimes.
With their encouragement and constant support, I keeping going and I have been able to get the day to day worries under wraps. Now, I can begin to work on and unearth the hurt of the past that impacts a lot of how I think now. Am I quite ready to talk about that now? No, because even in every talk, every podcast I have been on talking about what happened when I left religion, how it affected my relationship with my family, my relationships with my closet friends, and ultimately, how now I can see it affects my thinking towards the world and relationships now, I haven’t been able to say it out loud or even write it candidly.
Hopefully, I will in the remaining three sessions I have because it’s a lot been held away for almost three years now. When I am ready I will because no one really talks about the way leaving faith and living with no faith, publicly as a Pakistani woman, where being Pakistani is synonymous with being Muslim and the shame and honour culture that is attached to women puts an immense pressure on oneself to be perfect and successful in all aspects of life because you are the infidel woman of the family.
To end more positively, what were the two goals I had? They were to stop the physical symptoms and to stop worrying about so many things at once. And now the physical symptoms have subsided a lot, from time to time I do get chest pains and that is usually triggered by something and so far I haven’t let myself get into a state of a full-blown panic attack in the day time, which I am taking as win! My sleep has improved a lot for me, I only wake up once in the night, as opposed to several times or just not sleeping. I do have stumbles with the once/twice a week nightmare which does leave me a little shaken, but not to the point where I couldn’t function throughout the day.
I was able to make peace with this lockdown, and not be in the same place as of November. I am hopeful, I know it is hard to be and there are days where I lose all hope, but overall I try to remain positive by seeing the good I have right in front of me. By writing five good things that have happened in my day, even if it is minor as I drank more than one glass of water or as major as laughing for hours with my friends over zoom.
By beginning to appreciate the small things in life, I forget about the world for a few seconds.
