Who am I and what on earth is this all about?

Bloody hell where do I begin? I have been meaning to start this blog since the beginning of 2013 but just haven't. Partly down to laziness, partly down to my time being utterly consumed by my degree and partly down to being utterly HTML dyslexic (that is a thing I swear). But alas, I've sat down on a Sunday afternoon meaning to start my final assignments and the ultimate procrastination technique has actually become something productive. Half a pack of polos and 6 hours later, here we are. Who'd of known eh?

Who am I?My name is Emily Rose Antonia Akerman. I am 21 years old and originally from a small town in the middlest middle of England. So after 19 years in a small town bubble working as a barista (that's a coffee nerd fyi) and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I moved to Brighton. I began my BA (Hons) Education degree aiming to become a primary ed teacher and now am aiming towards working within the youth work sector, targeting mental health. Before this though, I had been accepted into London Met to study Fashion Marketing and Events Management. Oh how things change during a two year gap year.

What is this all about?
This is the long bit. Go grab a cup of tea and a hobnob or something. When I was around 11 years old, I began having night terrors. For those of you who have never had a night terror, or even heard of one; it might just be the most impossible thing to explain. Even I'm not sure what was really going on. All I remember is having the most terrifying, realistic yet surreal dreams. The one I remember most vividly is being able to see a wooden train set. I knew my mum and younger brother weren't there but I couldn't see them, just the train set. We were playing along quite nicely but then everything started to go wrong; the trains would come off the track and the tracks would fall apart. I remember shouting stop it, stop it, in my dream and getting really distressed. I woke up and ran downstairs. I started crying hysterically and apologising to my mum and dad. I didn't want to go back upstairs at all (something I'd later recognise as the flight or fight response).

These night terrors slowly started to manifest into panic attacks whilst I was awake and conscious of my actions. I started to hyperventilate and think that I was dying. I would cry hysterically and tell my mum to call an ambulance because I was having a heart attack. Nothing could calm me down or convince me otherwise; bear in mind my mum is a nurse but even that didn't work. All I could do was ride it out. I would have panic attacks on a near enough every other day basis. I was eventually diagnosed with panic disorder when I was 15, when the doctor gave me a print out on breathing exercises, some prescription for propanolol and sent me on my way. The propanolol gave me hallucinations for the first few weeks. I distinctly remember walking through Birmingham with my then boyfriend and suddenly stopping, thinking I had just stepped in a puddle of pennies. It also made my heart slow down so much I could feel it getting slower and slower. Despite this, it sort of worked and I managed to get to the point where I could go for months without having a major panic attack and only take propanolol when I really needed it.

This was the case up until July 2012. On the 3rd July 2012, my world came crumbling down when I found out that one of my best friends and former boyfriends had taken his own life after a long struggle with bipolar disorder. To this day, I still struggle to come to terms with it. It was without a doubt one of the worst days of my life and that more than likely rings true for the masses of his friends and family who came together for his funeral, unable to comprehend why James was no longer with us and why couldn't we have stopped him. Despite going through a difficult grief process, I moved down to Brighton in the August. James' ashes had been scattered underneath the pier and so there was some comfort in knowing he was close.

Without knowing it, my panic disorder was rearing its ugly head again but through the guise of what I came to understand was generalised anxiety disorder. It all happened after a few weeks of complete and utter breathlessness. It felt like there was an elephant sat on my chest. It got to the point where I called a non-emergency ambulance line because I thought I was dying. Despite this harrowingly familiar feeling, I felt 100% certain that it was nothing to do with my panic. After a long doctors appointment with a very strange Transylvanian doctor who specialised in mental health, it would seem that I was experiencing anxiety attacks. This feeling of breathlessness started to manifest into ye old panic attacks. The joy. Because I knew I was having an anxiety attack, I would panic that I would have a panic attack and of course the inevitable would happen.
I hadn't realised that I was anxious. I'm usually a very confident, bubbly person. But without realising, I had become withdrawn, I wouldn't speak in class and would very rarely go out and make mischief like a true fresher is supposed to. I would instead, sit and worry about my family, my workload, what others thought of me, money etc etc. I became so overwhelmed, I literally could not see a way out.

To rub salt into a very deep and very messy wound, I had been suffering with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) for around 3 years. SAD is a seasonal depression, caused by a faulty hypothalamus, not letting the happy chemicals in my brain work like they should. Normal things that make me happy such as puppies or watching people fall over on YouTube just won't do it for me during these horrid winter months. SAD is another one of those things which is so hard to explain unless you have experienced it or have watched someone go through it. I remember getting so angry at a friend for claiming that 'SAD is just a cry for attention, everyone gets a bit moodier in the winter'. I wanted to make them switch with me for a few months and then come back and tell me if they 'just felt a bit moodier'. There is nothing about SAD which makes me want to flaunt it as a cry for attention. Winter should be fun. Christmas is in the winter and no-one should be depressed at Christmas. When else can you eat your body weight in desserts without shame? But the truth is that I spent Christmas 2012 in bed because I physically and emotionally could not bring myself to get up.

Very few people know about my plethora of mental health issues. It's not something I personally like to divulge to those who don't know me. In fact, some of my very best friends still don't know a lot of these things. And so truthfully, the reason why I didn't start this blog earlier might be down to the fact that I wasn't sure how much of myself I wanted expose when I'd become such an expert at pretending to be "normal". But after reading so many inspirational celebrities, YouTubers and bloggers come out and admit that they suffer (I'm looking at you; Catherine ZJ, Zoella and Tanya Burr); I decided that if I could help at least one person, I have done myself and everyone who sits under the mental health umbrella proud.

And so here I am, feeling pretty emotionally naked. But most of all, and quite shockingly so, I feel relieved. I feel a bit like I could go run into the pouring rain naked and dance a bit. Although I feel like that isn't going to help the whole mental health label. I'm not too sure where to which direction this blog will end up going, if it even goes anywhere that is. But I'm doing this for myself. I'm doing it for anyone out there who ever feels like they might lose hope. For anyone who feels alone. For anyone who is a bit of a wallflower. For anyone who wants to be able to talk about why Illamasqua Skin Base might just be the holy grail of all foundations, but also talk about why they feel like they have no reason to get up in the morning. And I'm doing this for James.

Stay excellent, all of you.

e, x