What the f*** happened to you?

This time last year, I fell into a bad place, quite suddenly. Someone I cared about was struggling with something, and I tried to help, but the whole thing ended up overwhelming me. For a few weeks, I couldn;t think about anything else. I was anxious and miserable. It was the first time I had felt like that in years. I’d started to imagine that between sobriety, therapy and all the mental health crap I write and talk about in my professional life, I had managed to immunise myself from that type of sickness.

I was wrong. But thankfully, I was able to identify the problem early and take action to prevent it from getting worse. I got better after about a month. And as for the person I’d been worrying about, they found a way to deal with their problems without me having to fix everything. They got better. People usually do. It was a lesson learned.

Since then, life has been good, but I have taken a pretty long break from posting here. I think that I reached the point where reflecting on my emotional and mental health was a bit counterproductive. I love getting messages from people who say my writing has helped them. But I started to wonder if it was helping me anymore. After my wobble last year, I just wanted to get on with living life, enjoying the present and embracing whatever came my way.

But after a decade of sobriety, and five years of writing and talking about mental health and sobriety for a living, I felt I had said all I had to say. At least for a while. I was exhausted by it.

Luckily, I still know how to have fun. I make a large part of my living from talking bollocks . I spend my spare time watching West Ham, which requires a certain reliability and sense of humour. I only really like spending time with people who make me laugh and don’t take life too seriously. My wife and kids play these roles brilliantly.

Since I started this newsletter over five years ago, the discussions around mental health in wider society have got louder. This is generally a good thing. More conversations mean more access points for people who are struggling. Normalising this stuff removes stigma and shame. But at the same time, it doesn’t half get boring.

I wonder if I have anything new or original to offer the discussion? I’ve shared a lot.I don’t regret it. It helped to get things off my chest, and I know that it helped some other people, too.

But I reckon there is such a thing as over-reflection.

I’m not going back on all the stuff I’ve shared here in the past. I’m just acknowledging that I got to the stage where it wasn’t doing me much good. There’s a line where raking over your inner life just gets a bit suffocating. So I stepped away for a while.

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How do you identify the line between helpful reflection and over-reflection? I think it’s about working out what happened to you. It might or might not have been traumatic or devastating. It might have seemed trivial at the time. But it did happen, and it left its bruises. All of us are made up of these moments and experiences, and they all leave their marks. They shape the way we feel about things forever. They impact how we respond to people around us. They affect our relationships in ways we can’t always see.

Unless we look at those things, reflect on them, understand their significance in our lives, and try to process them, they will keep controlling us. A lot of people (especially blokes - and especially blokes of my generation) do not allow themselves to do that because, well, it seems like a bit of a hassle. Also, we all like to think of ourselves as strong and resilient. Nobody wants to be a whinging, navel-gazing pain in the arse, right?

You don’t have to be. You just need to know what happened to you. Stop denying it to yourself. Accept that the losses, big and small, the mean words or the disappointments, the harm you experienced personally or the harm you saw done to people you loved - it all had an impact.

When I went through a bit of a sticky patch last year, I was surprised by how quickly it dragged me down into a state of anxiety. I thought I’d done all the therapy and reflection and had immunised myself from those sorts of lulls. But then I realised that doing that sort of work doesn't fix you permanently. You’ve got to keep at it regularly, like maintenance of a car. You don't have to do it every day, but you can’t fully abandon it either, or it’ll creep up and kick you in the bollocks.

Work out what happened to you, accept it, forgive yourself, and try to get on with life. Because life can be a huge amount of fun.

I think I’ll leave it there for now.

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