Managing my life’s dopamine rollercoaster

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Recently, I realised how boring I had made my own life.

That’s not to say my life is objectively ‘boring’. To many it probably seems I do lots of fun and adventurous things. But subjectively, it’s felt unexciting. The things I’ve been doing haven’t felt particularly enjoyable.

In the quest for commitment, consistency and hailing ‘the grind’, I seemed to lose the idea that things were meant to be fun.

It’s probably no wonder that by the beginning of this year I found it so hard to motivate myself to do pretty much anything. Everything seemed tiring and exhausting.

Through this process, I think I lost a part of myself. I was modelling myself on the ‘boringly consistent’ types – gym everyday, unremarkable but consistent small gains leading to exponential growth.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to be said about this way of being. And I’ve certainly learnt lots about the importance of committing myself to what I say I will do.

I think I have been suppressing my chaotic nature. I’m an emotional being who thrives upon a mix of planned and spontaneous excitement. It’s what makes me buzz and really thrive in life.

In the quest to be regulated individuals within a society, I think a lot of us implicitly learn that being quirky is something to lose with age. Such ways of being are tolerated with youth, but in adulthood we are meant to give up such frivolities.

In my own effort to grow up and become independent, I think I lost that sense of fun and freedom in life. Everything needed to be a goal to be achieved, or something to improve upon. Only in my 30s am I taking the time to regain my sense of liberty.

My life realisations don’t come without challenges. My life feels more like a rollercoaster than ever – with greater vulnerability comes greater lows. These can be pretty damned tough. But the highs are also far more satiating and joyous. And now that I’ve experienced them, I couldn’t imagine a life without those amazing feeling again.

I’ve realised how much I enjoy people’s company. In some senses this isn’t a surprise for those people who have seen me going around speaking to people. Yet I’ve also had intense periods of reclusiveness too. I think this paradoxical nature has made it hard to understand what was going on. But I think this has been down to me finding it hard to find my place. In those spaces, it was easier to withdraw into a nihilistic pessimism to protect myself.

The challenge now for me is to figure out how I ride this rollercoaster without crashing. As my energy slowly returns, the temptation is to just fill my days with more people and events. Yet I’m not actually at a state where my body can quite handle that either.

Part of understanding my neurodivergence is seeing that my brain does not work in a particularly logical way. The more logical way of seeing the world would be that we have so much units of energy in a day and that therefore we can complete that many activities.

But for me, sometimes a small task can take me hours, whilst at other moments I can also do an incredible amount in an extremely short amount of time.

Before ever realising that my brain was wired different, I always saw the importance of momentum. There have been weeks where I have done the amount that people would do in several months, whereas the last few months have been extremely slow going. There were points that I put off simple tasks like folding my laundry for weeks on end, only to find it took me 15 minutes.

It’s why it’s so important to connect with ourselves to really understand how to live. The moment we try to overly rationalise the way we work as humans is the moment that we lose our understanding of what our bodies are really saying.

As an example, let’s take the idea of a night out. Many of us experienced this during our university days. We kept insisting to our friends that we were tired to go out. Later on we find ourselves buzzing with energy on the dance floor at 3am.

If our energy was based upon rational, measurable units, this would not be possible. Yet our bodies abilities to seemingly create energy is abundant. It’s probably why we feel more awake after exercising than before it too.

What makes this difficult is understanding the difference between what activities will revitalise us, and when we are doing something by simply struggling through. This is confusing because the same activities can be both things depending on the circumstances.

I’m much more on the overcommitment scale of things. I love having new and exciting things for me each day. But I’ve also learnt the importance of empty time without needing to rush around too. I’m still a work in progress on this, and probably will be for the rest of my life

But fundamentally, it’s important to keep doing things that feel fun. Fun is so subjective that sometimes these can be very mundane things. I see that for many people, they don’t need their lives to be so spontaneous – they are happy with the daily rhythm and stability.

But I also see that I am not one of those people.

It’s coming home. Or at least I did, I think.

Just as I arrived at St Pancras, my internet reconnected. I refreshed the BBC Sports page to find Ollie Watkins score a 90th minute winner. Welcome home. Perhaps football will be coming home too? But is the UK actually home for me anymore?

Not only that, but this was the first time coming back to the UK since the General Election. The result was both a mix of momentousness and anticlimax. For the first time in a long while I felt like I could actually be somewhat content with the result. That’s probably the first time in the last ten elections I’ve followed.

