Mindfullness Two: Talking about my own experiances with mental health issues. The Robbery

Last time I talked about Mindfullness I talked about my earliest experiances of anxiety and stress I talked about the things I went through due to bullying and studying, I also talked about how I had found video games to be a useful tool in helping me deal with my mental health issues.

Well I would like to say that everything from the moment school finished onwards was absolutly hunky dory but well to put it simply I went through quite a bit of crap like being hit by a hit and run driver, being attacked by a guy in a bus station and having two guys try to rob me with a knife all within a few years. A lot of these things caused me a lot of stress and certainly put a strain on my mental health but there was an event that would prove to be the real turning point not only for my mental health but in my life in general. I was working in a pub, it was long unsociable hours, I would get home and my partner at the time would be asleep but I would be too stressed from my job to sleep, so I would need to spend time unwinding and most of the time this would be by gaming. I would walk in the door kiss my daughter on the head and then play a few games until I wound down enough to sleep. It was just like a way to get some of my energy out of me, I would loose all of the stress and anxiety, id pump everything I was feeling into the games to the point where I would start to calm down enough to sleep. What I want to talk about next though is very senstivie and well it might be disturbing to some readers, I feel it is important to talk about these kinds of things but also feel I need to warn that it could be upseting to some.
 

One day I was at work, I had been trying to get promoted, I was also at university at the time and I knew that I didn’t have long left. I didn’t want to be one of those uni students who gets a degree and then just tries to use it to become a manager without having worked all of the way up, without having earned it through hard work. I had managed to become a supervisor but in order to be accepted as a manager one of the things you had to do where I worked was to be able to work in the kitchen successfully. Now I hated the kitchen it was very tough and demanding work, so my credit to anyone who does this kind of work on a regular basis but I certainly found it hard.

I was up in the kitchen one night and I had cooked all night, and had managed it quiet well especially considering my hatred for that particular work and environment. I had cleaned everything up and went through the whole shut down process making sure everything was turned off, checked and double checked, I had taken fridge and freezer temperatures, everything was perfect so its safe to say I felt exhausted but satisfied. I got the rubbish in bags and walked it out, throwing it in the trash. I could have just left then and there having finished my job, but decided that to be nice I would go through to the bar area and I would help them close down. I really used to have this idea that everyone was in it together, sure sometimes the job could be hell but we were all in it together, almost everyone leaned on everyone else for support, our mutual hatred of rude customers and upper management held us together like a firm glue.

I walked through from the back of house to front of house and there was a sudden flash of pain. I had been hit across the side of my head with a crow bar, I could feel the pain explode through my head, my vision blurred for a second and then a buzzing noise began to come from somewhere deep inside my head. I began to gain awareness of my surroundings again and I could tell I was surrounded by 5 or 6 guys, all of them were wearing Halloween style president masks. Before I could do anything else I was hit with crow bars again and again from various directions, in the end I took about 6 hits to my head. I never passed out but things got increasingly hazy from then on.

Somehow I made it from where I was to the bar, I kind of felt my way and crawled along the bar to behind it, and I ended up on the ground in the corner under the coffee machine. I could feel blood dripping from my head, luckily I had been wearing a leather cap to keep my hair covered and it seemed to have at least helped a bit. There were two girls behind the bar one was about 2 years older than me the other was maybe 5. It had become a robbery and hostage situation all in one. In the middle of this one of the robbers decided that he wanted to rape one of the girls, I got up stood in the way and pretty much suggested that it would happen over my dead body, this resulted in me receiving a punch to the mouth which cracked one of my wisdom teeth in half. It was all a blur from then on, but thankfully my intervention had been enough to stop someone getting raped, they left with the money and they were never caught. After being punched in the face I remember basically collapsing in the corner underneath the coffee machine. I was in a sitting position holding on to the walls because everything felt like it was spinning. I could feel my consciousness trying to escape from me part of me wanted to pass out and I could feel blood trickling down my head from underneath my hat. The only thing that kept going through my head was the fact that I didnt want to die because I wanted to see my daughter grow up, it seems silly to me now but at the time it felt like if I let myself pass out I would die. Of the two girls behind the counter with me the older one was the furthest away from me I can remember her crying and going on about how we were all going to die, she certainly didn't help matters. The other girl though had actually gone to school with me and was a few years above me, I remember her asking me quietly if I was all right, she actually seemed to be more concerned about me than herself and this is something that I will never forget, I remember telling her I was OK and not to worry but it was a complete lie for her sake. I didn't want her to get upset, I just wanted her to stay calm and stay still and stay safe.

