I’m exhausted from stress – but I know sharing how I feel will help

Writing a column like this doesn’t obligate me to share personal stuff, but very often I am compelled to do so. Commentary on events of the day is all very well, but in a world where everyone has a hot take on everything, it can be wearisome to find anything new to say. Look, I hate the idea of war, think the NHS could do with more money and wish that football would get rid of VAR. You see? Most of my views are perfectly reasonable. And in the social media age, reasonable gets you nowhere.

My own experience of the world, like everyone else’s, is unique, so I often feel more comfortable sharing that. Most of the time, I feel fairly content with life. I have love around me, I have passions and interests and I enjoy my work. Life is good. But no one wants to read about that, do they? Sharing stories of how privileged and blessed I feel is just smug and irritating.

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More interesting are the dark and twisty moments in life, where I feel uncomfortable and scared, sad and angry, lonely and anxious. These are the parts of the human experience we’re all familiar with. The scary bits that require real strength to get through. This is where I am right now. I’m in a fug. A pit. A rocky patch. A miserable, anxious shithole.

Why did it start? Probably because I’ve had a busy 12 months, full of small to medium-sized challenges (a house move, some parenting difficulties, a huge workload, the odd argument here and there) that built up slowly, almost imperceptibly, into a giant weight of stress that, about a month ago, suddenly dragged me under.

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The typical day-to-day feelings of stress morphed into an all-consuming sense of worry. Everything in my life started to feel precarious and scary. Work, money, family, friendships: I started to catastrophise about all of it. I could not relax. My body felt on edge constantly. I even lost my appetite. 

It’s happened before, when I was younger. Back then, I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I thought I’d gone mad and I didn’t want to tell anyone. Now, I can see the bigger picture. I am exhausted. Everything has got on top of me. Stress has somehow frayed my nerves and I need to take a step back to recover.

That means rest, exercise, professional support and (in my case) meds. But more importantly, it means having the right people around me with whom I can share this stuff. Sadness can thrive in the dark. Back when I kept my mental health struggles a secret, I would wrestle with shame and feelings of isolation. I would imagine I was the only person who had ever felt this way. I would exhaust myself by trying to maintain a public face of positivity, while secretly crying inside.

But these days I share. Probably I overshare. I have written and spoken about the way I’m feeling and I have had incredibly helpful messages of support from friends, family and the odd stranger too.

When people reach out, offer understanding and share their own experiences, a weight is lifted. I am on the road to recovery now, feeling slightly better every day. The most significant factor in that is the sense that people have my back, they understand what I am going through and they are rooting for me to get better. Often, they assure me that I really will get better, which is a great thing to hear on days when I think the Black Dog might never leave my side.

Forgive me if I’ve written similar before. I’m not always miserable. I’m mostly happy and positive. But, like I say, I rarely bother to share that stuff. When I’m feeling low and suffering from stress, getting it all down on the page makes my problems feel less overwhelming.

It helps to remind me that this stuff comes and goes and that I am strong enough to deal with it. We all are. Being human is a beautiful thing most of the time. But once in a while, it can really suck.

Read more from Sam Delaney on his Substack.

His new book Stop Sh**ting Yourself: 15 Life Lessons That Might Help You Calm the F*ck Down is out now (Little, Brown, £22) and is available from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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