Sadly, being actually into politics meant that I had to kill my own joy by delving deeper into the analyse. An increase in the far right vote in the UK is hardly a cause for celebration. Nor is the fact that in real terms, this was more the Conservatives losing their votes than necessarily Labour gaining a whole lot.

More fundamentally though, I find myself falling into the sense of questioning how much will really be different. The mood of the country hasn’t felt all that different in the short time I’ve been in London, whilst even a massive majority for Labour can’t hide the fact that there is serious turmoil and economic difficulty. The elephant in the room of Brexit is going to be ignored for as long as possible.

I used to believe far more in a centrist ideology. My ideal approach was around uniting people through sensible reform to bring meaningful change. But my recent reflections have made me doubt whether this actually works all that well. Our societal fear of discomfort means that the softly softly approach can often lead to avoiding them.

Maybe I’m accepting the more radical side of myself. I thought that the answer has been to tone down my beliefs to make them more palatable. But I’ve actually found that this makes me just compromise on my core beliefs.

So here we are with a new government. I do imagine it will be an improvement. Yet in a bid to win the election through being more centrist, it’s hard to see it being much fundamental change. The rhetoric on immigration is still similar. Many Muslim family members are dismayed at the hypocrisy around Israel. Meanwhile Wes Streeting wants to keep the ban against puberty blockers for trans people.

These events also happened to coincide with my 31st birthday. I still am not sure how I feel about birthdays, yet this one was nice and quaint. I have little desire to overly reflect on the last 12 months as I have done in the past. Perhaps that will come in a time when I am feeling less fatigued and burnt out.

Connecting to my roots isn’t just about coming back to the UK. Whilst I am British, I am also Bangladeshi. The actual reason I came across was to complete my application for my Bangladeshi National ID at the High Commission.

It’s a challenging experience in many respects. I went to the High Commission with forms filled in in Bengali. I can’t really read them very well. Most of the conversation was in Bengali, of which I can only speak at a broken level. It doesn’t help either that our language is actually Sylheti, which whilst similar, was different.

A lot of this was trying to negotiate the form correctly. It’s not so easy to write the correct full address for our ancestral home in the village, especially when it needs to be written in Bengali. Fortunately, my brother had already gone for an appointment, so I could learn from the corrections he had to figure out. Still, I did need to phone my dad just to figure out some specific questions.

It’s hard not to feel some level of dysphoria with the different identity connections I have. I find it embarrassing that I can’t speak my maternal tongue better, whilst my connection with the UK, my land of birth, feels pretty mixed. I don’t really have too much energy to properly comprehend the Belgian or EU elections quite honestly, but suffice to say the results were not feel-good.

Right now, I’m looking to just connect to my own sense of beliefs. Sometimes, it’s not worth trying to mentally ‘figure out’ what all these things mean. After all, if I do enough social deconstruction, the idea of being from a certain land is, in reality, a figurative concept.

What really matters is where I am now. And I am grateful for what I have.

Keeping focus on the positives in our lives

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This week, I’m doing a speech around how to keep focus on the positives at my local Toastmasters club.

I chose this speech because it seemed a pretty relatable topic. If you’ve been following my writing, you are probably aware by now that I’ve been facing a fairly substantive burnout period. So it’s been particularly important to keep the positives in mind.

When our life routine gets thrown up in such a huge way, it can be hard to not fall into a sense of despair. I’ve questioned myself a lot. Sometimes I’ve felt guilty for taking time for myself. Other times, I’ve wondered whether I’ll ever recover again.

These are legitimate questions, and is a key part of the process. Nonetheless, solely focusing on them only leads to a downward spiral of anguish. Our brains tendency to think negatively is much stronger than its ability to look at the positives. It’s part of our survival mechanism, and it was necessary to keep ourselves alive during our evolution. So it is up to us to set a better balance.

The beauty is that every situation can have a positive if we choose to see it. For example, my fatigue has given me a chance to rest my body in a way that I’ve not really done for over a decade. I’m breaking out of the pattern of always needing to have a plan of what I am doing, instead allowing time to simply be in flow with life.

I believe that this burnout period happened for a reason, and I would not have faced it if I wasn’t able or ready to. The situation has pushed me to look into understanding my own brain, and in particular my neurodivergence.

Despite reading about psychology extensively in the last five years, I had little idea that my brain functioning was so atypical. It’s only when I started looking more into autistic burnout symptoms and reading further into it that I had any clue to better understanding myself.

This revelation has put so many things in my life in context: such as understanding why my reaction to things are so different to the people around me, and why I found it so tricky to make friends throughout my life.