When the robbers had left before the police arrived I remember pulling myself up of the floor and I actually walked across to where we keep the cutlery and I sat down and began to polish and wrap it, as well that's one of the tasks you do at the end of the night before everyone goes home. I never thought about calling an ambulance or about treating this as a big deal in anyway at all but when the police arrived they called an ambulance which came and fetched me. I remember arriving at hospital and sitting in the Emergency waiting room. I looked around the room seeing lots of other people there and then I looked to the telephone. It was very late at night and at the time me and my partner and child lived at my parents house, I knew that if my mum woke up at any point and found I hadn't gotten home that she would panic. I decided that I needed to call home, I needed to call home but let them know what had happened but try to make it not sound like a big deal. This in itself was terrifying how do you call your mum and dad and go ''hey I just got beaten in the head and I am in hospital so if I am late home don't worry about it''? I called and thankfully I got my dad, I remember playing it all casual like yeah I have been hit and I am in the hospital but I am cool, don't worry about it I will be home when I am home but bless my dad he knew better than to tell me he was coming and give me chance to argue, he just came down anyway and waited with me.

When I got seen it turned out that all I had was surface wounds on my head, I didn't need any stitches and instead I got given a pamphlet on concisions and got told I would be allowed to go home as long as there were people there to look after me. It turned out I had basically been saved by two factors one I was wearing a leather baseball cap which had slightly cushioned the blows but I also apparently have a super tough and thick skull.

I was off for a month and I was only getting very limited sick pay so I pulled out my old consoles and began to play on them and something about them touched me, they took me back to a simpler time, back to my childhood and in a time when I felt the most vulnerable in my life they actually made things seem a little bit safer, they added some normality to a very horrible and strange time. From that point on I began to spend more money on retro games, I began to talk more to other people online, but I also realised that I was living in an awful marriage. My partner never seemed to care about what had happened to me, she didn’t support me, my mother and father were the ones who were there for me, the ones who helped me try and piece myself back together. I remember that I initially tried to go back to work about 2 weeks after the event but I couldn't manage it, they kept trying to give me night shifts including on the same night of the week it had happened and I kept having these awful panic attacks where I would literally end up in the corner rocking and panicking. It felt so dehumanising, I kept thinking I am supposed to be a man, I am not supposed to be scared of anything. I felt guilty and I hated myself not only did I allow them to beat me up without hitting any of them back but now I was worried about returning to the place where it had happened, it wasn't just that I didn't want to go to work, if I could help it I didn't really want to leave my house. Work made no real effort to help ease me back in to work but when I had returned they made me go see a psychiatrist/psychologist he turned out to be a weird guy in a private house. I went to one session where he started by making me talk about the robbery but he then went on to ask me about my penis, my childhood, if I had any childhood traumas and to inform me that the company was paying the bill so I could come as much as I want and talk about any problems I had ever had with anything as he was cool with that as it would get him a bunch of money. This was my first experience of a mental health professional and it was an awful one which at the time seriously put me off them.

The return to work wasn't a good one and it wasn't really something I should have done but I kept telling myself that I needed to push forward and that if I ran from this job I would be allowing myself to be a coward, I kept telling myself that I needed to face it down. I was determined that I would still continue my quest to become a manager despite the fact that an area manager openly told me to my face that I was mentally damaged now and would therefore never make a good manager. I didn't have my branch managers confidence either she actively tried to bloke my progression as much as possible, I pushed for every promotion I wanted going above her. I could feel the stress mounting up and I tried my best to slow it down as much as I could. When I was going through bad periods and didn't think I could take any more pressure I would fail tests which I needed to pass in order to slow down my progress until I could deal with it. I had to deal with people belittling my failure doubting my intelligence and pushing there superiority in my face. Occasionally I would feel my mental health slip, I would find myself struggling and I would either use holiday time or sick time blaming viruses and such for my time off. It always seemed a lot easier to claim I was physically ill instead of mentally, you tell people you feel bad they ask you questions you tell them you have food poisoning or something else physical and they simply don't question it. I started to experience things which I latter learned to be part of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I would see what had happened during the robbery when I closed my eyes, I began to have nightmares about it, some of them were just like films with the events playing out beat for beat me reliving it unable to escape, others would deviate from the plot in a variety of ways. Soon I began to consider any dream that even featured that setting a nightmare as I would wake up in pools of perspiration. I began to hear this noise and to feel disorientated when I heard it, it was the sound one of the crowbar strikes had made when it had hit me across my ear, I would hear the noise and I would feel the pain as if the pain itself was travelling through time to make me suffer. It became hard to relax, hard to enjoy the better parts of life but after awhile it kind of became normal and I learned to deal with it. My life wasn't a good one but it was what it needed to be to keep putting food on my daughters table.

