A #WorldMentalHealthDay post.
I’ve had low level ongoing anxiety/fear for days now. It’s not uncommon for me, but in the past week or so it’s ramped up quite a lot.
Right now I’m on my way to yet another meeting/workshop with academics & arts professionals with whom I will no doubt (as SO often) feel out of my depth, out of place (maybe ‘imposter syndrome’, may actually be the truth of the situation!). I don’t think I know anyone else who will be there. It’s a perfectly valid situation in which to feel nervous/uncertain, but this feeling isn’t just circumstantial, I have it in the safety of my own home too. (Although, of course, having had two cancers I know there is no real ‘place of safety’.)
I am chanting, yoga-ing, mindfulness-ing, and it’s all still there. Anxiety, fear, whatever. I know that my experiences with illness have made me more aware of the precariousness of existence, of the limits of life. So I’m scared and up and on with it anyway.
Today I will try to remember that many of the people I encounter in the course of this day also live with uncertainty, fear, anxiety and respond to them accordingly.
AND it is a stunning sunny autumn morning, the view from the train is fine.
Not Writing But Blogging 
Thank you for your honest reflections. I feel that fear at so many meetings and gatherings, and try not to show it. The mobile phone allows me to go into a corner. The toilet is my go-to retreat. I try and remember that, behind all the other confident faces, there is at least one other person feeling as I do. And then I meet a friend, or someone talks to me, and I feel validated and calmer.
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Yes, I so recognise those feelings of out of depthness. Sometimes I think it’s the arrangement – the fact people have been brought together and as a result make something far more scary than the sum of the individual parts. I try to see each of them as individuals – and usually fail.
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Thank you Peth. Yes, trying to see beyond the sum to the individual. Always a task. X
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But once we all value each individual equally and once they all feel that value, the whole can be magnificent.
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yes it can.
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