This period is a relatively short time in the wider span of my life. So I know that taking the time now is not making me ‘miss out’ on anything. On the contrary, I think it sets me up for a far more joyous and expansive life for the coming decades.

The best thing I can do for myself is enjoying the moment I have now, as well as appreciate the things I do have. I’m very grateful that I have the space and support systems to allow me to recover. I also appreciate myself for having constructed my life in a way that allows me to have these things too.

When I hone in on this space of gratitude, my life feels lighter and easier. I can feel the anxiety and stress lifting. Life becomes just that little bit sweeter.

(more…) “Keeping focus on the positives in our lives”

Overcoming the fear of letting people down

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I’ve always prided myself on the ability to be consistent. Generally, when I say I will do things, I tend to do them.

Whilst this is a rather positive trait to have, I’m also starting to see where it can fall into unhelpful behaviours too.

This recent period of fatigue has been a moment where I really needed to go into cocoon mode. I’m not the biggest fan of the cliché of prioritising oneself, but here I really needed to make sure I took the time to rest, in particular reducing external contact.

That’s been tricky for me. I’m someone who wants to make space for people in my life and be available for them. It’s only become evident recently how difficult I find it to say no if someone wants to see or do something with me. I quickly feel guilty if I turn people down, and the feeling of guilt can hit me pretty hard.

I’m currently in my recovery period, so my energy levels are at a higher point than they were a few months ago. My internal social bee wants to spend more time with people, so I’ve been scheduling more socialising time. Yet this has been a challenge since it can be unclear as to how much energy I’ll really have on the day. My tendency is to overestimate, and overschedule.

I’ve found it a real challenge to live up to my (probably unrealistic) challenges of not letting people down. I get very stressed at the idea of being late to a social appointment (say by 5-10 minutes). It’s a bit of a recipe for disaster in my current state. My executive dysfunction makes simple tasks of getting up and taking a shower can feel heavy and confusing, meaning I can take a long time just to get out of bed. This doesn’t help for meeting up with people at a pre-agreed time.

It’s probably an ‘autism thing’, but I find it difficult to cope with sudden shifts in plans if they were quite big. Whilst I’m fine with someone no longer being able to make a coffee date, if it’s something bigger (e.g. an event I’m revolving my day around) I can feel lost when such plans fall through last minute.

It’s probably why I’m also so keen to avoid cancelling things for other people. After all, I’d rather be the solution, rather than the problem. And for the most part, I think the people around me appreciate this part about me.

Yet it also means that I can end up forcing myself to go to things, even when it might not have been a good idea. Whilst I love the idea of ‘being my word’, I also can recognise that I do not need to be an infallible human.

I never quite saw myself as a people pleaser a few years ago, but my recent experiences on the social side have opened my eyes to how needy I can get for people’s approval. In these situations, my motivating driver is a sense of guilt, rather than an actual will to be with someone. Guilt doesn’t tend to be a particularly helpful driver in the long run.

I think the solution is to be light with ourselves. I’m not a failure of a human being for having this challenge. I can also let myself have a margin of error – I don’t need to always aim for 100% consistency, and I can allow myself to cancel on things if I need to.

Even if I cancelled a little bit more I’d probably still be one of the most reliable people I know.

Letting go of our mind’s self control mechanism

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You’ve probably heard about the importance of letting go of the things that we can’t control. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it several times myself.

But what about letting go of the things that actually, we can control?

As I’ve been progressing further into my therapy, I’ve had the chance to explore how much time and effort I spend managing myself. In other words, how I think about how I come across, what I should say and how I should present myself in a situation.

This is beyond some level of general reflection. I’m talking about my brain being a constant computer calculating a situation in the background. Putting this into words, it becomes pretty obvious that its a very exhausting process, yet it’s also something I’ve been doing it subconsciously pretty much my whole life.

This fits in with my hypothesis that I am autistic: my normal modus operandi being a bit too weird to fit in, so I learnt to get very good at analysing what I’m meant to say in situations. (Sidenote that I am due to get my diagnosis done in the next month or so hopefully – fingers crossed). Like many adult autistic people, I thought this was normal and what everybody did. Turns out that this is not the case.

Whilst it is good for us to have some level of filter, turned up to the extreme this can make us seem robotic and inauthentic. We can quickly get to a place where we are constantly second guessing ourselves. For much of my life, I’ve felt like a chameleon and found it hard to know what I really thought.