I managed to keep my mental health just about in line for quiet a number of years, sure I was suffering but I was also coping and I was also managing to keep it hidden from the vast majority of people and managing to do pretty much everything everyone expected of me. This is when I started getting a lot of allergic reactions. I went through this period of getting an allergic reaction and having my throat close or eyes swell more or less every other day for about 4 weeks and then I ended up at hospital. I was eventually diagnosed with Angiodema and Ulteceria, the doctor told me it was stress and he gave me his opinion that it was because I was under massive stress and that if I didn't do something to lower this stress I would be dead in 6 months time. So what did I do well I stuck my head down and went back to work and tried to carry on. I was the deputy manager at work by this point and I had done all of my paperwork and exams to take it to the next level all I needed was for my complete totally correct work book to be signed by someone higher than me. We had a new area manager and basically he refused to sign it, my boss had cried to him about how hard her life was and he took her side. She was one of those bosses who basically does nothing makes those below her do there work and her work but then tries to make out she is the only one who really works hard. The robbery had happened on a Sunday night and I had managed through talking to some of the past area managers and through getting really good and stock counting to not work many Sunday nights, on the occasions were I had to work them I would be in a state of panic from the moment I saw the rota until the point when I returned home with that shift done and out of the way. The thing is that my brain would tell me that if I worked on a Sunday night it would happen again the robbery the beating and to me the idea of that seemed worse than anything worse than dying even. My boss had convinced the new area manager that she shouldn't have to work Sunday nights she had convinced him that I should work all of them. I worked quiet a few of them and I even ran the whole pub several times while she was on holiday but the stress began to mount and mount.

I didn't know the moment that my time in that job would end. I thought I would work there until it killed me, it was a cultural thing I guess. I had always thought that a man provides for his children and that he pays his mortgage and that if he cant do these things then he isent a man. So when I went to the Doctors one day I didn't intend to stop working I went for help to cope. The Doctor wasn't actually much help but he did write me a sick note but I said something in his office which caused him to contact something called Crisis Team. Crisis Team are a mental health service called in when there is a concern that you might try to hurt yourself or attempt to commit suicide, I hadn't threatened to do that but I had threatened to jump down the stairs legs first in an effort to break my legs so that I didn't have to work. I am not sure if I had said it seriously or in jest to be totally honest but I do know that they idea had crossed my mind. This began a process where I was sent to various Therapists for assessment and it was determined that I had developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which for those who don’t know is basically when a traumatic situation keeps replaying in your mind, you can hear things and see things that happened before and you can feel the feelings. This diagnosis itself actually explained a lot it explained the noises I had heard, the things I had seen it reassured me that I wasn't crazy, I just had a problem.

I had to stop work and I had to see a specialist Trauma Therapist. Part of my therapy involved having to talk about what had happened to me in great detail but after in order to calm yourself and try to leave in an OK mood and not leave the therapy upset you had to have a happy place. A happy place was a place you went to in your mind where you felt safe and well happy. My happy place was in my bedroom playing Super Mario World on my Snes, jumping on dinosaurs, collecting power ups and finding hidden secrets. I owe the game so much, it was there for me. During this period I didn’t leave my house much except to go to therapy. I sat and played my games, worked on my systems and tried to put my head back together. One of the only things that could get me out of the house was the idea of visiting a market or a retro store chasing the various games. I had decided that I wanted to collect old games and that the real thrill of the chase for it was getting a game cheap, it gave me a purpose when all other purposes seemed to have dissapeared. I got lots of SNES games and megadrive games and for prices which compared to now were for virtually nothing. I didn’t have a lot of friends after this everyone seemed to be too worried that they would say the wrong thing or they were just far more interested in getting drunk than in offering anyone a helping hand or a bit of their time. I had my games and my daughter, my X wife would go see her friends and leave me to struggle, she got increasingly mean to me even telling me that she wished I would die so I wasn’t in her way. My games became my friends, my games became my lifeline. I cant say that the therapy cured me, I don't think you are ever cured of something like this, but it helped me put it in to perspective. My poor mental health led to my wife leaving me and me becoming a single parent but this was a good thing, no partner is always better than an unsupportive one.

Since then I have gone on to do a few different jobs sure none of them have been high flying but I have managed to work at keeping myself together at trying to enjoy my free time. My wants and perspectives have changed significantly, I now work shorter hours and concentrate more on trying to be happy and trying to make sure my daughter is happy than on trying to have an important career. For me I view mental health as something you need to constantly work on, you need to take time for yourself and you need to try to be open, if you need help ask for help but also look at those around you and help those who need it. I think that in telling the full story I have kind of come full circle. I can never get rid of or change what happened to me nor can I change what it has done to me as a person. No I can only accept it and keep moving forwards, keep trying to stay as healthy as possible and a large part of that is by stopping and appreciating the little things be they a good book or a darn good game. Video Games get a lot of bad press but I know that if it wasn't for games then I probably wouldn't be here, they provided a life line for me when I needed it the most.

I still have moments now and then when it all feels too much when it overwhelms me and I fear I could slip back to how it was before, that the depression, anxiety and panic attacks could take over again and I think this is most likely something that I will have to deal with until the day that I die. I still make my self little deals if you can do this thing you don't want to do then you can buy this game you want, if you do this then you can go look in this games store and look at what they have in the retro section. I don't know if this kind of self bribing is a good thing or not but I know it does the trick. I know that I am not the only one who has to deal with stuff like this but by sharing my story I hope that I can reach other people who have suffered in similar ways and let them know that they are not alone.