Mental Health: Managing Anxiety

An honest account of one week of difficult mental health.

This isn’t a post I thought I’d ever be writing on this blog. It doesn’t have anything to do with animal welfare or veganism, which is what I started this blog for. As I’m writing, I’m not completely sure I will post this. My mental health is clouded and foggy, which makes it really hard to feel clear about your decisions or how you’re communicating, but I miss putting out content into the world (even if it is only a very tiny corner of it) and I know that writing relieves a huge amount of tension for me. I also know that reading honest accounts of other people’s mental health can be therapeutic for me. So, that’s what it will be for, if I do post this.

I’m really feeling the restrictions of my mental health this week. I experience anxiety in quite a debilitating way. Sometimes I can go weeks, maybe months, without anything major disrupting my ability to live and feel normal. And at other times, even something which I would have brushed off one week, sends my mental and physical health in a spiral the next. But this time, something very big, which I wouldn’t normally be able to ‘brush off’, is causing me to experience anxiety in a way which has sent my physical body into a permanent state of panic.

I’ve got a job interview. And not just any job interview – my first graduate job interview and one with my dream organisation in what I imagine to be my dream role at this stage in my life. After eight months of hoping my perfect job would come along and receiving zero invitations to interview after my tireless efforts to be employed in a position I care about, I have been wrestling with the insidious idea that maybe I’m not good enough. I could blame it on Covid and its effect on employment rates, but deep down, I haven’t been able to shake the worry that maybe the problem is me. Now that I’ve received an invitation to interview, I’m suffocated by my internal conflict.

This interview means that maybe I am capable, but also – am I really? Or has some sort of mistake been made? I now have to face the absolutely debilitating fear of an entirely new social interaction during which I will be assessed by three highly experienced professionals. Will they be disappointed when they hear what I have to say in interview? Will they realise a mistake was made and an invitation to interview was sent to the wrong person? The knowledge that I also will have to complete an unspecified timed task directly before the interview is sending me all over the place. What if I don’t understand the brief? What if it’s something I have no idea how to do? What if my technology lets me down? What if I get so stressed out by it that I can’t perform effectively in the interview immediately afterwards?

I realise that I’m living in a state of ‘what ifs’. I realise that it’s silly to let something that I can’t control affect my life so much. But the problem is that on some level, my brain thinks that if I acknowledge all of the ‘what ifs’, I will be able to prepare solutions, if they do happen. This means that I need to know when it’s okay to stop. There’s only so much preparation that you can do before you burn out. And I need to figure out where that point is and that if it turns out there is something I haven’t prepared for, what will be will be. I tried my best that was reasonably possible to preserve my health.

I also must accept that, as much as I can envisage a ridiculously happy me if I were to be successful in this job, life will go on if I’m not. I’m still subjecting myself to an internal tirade of ‘what ifs’ even about this. “What if I make an absolute disaster of it and my interviewers will remember me whenever I may apply to future roles with them?”, “What if I stood a good chance in this job but I let myself down over one tiny thing?”, “What if it’s all my fault because I didn’t prepare thoroughly enough?”, or even, “What if I stress myself out too much by preparing way too hard and then end up stumbling and stuttering and losing sight of representing my authentic self?”. But the truth is, even if any of these worries do come true (which chances are, they won’t), I will be okay. The way that I’m thinking and ‘preparing’ myself is by creating a situation for myself that I can’t possibly win. The truth is, no matter what happens, if future me experiences that interview and lives to tell the tale on the other side, I’ve won.

I hope that this post hasn’t been too self-rambly. I hope that whatever you feel yourself going through right now, you can remind yourself that you have enough to be proud of just for living through it. You are resilient and you will be okay.

– Frances