WORLD MENTAL HEALTH DAY 2020

*TRIGGER WARNING - I talk about my mental illness and a huge breakdown. There is very brief and not at all detailed mention of suicide and self-harm.* 

 

About this time four years ago, I was in a terrible state. My mental illness had been getting harder to manage since moving to Switzerland a decade before, and earlier that year I’d had the last of many miscarriages at a time when I’d finally stopped expecting to fall pregnant at all. It hit me hard. I was 43. I tried to ask for help, to communicate what was going on with me, or thought I had, but for whatever reason it hadn’t worked. I was an old hand at self-medicating and would binge drink like I thought it would save the rainforests, and boy did I turn that shit up a notch. I wasn’t looking after myself in any way, shape, or form, hadn’t been for months on end, and then I got sick. Really sick. A nasty bout of viral Bronchitis, with a side order of broken rib from all the coughing, I can still hear the sound it made, an infection in my boob – my fucking BOOB, man – that was as scary as it was disgusting, and what can only be described as a “Massive Mental Breakdown” devoured me. Fully. Hungrily. Like I was Flaky Mad Pie and I had lashings of deranged gravy all over me. DEEEEE-licious. 

It wasn’t a new thing. I’ve dealt with mental illness since I was a kid. I didn’t know that’s what it was then, and neither did anyone else, but looking back the signs and behaviour flash at me in brightest neon. A nasty experience in my teens intensified matters, and I slid into my twenties on a wave of suicide attempts, prolonged bouts of insomnia, visual and aural hallucinations, panic attacks, bouts of proper tinfoil-hat paranoia, self-harm, a couple of nasty little breakdowns, and some ludicrously impulsive behaviour. By 30 I was an old hand at Pretending I Was Okay. I’d cumulatively been diagnosed with OCD, Borderline Personality Disorder, Social Anxiety, Agoraphobia, and Depression. 

Back to 2016. I honestly thought that was it for me, that I was done. This was how I was – a mad fucking bitch, as someone reportedly called me; I’ve called myself worse – and was going to be forever. How could there be a future to look forward to when getting through the present was so fucking excruciating? Breathing felt like a punishment, and I wanted out so badly. I hoped I’d fade away, just disappear. I didn’t have the energy for anything else. I could barely dress myself or speak coherently. I wasn’t just away with the fairies; I was living in their basement and chowing down on their rats. 

Physically, I recovered. Mentally, I was fragile. There was stuff outside of my control that had battered me too and I simply couldn’t cope with any of it. My social life had been pretty much decimated. My family were a long way away. My confidence and self-esteem were at an all time low. When you’ve never really had much of either, that’s quite something. I couldn’t see how to fix any of it, not really, so I carried on a bit like I had before, self-medicating and boozing, etc. I was a miserable, terrified mess, and I was in constant pain. All the time though, I knew that’s not who I was. I don’t know how other people perceived me, but who they saw wasn’t who I was, not in the year or so before the breakdown and certainly not after. Not really. It was an illness and it was in control. I was too tired to fight back. I’d been too tired for a long time. 

Then two things changed everything. The first was Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), which is a therapy developed specifically for Borderline Personality Disorder, aimed in part at the intense and rapid emotional swings Borderlines experience. I stumbled across it on Facebook, talked to a therapist friend about it, and started on a course of it with an online support group. DBT isn’t as widely known as it should be and a lot of people can only access it through self-study. It was hard work, challenging, and it saved my life. I began to gain perspective, I got a handle on what was going on with me when it was going on with me, and I learned what to do with it. It didn’t just help me with Borderline either; it quietened the OCD and eased the worst depressions. I'd recommend looking it up. It has so many useful exercises you can use to cope with a range of anxieties and problems. 

