Morning all,
I am trying to make sense of some of the things that happened yesterday and thought I would share with you all.
My wife works in central London, about 50 yards away from where the bus exploded. She travels on the tube into work every day. Yesterday when she got to her tube station it was closed (this was before the attacks - some other problem with the line) so she got the overland train into town. She then got into work about 5 minutes before the bus bomb went off.
Normally she would have been on a tube train right in the area where all the bombs went off, and would have been walking along the street where the bus bomb went off. She missed both incidents purely by random luck and by a few minutes. One of her colleagues was on the bus directly behind the one that exploded, and saw the results in close-up.
My wife contacted me as soon as all this happened to make sure I knew she was OK. My relief was huge and remains so today. I am trying very very hard to count my blessings. But at the forefront of my mind is that I don't want her travelling into central London anymore. She is at home today, still in shock, and we will talk over the weekend about what to do. I fear that I will now be living my life in fear of something happening to her. We all knew that these attacks were coming, but I fear that the attackers know now how easy it is to hit us and cause mass death, and so they will continue to do so. Anyway, that is something for me to work through, as the reality of the situation is that my wife needs to work, she loves her job, and until we can find a new life away from London, she must continue to travel into London along with the thousands of others who make the same journey. We must both be brave.
As soon as I heard she was OK I drove into central London (I work in Surrey) to get her. I eventually found her in the London Bridge area (along with 3 of her colleagues) and we drove home through the chaos, dropping people off along the way. I found myself, amidst all of the conflicting emotions, thinking long and hard about my anxiety, and how it was so small in relation to this situation, and almost feeling ashamed of how I have been feeling, and how selfish and self-centred it is, and how really I mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, so surely I just might as well be happy? But happiness unfortunately doesn’t come as easily and quickly as that.
My GAD seems to have been caused by me telling myself (in a nutshell) that my life is not good enough, that I don't have the things I want, that I have underachieved massively given my opportunities. It is also a result of emotional trauma from my childhood, including the attempted suicide of my mother when I was 15.
As a result of parental separation and the suicide attempt, much of my anxiety has revolved around the fear of losing my wife. She is my "safe person" and I rely on her for so much. We understand each other completely, and I cannot see myself without her. I therefore thought that yesterday would affect me much more deeply, and perhaps it yet will. But today I just feel numb, and angry. I think that perhaps I will feel differently when she starts travelling into central London again, but we’ll have to see. As I said, everyone, not just me, will have to be brave and hope for the best at all times.
What I really want to do is to count my blessings, but I find it hard. I understand how lucky we have been, but the closeness of what happened somehow makes it feel a little unreal. I think that we are so de-sensitised to random acts of violence and atrocities that even when it happens on our own doorstep we are unable to properly process the feelings of horror and shock that would normally come.
I think I felt that I had a duty to somehow see my problems in perspective as a result of this horrible day. Perhaps part of me thought that these events would help me to put things into perspective and feel glad for everything I have, and therefore work through my anxiety more efficiently and more quickly. The reality is though, tha
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