Cruise texts 6. Managing Anxiety 1. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Last year I was asked to write a series of blogs for publication. As ever, they disappeared down a rabbit hole, having just uncovered them, they are I feel ripe for release so here they are. Written whilst on a cruise around the North Sea and the North Atlantic on the P&O Cruises cruise ship Aurora organised by Laura Childs of Pure Travel. Hence Cruise Texts.

Now here’s the thing, yes, I was, but I didn’t know it. Its natural to try to make the best of things. To be safe. To be happy. In whatever way seems best at the time, with the information you have available.

That’s the crux. With the information you have available. If you’ve done the best you can, knowing what you know, then you need to have no regrets about what you’ve done. Even if at a later date, you know better.

Closed doors were a major difficulty for me for much of my life. I struggled to even knock on them, firm in the belief that when, or if, they were opened, the person would look at me and ‘yes, what do you want?’, and I would be struck dumb and quite often just leave.

This belief was supported by a belief that I was poor in conversation, in small talk certainly. Quietly spoken, even if what I had to say was relevant, interesting or funny, it wouldn’t be heard. I would believe, ignored. The more it would happen, the stronger my belief and the greater my anxieties would become.

As a teenager, the simplest safest way to avoid the ‘dangers’ was to isolate myself. I would spend long hours alone reading, playing cards, listening to music. I as always on the edge of groups, desperate to fit in, but never feeling accepted. Rarely invited to gatherings or events, tolerated if I was. Usually having heard something was happening and just being there rather than part of whatever the event was.

I struggled to be heard, struggled to have conversations and when I did manage to say what was on my mind, there would be silence at the end of it. I didn’t have the skills to turn it back to the others and no one picked up on what I said.

Or so I believed.

There was no one to talk to, for me. I grew up in a loving home, but we didn’t talk about emotions back then. There was no internet, no awareness of mental health, just stigma and dogma. No one admitted they had mental health problems. That meant you were a ‘looney’, ‘mental’ It was a derogatory term. You just dealt with it. ‘Man up’.

Anxiety, or the perceptions of difficulties are cyclical. The more it happened, the more I stayed isolated and the greater the fear of rejection. Real or perceived.

I did have a couple of friends, but they lived a distance away, and I didn’t see them often.