For me, the idea of relaxing my mind is somewhat terrifying. I’ve had real bouts of fear. I feel like a child whose had my favourite teddy bear taken away from me.

The fear is legitimate – I’ve used this mechanism of internal filtering to get through life. With the weird and wonderful way I work, I imagine that without it, I would have found myself ostracised, and potentially at the edges of society. But I also recognise that there is a downside to filtering everything I say. If nothing else, it’s exhausting, and I’m not sure my energy levels will return to a point where I can do it anymore at such a constant level.

Whilst my case might be on the more extreme end, I think we all get caught up in trying to control things. I see this happen more often as people get stressed, and it feels like there’s plenty of stress to go around right now.

Just because we can control things, doesn’t mean we should. I think it’s why so many people have a hard time delegating control or being open to different management styles. In more relaxed settings, I don’t think that we see such levels of squabbling around minor issues than we see in the workplace.

Acting without analysing is what brings us closer to our animalistic instincts. These instincts are what made us survive and thrive for millions of years.

Keeping grounded in a changing world

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Change is a constant, whether we like it or not.

If you’re into your politics, then you’ll probably notice that there’s a lot of change this year.

The European elections took place last week. For those unfamiliar, it’s the voting across the EU Member States for the representatives in the European Parliament. Broadly, it sets the precedent of what direction EU politics will go in for the next five years.

But one election was not enough. There were also federal elections in Belgium on the same day. The results of the EU elections led French President Emmanuel Macron to call for elections in the coming weeks.

Oh, and did anyone also notice there were elections coming up in the UK? Those will take place on 4th July.

Outside of European countries, there were elections in some of the most populated countries – the subcontinent had elections in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan (all with differing levels of drama) as well as in Indonesia.

Oh, and later this year there’s the small matter of the Presidential elections in the United States too.

Outside of the elections, we’re also seeing the devastating killing of Palestinians in the Middle East, whilst the war in Ukraine also rumbles on.

In the midst of all these political shifts, it can be pretty easy to get overwhelmed. I certainly have felt it. And yet, it’s important to keep on going with our lives rather than falling into despair.

It may not surprise you to hear that I am generally more on the left of the political spectrum. So the general shift towards the right in the European and Belgian politics has felt pretty disheartening. The shift away from climate policy is quite terrifying for the sake of tackling climate change within time.

But the most personal part has been the growing rhetoric railing against diversity, in particular trans and LGBT+ rights. It hits deeper when I personally know trans people just trying to live their lives. Considering less than 1% of people are transgender, the focus on the topic has felt really disproportionate to me, not to mention rather different to the image portrayed in the media.

Election results meant additional bouts of anxiety at the beginning of this week for me. I had to deliberately distance myself from politics so as not to get further stressed by it all. That was easier said than done, considering how (overly?) connected on social media I am.

What helped me this week was trying to keep all this news in balance. As humans, we can fall into a tendency to overreact to negative news. In the case of politics, we can quite quickly fall into doom and gloom because things didn’t go the way we wanted them to. I see this more in younger people who have less experience of going through the highs and lows of election cycles..

I try to see these things philosophically – politics has a tendency of oscillating between left and right. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. As is the wheel of life. In certain spaces there are losses, whilst in other areas there are progress. It’s never so black and white.

For my politico friends – it’s also important to remember that there is a world outside of politics. So many people I know get so absorbed into the politics bubble that they forget that the rest of the world carries on existing. Indeed, for most people, elections don’t actually carry that much importance.

If we want positive change, we have to get comfortable with change that we don’t necessarily agree with.

So take each day as it comes. Change is part of politics – indeed it’s part of human nature.

The importance of trusting our own senses

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Earlier this week, I woke up at 4am with the distinct smell of burning coming through my nose.

The last time I smelt something like this, I ignored it. I thought that my sense of smell was playing tricks on me. Turns out that there was actually something on the stove downstairs burning to a smoke.

So this time, I got up to investigate.

It turned out the smell was coming from outside. It was actually pretty nauseating just standing out on the street. My window had been open so I could smell it pretty distinctly from my room.

When I looked online for information, I read about a burning recycling plant on the other side of Brussels. The fire was seemingly large enough that the smoke had covered its way across to my neighbourhood.

One thing I’ve learnt about myself is my heightened sensitivity. My ability to pick up sounds, smells, movement and emotional shifts is higher than normal (sidenote: these are probably signs of Autism).

For a long time I had often ignored these heightened senses. Since my heightened sensitivity picked up things other people didn’t, I would be told that I was imagining things. Noises in the background didn’t exist, and my disgust at strong smelling foods was me being a fussy eater.