All that said, the road to recovery has been neither straightforward nor easy. I still have mental illness. It’s not gone, it’s probably not going anywhere, but I live with it much more cordially these days – it sleeps in a little kennel out the back. Of course I still get down, my agoraphobia flares up, OCD tics chitter at me, my mood can swing suddenly, I can feel bleak and sad and afraid, all that stuff, but now I know I can feel that way and survive. I’ll work it out. I don’t react to things in the same way. I give 100% less fucks about what other people think of me, where once the slightest thing would burn me up inside. Neither is the illness all there is to me. I’m not lost in it as I once was. The bird crumbs are still there to show me the way out of the dark forest; I just have to look for them. And I do. I know how. I can deal with my shit kind of like one of those regular humans (who don’t really exist) and it feels pretty fucking good.

Suddenly in 2018 our dog, my constant companion, Miss Maudie, died and I feared the worst. I won’t beat about the bush - I did regress, I did behave like El Twatterino, but only for a very short while. And that’s when the second thing happened. I stopped drinking. It was a conscious decision. It had stopped being fun, or I’d stopped being able to pretend it was. The hangovers were monumental. I’d get leg cramps, night terrors and sweats, prolonged bouts of dizziness that would last for several days, and a constant, throbbing mountain of alcoholic remorse and anxiety was weighing me down. It was no fun at all and it was solving nothing.

I don’t want to preach, we've all got to find our own way, but – and I deliver this to you with every bit of gravitas I can muster – if there is one single thing I would recommend you do if you’re experiencing mental health problems of pretty much any kind, it is to knock alcohol on the head. You don’t have to go as far as I have, but at least give yourself a break from it for a while. Give it a whirl. There are other ways to manage what you are using it to block out, you’ve just got to give them a chance. I know you don’t believe me, I wouldn’t have, but it’s true. I could drink most anyone under the table in my day, and did, I thought I was a pretty entertaining and happy drunk, I excelled at it, or so I thought. I wanted to have a good time, and a good time was had… and it had taken hold of my life and fucked it right in the eyehole.

So I stopped. For one thing, the old gastric reflux settled right down but, more seriously, my life started to come back together. I started to come back together. Within just weeks, I was calmer, I was clearer, and I was happier. I could feel actual joy at times. That shit is like a fucking sunbeam bursting right out of your sweetmeats. Since then, and according to my sober app it’s been 839 days (2 years, 3 months and 16 days, as I write this), my life and mind have improved immeasurably and I’m not going back. 

This pandemic bullshit has been hard on everyone, and I wondered if it would break me. It’s certainly tested me, I won’t lie, but I’m rolling with the punches, functioning as well as anyone, and am still sober and in control. Once I’d have been a wreck, and that’s okay too. It is what it is. Sometimes we are ill. Sometimes no one can see it because you can’t stick a bandage on your neurals. Sometimes it consumes us. Punishing ourselves for that, out of shame, guilt, whatever, only makes it worse. It never makes it better. Never. 

Writing this, as inadequate an account as it is, has been really cathartic. There are more facts and insanities, but the devil is in those details and they're for me to worry about. Everything is so different now, I’m different, a living breathing WIP, and every day is a step forward, even when that step feels more like a kick in the arse. Right now, I’m okay and that’s good enough. To hoot a cliché at you, no one is promised tomorrow, but if it comes for me I’ll be happy to see it. Once, I wouldn’t have been, not one bit. The way I feel now is a lot fucking better.  

My mental illness has been pretty severe. It’s altered the way my partner and I have had to live our lives. If wishes were horses and all that, but you can adapt, you can find ways to survive. Not everyone needs the same thing, not everyone gets access to the same stuff, but you can find ways to cope, to feel a bit better, to live. Just don’t hide from yourself. That’s the first step, admitting how you’re feeling and that it’s not… I want to say “right” but that has too many pressured connotations… so, “ideal”? You have more options than you think, even when it doesn’t feel like it, and I hope you find something that works for you. Just take it one breath at a time, one step at a time, one day at a time. There are no easy answers but you are worth the effort.