Climbing mountains - Its their problem, not mine.

Going out today (as I am only a week away from my period) really did feel like climbing a mountain -
a hard thing to do but at the end you feel like you have achieved something great.
As I walked out the door I felt so nervous, and as I walked further and further towards the city I felt worse and worse. The urge to rush back home was so overpowering, it took all the knowledge from the book 'Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for dummies' for me to be able to resist that urge.
But the most important thing and surprising thing is that I did! I was physically able to go further than I have in years. I sat down in the city centre with lots of people walking by doing their day to day shopping, and I tried to calm my thoughts and convince myself that if I have a seizure and people have a problem with it then its their problem, not mine.
I was walked right through the city centre and even round three of the supermarkets (Iceland, Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer)! I then went right down to Thorntons and bought my mum and dad lots of yummy chocolate treats for Halloween :)
When I got home I felt so good, like I really had climbed a mountain. I felt like I had really turned a corner in my struggle to overcome this anxiety and agoraphobia. They key is to not care if  I have a seizure or not and to go out and do all the normal things I want to do, whether I 'feel like it' or not!

Esther xoxo

Achieving anything

I did so well today, much better than I thought I would!

After a week of not being able to go out because of the awful cold I am still recovering from, and the big break to my routine of maintaining busy and challenging days, I still managed to walk right to Winchester city centre! It felt awful and so frightening as I reached the city. I felt so dizzy and my head felt like it was vibrating so violently, the only thought that went through my head was ‘oh god, I am going to have a seizure’. It was just my nerves and anxiety playing tricks on my mind. I know that what matters most is not what I  am feeling inside but what I have actually done. I wanted so badly to do something normal and to go to ‘card factory’ so that I could buy some Christmas wrapping paper. It seems silly I know to start wrapping presents so early but the presents I have bought for my mum and dad are so big that I really need to wrap them as they arrive from Argos, and I’m only half way through my Christmas Shopping, lol!

As well as this I have had a very busy day: wrapping my mum and dads christmas presents, cooking my own lunch, washing up, and began studying my first Psychology course (DSE141 – Discovering Psychology)-that I am studying with the Open University.

Today just goes to show how often you can do more than you think you can!

Esther xoxo