It’s hard to compare when the only reference point for perception is myself. Many things I just assumed was the case for everyone, so I never stopped to question it.

I now realise that my sensitivity is one of the reasons that I pick up on subtle things earlier than other people. For example, my attunement to the vibe of the room has helped me immensely in positioning myself during work meetings.

Yet such sensitivity comes at a cost. After smelling the burning smell, I did not get back to sleep for another hour, and I felt fatigued afterwards. If I had just slept through it all, there wouldn’t have been any negative repercussions either.

It means I have to be more careful with how I manage myself. I now wear an eye mask every night because of how perturbing I find the morning light which can wake me up at 6am.

It’s also pretty easy for me to get overstimulated. Too much noise or intensity can be so overwhelming that I can shut down pretty quickly. I find it particularly hard to listen to a conversation in a noisy space. When I’m overstimulated, my ability to sense things gets distorted. This can turn into worry and fear pretty quickly.

Yet despite all of this, my senses are my gifts. When I use them right, I can sense things that most people would not otherwise notice. And in a world lurking with uncertainty and danger, that’s as important as ever.

I personally believe that a lot of us are far more sensitive than we think. The idea of being ‘sensitive’ is seen as negative – it is often used as an insult. We don’t want to be seen as sensitive (particularly men) as this makes us sound weak, but we also don’t want to be seen as insensitive either. So we go with a balance of middling emotional expression. For some reason, we seem to think this is the gold standard.

It’s almost like we are taught to be hyper-rationalist, logic-based people, because that is what the world expects of us. I should know, I used to see myself as a calm, ‘rational’ person. This is in stark contrast to the hypersensitive person I now see myself as!

If we were not sensitive, we would not be able to react to anything. Our inability to sense would mean we were walking through life blind (quite literally).

Our senses are what gives us joy. They are a real gift, so it is worth treasuring our own sensitivities.

Feelings of happiness, familiarity, love, touch – these are the things that give our lives meaning.

Taking time to appreciate our physical bodies

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I’ve generally been pretty fortunate when it’s come to injuries. I’ve generally not had anything particularly inhibiting or life threatening.

The one exception was when I needed surgery for a finger on my dominant hand. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it essentially meant that I could not use one of my hands properly for months. Inconveniently, this was at the same time as me needing to finish typing up my master thesis. It added an extra level of pain in an already painful process.

Otherwise, my injuries have been relatively minor. This has meant that I somewhat forgot how frustrating and painful it can be when we have an injury. Yet getting one also is a reminder of how well our bodies function – most of the time we use them without even thinking much about how much they do.

On Tuesday, I rolled my ankle whilst walking down Brussels’ infamous pavements with a random hole in the middle of it.

Ironically, I was just walking back from doing an exercise class. I was feeling pretty good about it too, my body was holding up well and I didn’t feel particularly sore.

I’ve had quite a few ankle twists before, so I figured this one would be alright. I did some icing and elevation as is recommended, figuring that would do the trick.

What got me particularly worried was when the pain swelled during the night. It got to the point where I couldn’t sleep at all. In my wakened, painful state I ended up looking up how bad the injury might actually be on my phone.

Luckily, the pain was more the inflammation than the twist itself, and within a day I was back to being able to walk around without too much issue.

Yet, I can’t help but think how different things would have been if it was a worse injury. I probably would have needed to stay home and recover, with little outside contact. It made me realise how reliant I am on my physical body to move around with, and do the things I do everyday.

When such incidents happen, we have a choice of how we look at them. The temptation can be to see them as a period of misfortune. I can curse the pavements of Brussels for bringing me unnecessary misery.

Or, I can choose to be grateful that the injury was actually pretty minor. Furthermore, I can also use it as a reminder about how much I need my body, and how easily it is to take it for granted.

In recent times, we’ve heard a lot more about loving our bodies. Whilst this is often talking about it aesthetically, it also holds true mechanically too. The amount our bodies do for us is incredible. In fact, it is so good that we can forget it’s even doing anything.

Appreciating our bodies is important. After all, we only have one of them.

The tale of the misplaced wallet

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Grand philosophical ideas around peace and harmony are great. But they are only useful if they can hold up when coming into contact with our real, messy and unpredictable lives.

This week I had the fortune (or misfortune) to be tested on my worldviews.

On Wednesday, when looking to leave the house I simply could not find my wallet. After a rather long search I came to the conclusion that I must have dropped it when coming off the bus the day before.

