Five Blogs of Thanks - 5th Anniversary of The Anxiety Tracker - Introduction

Hi all,

If you had said to me five years ago that I would set up a blog and still be writing posts in five years’ time, I would not have believed you.  Mainly because things like blogs often don’t have longevity without gaining financial incentive but also because there was a significant chance that I could have had a nervous breakdown at some point during that five years rendering me unable to write blogs or anything else for that matter.

So I feel it is an occasion to mark and I am going to do this in the form of five blogs starting tomorrow and posted each day until the anniversary on 15 June.  They will each thank five different ‘groups’ of people, people without whom I wouldn’t be able to write this today, people to whom I owe a huge amount of debt and gratitude for what they have given me, knowingly or unknowingly over the years.  Each of the five categories has been deliberately and carefully chosen so to encompass as many of the people I can that have contributed to my stability from crippling anxiety. This hadn’t long left me back on 15 June 2012, but now it is buried much deeper, allowing me to live a more fulfilling life, albeit not without its anxiety and non-anxiety related challenges.

The fact is, without the influence of these other people, I dread to think where I would be.

This blog is the introduction to this series and to set the scene.  Where was I five years ago and where am I now?

Date	15 June 2012	15 June 2017
Age	3 days away from my 25th birthday	3 days away from my 30th birthday
Living situation	One month into my first ever house-share situation; only just moved out of my parents’ home	Two years owning a home having shared two different houses for about 2.5 years previously
Job	Four years into my job at a local authority	Three and a half years into my job with a charity
Education	Four years since graduating	Nine years since graduating
Relationship status	Single	Single
Therapy	Days after finishing fifty sessions of CBT	None since the aforementioned CBT concluding five years prior
Friends	Several still living in Stafford	As aforementioned, with friendships even stronger if anything
Family	Not close with any except parents	As aforementioned; mum has recently been diagnosed with dementia
No. blog posts	0	134 (assuming I post these six as planned!)
Anxiety level (/10)	6, ranging from 5 to 9	3, ranging from 2 to 6
Overall happiness (/10)	3, ranging from 1 to 5	6, ranging from 5 to 8

I appreciate that I am writing this five days in advance of the comparison, but unless I suddenly find the girl of my dreams, get sacked and as a consequence my home becomes repossessed this side of Thursday, I can be fairly confident that what I have put here will still be the case.  What this shows is some definite improvements which, okay, may come naturally with age. But aside perhaps from the relationship status, everything else that has changed has come as a surprise in the past, as indeed has not requiring any more therapy. I never thought after finishing those CBT sessions that ‘that would be it’ – of course, it may yet not be.

You can read through my blogs for more context but at that I will leave it for now.  All it remains for me to write by way of an introduction is twofold:

What are my top five most read blogs in the past five years?

1.       Moving on… again (22 May 2015)

2.       The New Job (19 January 2014)

3.       Zzzzzz… (5 July 2015)

4.       Anxiety@ The Shared House (8 March 2015)

5.       The Confidence Issue (27 July 2014)

I wish to also draw your attention to some of my favourite blogs and series:

The Seven Steps to Stability series (May 2014)

Guest blog about arachnophobia (July 2014)

The Anxiety@ series (starting with this one) (November 2014 – March 2015)

My (constructive) rant about social media (November 2016)

My plea to government about mental health in schools (January 2017)

And finally, as I’ve said, the next five blogs, one to be posted each day up to and including Thursday, the fifth anniversary of this blog, will thank those people that made me jump from a 3 to a 6 out of 10 for happiness and fall from a 6 to a 3 in terms of anxiety in those five years. 

Thank you ALL!

Best wishes,

Al