Abigail's Anxieties

Don't worry, I'm still here! Don't worry everyone, I'm still here, I'm still alive, it's just the case that the last year of my life has been rather action-packed and some things, unfortunately, had to go on the back-burner- including Abigail's Anxieties.    In the past year, I've been finishing my BSc (Hons) Food Development and Innovation degree, helping my family care for a member of the family who's had major surgery, dealing with my fibromyalgia that has been getting worse, dealing with many costochondritis flare-ups. Oh, and dealing with the multitude of changes that have come with this global pandemic while being an "at-risk" person living with another at-risk person. So you know...not much. In all seriousness, my family is starting to get into the swing of things with our "new normal" and having some adaptions in the house now that make life easier. In terms of my fibromyalgia, well it's affected my mobility with extre...

So yeah, where exactly have you been Abbie? An explanation explaining my absence  So yeah, I've been gone for a while, much longer than I was planning to be gone but gone none the less. So why was I away for so long? Where was I? What was happening? Well the answer to these questions are the same thing: A sever episode in my depression and anxiety disorder. You see, it's been a stressful time in my life recently what with getting my exam results, finding out if I got into university or not, starting to feel less and less confident in my own life decisions and this lead to me entering my "episode" as we'll call it. I was stuck in a vicious cycle. My anxiety was convincing my brain that I had failed my exams, and that made my depression kick in and say "well if you have failed, what's the point of getting up and doing anything? The past 3 years at college have been a waste of your life so you might as well rest the waste of it" ...

The weekly catch up #5 (of sorts) A week in my life condensed down into one post...but this weeks is a little different. So first of all I want to say sorry for not only the lack of posts this week but also for the fact that this weekly catch up is a day late. You see, other than going shopping with my mum on the Wednesday of last week (which you can see my vlog of in my YouTube channel, link in my about me page) I really haven't done much this week and that has caused me to enter one of my slightly depressive episodes. I have honestly been waking up in the mornings, and sometimes the afternoons, thinking to myself "what is the point to me waking up?", "should I just go back to sleep?" And "why am I feeling like this?". And the honest answer to the last question is that I just don't know.  You never really know when depression is go into strike, and it can sometimes be overnight and for no apparent reason. I would wake up to just...

The setting up of my DSA equipment What it was like for me to have my DSA equipment delivered and set up So today was finally the day I had my DSA equipment delivered and set up for me. And honestly was much easier than I was expecting it to be. I wasn't really sure was expecting, but I certainly wasn't expecting it to only take around 15 minutes to get all of the software downloaded onto my laptop. The most challenging part was probably trying to make small talk with the man delivering, that's the one thing I struggle most with my anxiety; making small talk with people I don't know. Luckily the delivery man was quite understanding about this, and my mum happened to be in the room with me and she's great at making small talk so that took a bit of the pressure off me. The most challenging part was properly once the delivery man left because I just want to jump right in and have a go with all the equipment and software, and instead of having the delivery ...

DSA UPDATE This isn't going to be a long post but more of a follow-up on my previous post about DSA (which I recommend you read here  first so that everything here makes sense).  I wanted to let everyone know that I'VE BEEN APPROVED!!! I'm now going to list off everything that I have been approved for and how it is going to help me. However, everyone (including myself) has to bear in mind that I'm not going to have this from the offset of university as I actually have to be attending classes before I can get all this with is understandable. I mean, they don't want to pay for everything and give it to me if I end up not even doing the course.  Now that that disclaimer is out of the way, let's get to the list: Text -to-speech software with a wireless headset- very often I am sitting and looking over notes so much that I won't even get up to eat in fear that if I don't read over them enough I will never understand them. I also sometimes don...