Here I had a choice of how I reacted to the situation.

Naturally, losing a wallet is not particularly nice. It meant quite a lot of administrative burden, blocking and reordering various bank cards as well as losing my Belgian ID. For this, I had to go to the police station to file a claim, which took out two hours in total yesterday.

For a second, I fell into a negative frustration of ‘why me’ – I actually had a nice day when I had lost it, so for a moment I had this pessimistic thought that the world was pushing me back down.

But on the whole, I was quite happy with how I reacted to it. Considering my current state of lethargy, I was quite surprised at how functional and direct I was to sort out the situation. Thanks to our world of technology, I could see my bank accounts were untouched. Within moments, I blocked and reordered the cards.

These days you can even add a new card straight onto Google Wallet, meaning I could pay for things with my phone – I was effectively cashless only for about an hour.

I was worried that not having my Belgian ID would mean some complications for a medical appointment next week. But after a quick google of the process, I figured out the system to get a provisional document in the police station. I have a tendency of underplaying how well I can manage these things, particularly considering all the information and interactions I had with the police were in French.

These small bumps in life can be a good moment to check in with our current state of mind. Now when I think about it, the thought of blaming myself for making an error didn’t actually cross my mind at all. In fact, I haven’t lost my wallet in probably around 15 years, so with the benefit of that perspective I figured that I’d actually had a pretty good run of it, all things considered.

For someone who is still in the midst of anxiety and fatigue, it’s nice to see that I’m a lot more effective at dealing with situations than my current predicament suggests.

It has crossed my mind that this could be a sign of ADHD – being prompted to act in a crisis gives me a good level of dopamine to act effectively and efficiently. This is in contrast with things with a longer timeline, often with far less work that I’m struggling to do. But for now, that’s just a hypothesis.

I’m very grateful for the work I’ve done over the last years to re-frame my worldview. Considering how much I’ve invested in that space, there have definitely been points where I’ve questioned whether the time, energy and money was worth it. But it’s moments like these which demonstrate how valuable it is to work on ourselves.

When challenges are but small bumps rather than big mountains, it is far easier to glide through life.

Finding an outlet to express our internalised emotions

This week started more anxiety driven for me than most. I found I woke up with a lot of existential dread without really being able to pin point why.

This week ended up being about finding ways to express the emotions outwardly, without necessarily trying to analyse them. Spending too much time trying to think about ‘why’ usually ends up worse rather than better.

One thing that helped a lot was talking it out in therapy. Having the space to explore and divulge what was going on internally made it apparent how much turbulent internal emotions were swirling around within me.

I’m not exactly shy about expressing what is going on within me with other people. I’m certainly not one of those ‘bottle in all the emotions’ type. Talking to friends is definitely beneficial, but a proper professional session goes to a deeper level of introspection that gives the time and space needed for such conversations.

The funny thing about emotions is that it’s often more about experiencing them rather than trying to solve them. Talking about my fears does a lot to alleviate them, even if it doesn’t necessarily fix the issue. It’s just nice to get it off my chest. Right now my thoughts are frazzled, so I’m in need of time just to piece it all together. It’s a slow process, but it’s progressing.

It is also one of the reasons I like writing these articles. I find it a way to have some space to share my thoughts outwardly, rather than keeping them stuck in my head. The weekly habit also means that I’m prompted to make sure I actually am listening to myself on a regular basis. It’s no wonder why journalling is a recommended activity for mental wellbeing.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that yesterday was Pride in Brussels. This year I actually joined the parade and marched along. Despite my anxiety of the large crowds of people, it was very good for me to go outside, see people and move around. Walking, talking, moving and dancing are other ways just to get the feelings out. It’s funny how the fear of crowds and sensory overstimulation wasn’t too much of an issue when my mind wasn’t so focussed on it (though I will admit to a sense of agoraphobia trying to move through the crowds).

Pride for me was a nice reminder of how much more settled I feel in Brussels. I bumped into a lot of people I knew during the day, without really trying too hard. It felt cosy and familiar, as well as warm and welcoming. Whilst last year’s pride was about chatting and meeting new people, this year felt like it was more reconnecting with those I hadn’t seen in a while.

My emotional expression has certainly been varied this week – introspective withdrawal to extroverted socialising and movement. I personally don’t think one is better than the other – they both have an important place.

Whatever method we choose, it’s worthwhile reflecting on how we are expressing our emotions to make sure we are doing so in a healthy way.

After all, the last thing we want to do is bottle them all up until we burst.