Category: self help

Driving in a rainstorm

Ellen Thomas2 Comments

I drove home from work on Friday in the most horrendous rainstorm. At one point I actually thought I wasn’t going to make it back.

I’ve thought about the journey this weekend and I think it’s quite symbolic.

Picture this: you run from your work building to your car, you have an umbrella but your shoes have managed to start squelching even though you’ve literally ran about 30 meters. By the time you’ve put your umbrella down as you attempt to scramble into your car with your rucksack fully disrupting your entry, your clothes and the inside of your driver door are dripping, your hair is an absolute write off and that cheap mascara you bought to last until payday when you can scrape together the money to buy benefit has truly and utterly let you down. (Enter Marilyn Manson, stage left). You sit staring out your windscreen whilst the rain absolutely hammers down, but you only sit for 30 seconds, despite knowing the safest and best thing to do would be possibly to wait a couple of minutes and see if it dies down. But no, home awaits. You have a good 50 minute car journey ahead of you, but heck, turn your podcast up extra loud, put your foot down, you’ll be cracking.

You give no second thought that your windscreen wipers are on there way out and that you are feeling less than well today. Who can’t cope with a bit of rain on their windscreen?! People do it every day mate. Pull yourself together!

As you pull onto the dual carriageway (which forms around 40 minutes of your 50 minute journey) the weather takes a turn for the worst, your windscreen wipers are now working overtime, slamming at the bottom and right hand side of your windscreen but still struggling to provide you with even 40% vision. Still, why pull over?! This is your commute, you do it every day, you have done for nearly 3 years and a lot of times in the rain. You’ll be fine.

The windscreen wipers are really trying now, they are trying to help, but you’re starting to hit major planes of water and you’re gripping so hard to the steering wheel that your fingers start to ache. You lean forward in your seat and start getting audibly worried. You turn your radio off and concentrate, hard. Still, it’s only a bit of rain, your hearts started beating a bit faster but.. yeah, this isn’t working.

You decide to think about this, none of this is working, you need to slow down, you’re not going to get home in the normal time, and you need to be wary of the other cars around you, and your own safety, you turn your lights right up, and pull into the slow lane. You slow down to 40mph, sit back and concentrate on your drive, people are starting to flash you, but they get over it and take over. You are safe and more comfortable at this speed, you will still get home, it just might take a bit longer. What you could do, is pull over for 5 minutes, let yourself calm down, phone your mum and tell her you’re worried. Stop for 30 minutes if you need to. Home will still be there and there is genuinely no rush. You relax a little, and just as you do the rain… the rain starts to calm. It’s still not a pleasant idyllic driving experience but it’s manageable. You decide to carry on, but maintain the slow pace.

The rain stops at some point, and your windscreen wipers are still screeching against the glass, working overtime to clear your vision, without you needing it. It’s time to turn them down, turn them off. You’re ok.

You manage the final 20 minutes of your journey and pull into your road and turn off your engine, you throw your head back against the seat and feel momentarily very emotional, you were really scared, and you didn’t enjoy that. But the relief that it was over, for some reason, on that Friday, meant a lot.

What was all that about, what was there to worry about?!

But stop. You’ve just driven 33 miles, you’ve driven 33 miles in the most horrendous rainstorm, you were scared at one point, but you slowed down, you slowed to a pace that you were comfortable with, you let others over take you and you quietened the noises that were distracting you. You concentrated, but not enough to hurt your fingers, or your head. You let the windscreen wipers do what they could, but knew that they could only do so much. You turned your lights up so you could see in front of you better. You could have pulled over, you could have stopped, for however long you wanted, it was your journey, you had nothing to rush for, but you decided not to, that was your choice, you managed it.

It took you a bit longer to get home on Friday, it was a rough one, but you got home, in your own time and you used what you could to make it easier for you to manage. No one else needed to know, no one needed to rush you, it was and is no one else’s journey. To some it would have just been a commute, a car journey, in the rain. No big deal. But for you, for you my sweet one it was a big deal, it was a drive in a rainstorm, a bloody horrible one, and you got there. You did that by yourself. Good for you kid.

Hang in there.

