I’m Not Scared Anymore

I’m sat writing this blog post on an airbed in a flat in Nijmegen, Netherlands. I’m writing it after the first flight I’ve ever taken by myself. I arrived in Nijmegen after something of an adventure. Yeah, let’s call it that..

So something that stems back to my teenage years, is the fact that I’m a massive worrier. I worry about a lot of things, and manage to get myself all worked up about scenarios that haven’t even happened yet. I vividly play out how a situation is going to go in my head, and it usually doesn’t go well, so I get more anxious, and often times end up not doing stuff because I don’t want it to go the way I pictured it.

But as I sat alone in Cardiff airport’s finest coffee shop, I was pondering why it was that I was nervous about this flight. There was a point a few years ago where I was nervous about taking trains by myself, but now I do that pretty much every day. There was a point where I was utterly terrified of the London tube, but now I’m usually the one leading the way when we go to London. And I realised it’s because I worried that, in all of those travel situations, I’d find myself on the wrong train, in an unfamiliar place, and lost.

Now, the flight was fine (there was free coffee and biscuits, and I sat next to a top bloke called Kevin, so that helped). And once I got off the plane, it was apparently a single, one way train from Amsterdam to Nijmegen. 20 minutes into the 90 minute journey, an announcement comes through on the train, all in Dutch. I assumed it was just a “welcome aboard this train..” and carried on falling in love with the scenery. Turns out, the announcement was detailing an incident on the line, and this train was no longer going to Nijmegen. And I should’ve gotten off at the last stop. Now, rather than one simple train ride, I had to hop back and forth between small stations in the Dutch countryside. Literally the very thing that I was worried about with this journey. But there was a Spanish psychology student, an Indian business man, and me (it sounds like the start of a bad joke), all in this same position. And you know what? My body’s adrenaline kicked in, and I entered that “hero mode” you go into on Guitar Hero. I found myself leading the way down platforms towards trains. Because I knew that my end goal was to get to Nijmegen, and nothing was going to stop me. I think if I’d actually stopped to let the situation sink in, I probably would’ve curled up in a foetal ball and cried. But I didn’t. I made it. And the unlikely band of brothers that were with me made it too. We were in the same situation, and we helped each other through it.

I used to be afraid that I could never get better. I used to be scared that the misery that had descended upon me was going to cling to me, and that’s the way my life was going to be from now on. I used to worry that no-one would listen to me if I talked to them; that my problems weren’t worth their time. But, like my Nijmegen train situation, once the worst has actually happened, what is there to be scared of and worried about? You’re in that situation, thrown in at the deep end, and you just… deal with it. You find ways around it. Now unfortunately for me, self-harm was a knee jerk reaction to my bad situation. But then writing and playing music (which didn’t have that same crappy guilty feeling as after self-harming) was the reaction to self-harm, even if it wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision for me.

Like I worried about catching a wrong train/flight/bus and getting lost, and being in an unfamiliar place, I think the process of leaving behind self-harm can be kinda scary. Once it becomes familiar, it becomes what you know. It becomes your go-to way of coping. But you know what? Get yourself out of that comfort zone, put yourself in an unfamiliar situation, and your survival instincts kick in, and you’ll surprise yourself at just how much you’re actually capable of. If you’ve got that end goal in sight of getting better (or getting to Nijmegen) then don’t let anything stop you. Once you decide that you’re ready to leave self-harm behind, then don’t let a single bad day ruin a month of progress.

And there will be people who are in the same situation as you. There are people who’ve been through the same situation as you. There are people there to offer you a helping hand. Hopefully you find a few of them through Heads Above The Waves.

But if the worst has already happened, then what is there left to be worried about? Stop worrying, and start living.

– Si