Measuring Success
In September 2020, mid-pandemic I lost my job. I didn’t just lose my job, I lost almost everything. I made many choices during the pandemic which have resulted in where I am now.
Right now I am better, in recovery, and once again in love with my life. But the challenge behind me was the hardest and most humbling experience I have ever lived through. The word ‘recovery’ comes with many associations however, for me the term fit and has become an easier way to communicate where I’m at. The whole process of recovery comforted me to be able to face the fact that my life was not how I had planned it to be. Most days it left me uneasy and nauseous and utterly confused, but on days like this it’s a happy reminder to see just how far I have come.
For me I have had a very public journey through my mental health and the fact that I have inconsistently ‘bounded my words online’. The internet is the most incredible resource; with half a bachelors to my name, I have learnt everything from cooking poached eggs, to solo travelling across London and the journey to accepting myself in a world where all we do is label ourselves. And yes, it’s true, I get so lost in what those labels are that I don’t really know who I am most of the time.
What I do know, is that I am hard as a rock. I fought for my life this year, I should have died, and most days I still wonder why I didn’t. But I am grateful that I didn’t. I woke up sure, but I didn’t come out of that dream for months. Most of the time my mind is plagued with an internal monologue that quite frankly won't shut up. Sounds great for a writer, yes. However, with poorly diagnosed chronic illness’, it’s quite frankly the quietest trauma that I have to live through; dusk ‘til dawn every day. These days my head isn’t as loud, but when it is I find myself on a war path trying to do everything I can to make it stop.
I’ve spent the better part of my life fighting suicidal thoughts. I can’t remember a time before now that I haven’t been acutely suicidal. This is incredibly hard to share, but I know there are people around me who go through the same battle, and we are all so quiet about it. It shouldn’t be a secret; mental illness, breakdowns, and hospitals.
I was a frequent flyer at Logan Hospital. There is this mental health waiting lounge, I can paint you a picture of every square inch in that building, I could write a screenplay about all the people I’ve met there and roll the credits on a cinematic end screen; walking out feeling defeated, deflated, and more ashamed than ever. Simply for trying to get help in the one place they tell you to go. I can’t recall how many involuntary orders I’ve been on; trapped and waiting for a doctor that never comes.
I wrote a piece, a private poem in the height of my psychosis about a nurse who made a passing comment on the self-harm I fought so hard not to do. Her comments still replay in my head to this day, and carry a prime example of how our brains cling to anything while we’re broken. It took me years to get over the comments in that room. It broke me. Feeling like I had never been good enough at anything, and then having a mental health professional affirm it indirectly. It broke me.
The frequency between my ED visits became more and more over the past 6 years, I did every free program I could do. I sat my ass in therapy for a year at 19, paying thousands of dollars I simply didn’t have. Trying to balance this career I was starting. I cried at my bosses desk frequently and it all became too much. So I left. I went where I always wanted, 30 hours away. I wasn’t coming back. I spent all my money, ran off into a park when my landlord wanted 5 months' worth of rent, I lived off Costa coffees, London parks, and agonising anxiety.
I met some of the most amazing people in London, I shared a flat with 8 others in a mansion in west London. My dream. I was a pretty terrible flatmate, sleeping during the day and spending every waking hour in pain. I wrote a novel in London, pen to paper and as raw as it gets. I made my way to Paris and slept two out of the three days I was there. I laid under the Eiffel Tower for hours by myself, travelled, and got lost on the metro without a lick of French. I did a lot in London, Paris and Ireland. I terrified my parents.
It came to a crashing end, like most major events in my life. A ticket home was booked and my heart was broken. Back to the Lockyer Valley I go, with the discontent that I am once again, where I painstakingly didn’t want to be. Starting from scratch once again. The pattern is pretty obvious to anyone around me, I couldn’t sit still, hold a job down, finish my studies. I lived pay check to pay check, spending every cent I could to fill the hole.
I was lost for years, floating around in a messy orbit while everyone around me grows up. I was incredibly unwell and had no idea. I had no path, no answers, and no help from the mental health system. In a last ditch attempted I landed at Headspace for the third time, hallucinating and confused and incredibly angry. Here’s the thing when you hit psychosis, you don’t know it’s happening until it’s too late. So I spent the better part of 5 years trying to get a hold of this thing. Now I have a diagnosis, not that it matters, but it helps.
For reference I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, and laughed when they told me. I quite simply didn’t believe them. I guess you could say my reaction to my BPD diagnosis was TEXTBOOK BPD. The problem here is ‘great I have a diagnosis, what does that mean now’. I didn’t know what a personality disorder was, all I knew was Girl, Interrupted. I think that was more damaging to me than the actual diagnosis.
Unfortunately. It takes me two or three times to realise my own cycles. This year two more diagnoses combined a family of disposition in my mind. Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and of course the Chronic Depression that’s always there. I didn’t know what the CPTSD meant for me and I spent my fair share of time screaming at doctors, hysterically crying, and incredibly confused. It was hell, and still is some days.
Now I'm blistering on 26, happy, and healing from a lifetime of trauma, that no one I love is to be blamed for. I’ve been in recovery now for almost a year and I realise that I did not lose a year of my life to my chronic illness, I spent a year healing the part of me that broke to spend the next 60 years wonderfully in love with my life.
We must destroy the chain of mental illness stigma and the abrupt chaotic silence around the people we love. I am humble knowing my children will never have to experience what I did, because it ends here, with me and my future.
So that is my success, at 25. I am healthy, I am healing and I am in love. That is more success I could ever ask for.
Always,
e.m.