Ellen on the Edge xx

Give up the booze for a bit

Ellen Thomas4 Comments

Alcohol surrounds everything. It’s surrounded my social life and me since the moment I turned 18. I have very few “tee-total” friends and have spent a lot of my weekends over the past 7 years drinking alcohol. Drinking alcohol is fun, and for me (especially in the past 2 years) it didn’t always end in disaster. There’s dancing on tables, lots of loud singing and screaming, meandering conversations that wound on late into the night, and much laughter. Me and my closest friends are regulars at the millennial English tradition of “Prosecco brunch” where we would in a very classy style, scream at waiters to fill us up faster as we downed glasses of cheap Prosecco. It is great. But there were also the darker repercussions of drinking, I hate feeling out of control, my anxiety and feelings of utter hopelessness come thick and fast when I wake up with a hangover and I was increasingly becoming appreciative of Sunday’s well spent.

Alcohol is a depressant. It’s a fact.

In the months leading up to the breakdown I experienced in August 2019 I was really not enjoying drinking, but was craving the effect of delusion and escapism it gave me from my own thoughts. I began regularly drinking, everyday. I would have a couple of glasses of wine every evening and was finding that, momentarily, this was taking the edge off. And due to its casual nature, went completely unnoticed by anyone close around me. But this edge was only taken off for a very limited time and boy was I paying for it. When I was going out with my friends I was finding it difficult to get “fun drunk” like I had in the past and was feeling like I wanted to go home when I went on nights out.

I realised I might need a break from alcohol following one evening in July, when on a weeknight, I was home alone, and drank a bottle and a half of wine. I was watching a TV programme about mental health and was struggling with the content, and so rather than turning it off, I turned to the bottle in order to numb how much I was relating to the sad and raw reality of the programme. This wasn’t right.

It was the following week that I went to the doctors and described the slippery slope I felt I was on, and that I felt depression was consuming me. I was signed off work and placed on some medication.

Like every other millennial, I’m a google searcher. I google everything, and usually look for the worst case scenario before I stop. I was googling the medication I was on the moment I got it. “Will it make me gain weight”, “Will it make my hair fall out”, “Will it kill me”, and the clincher “Can you drink alcohol”.

I knew what I was looking for with the final question and it wasn’t what I thought I was; “You can continue to drink alcohol while taking sertraline but having the two together might make you very sleepy and unsteady on your feet. … Drinking alcohol every day, or in large amounts, can make your symptoms worse and the sertraline will not get the best chance to act.” This was enough, this was my get out clause, this was the excuse my brain needed to stop. I wasn’t to drink for the next few months, and give the medication the best chance to help me. After that I would see how I felt and may continue to drink, but hopefully I would be more mindful following a break.

What I quickly realised however was that I was relieved, I was relieved because I had an excuse, and I never had had one. I was able to approach the dreaded “don’t you drink?!” question by explaining that it didn’t agree with the medication I was on. My body was thankful for the break and Tesco own brand orange fizzy is a new favourite. But that got me thinking… why the BLOODY hell should I feel the need to have a viable excuse, why should I need an excuse at all. We live in a society which excludes non-drinkers as “boring”. However people don’t often stop to think about the background that may surround this lifestyle choice, the dark and extremely painful past that someone may have with their relationship with alcohol, the despair and the fact it may exasperate an underlying condition. And actually whether it is any of their goddamn business.

I’ve not drank alcohol for 2 months now, whilst this is a choice, I appreciate that I have not occupied spaces that have massively encouraged me to drink and I have no intention of ‘never touching a drop again’, living an openly sober life, or an intention of making it a big deal. I would never insist on sitting and preaching to people about why they should stop and take up a sober trial, least of all, it’s none of my business. But its working for me right now, my mental health is improving at the moment and I feel good. I am increasingly going off the idea of alcohol and would quietly advocate giving it a go, even just for a short period, for your physical and mental health, and your confidence. Our society is so dependant on consuming something to numb reality or give us an altered rose tinted fun experience, that when you stop turning to alcohol, you realise that real life, and feeling raw experiences with nervous clarity, can be just as much of a high as that tequila shot.

Hang in there.

Ellen on the Edge xx