It is not easy being mental, as I often tell people. It’s been a lifelong thing for me, as I was reminded this morning at my latest therapy session. More to the point, I was encouraged to remind myself of when I thought it all started.
You visit a lot of places when you see a therapist and very few of them are places you particularly want to revisit. The place I chose to revisit was when I first realised that something awful was wrong with my head. My earliest recollection was night terrors as a young child, awful horrible scary terrifying night terrors and later into adolescence a form of agoraphobia, accompanied by huge mood swings, anxieties and deep depressions. Not that I knew any of these things at the time. I had no idea my first psychiatrist was a psychiatrist until years later when my mum told me. I never knew I was mentally ill because no one ever told me that until I was an adult. In fact, I only began to find out what was wrong with me by reading stuff in Wick Road library in Brislington and then insisting that first my mother and then the family GP come clean with me.
I’d pretty well forgotten the night terrors and episodes until today but I was taken back to a family holiday in West Bay, Dorset where I was in full panic mode late in the night, shouting and screaming to be allowed out of the caravan in which we were staying, waking everyone up in the process, probably across the entire camp site. And being at home, in full panic attack mode when I believed that everything I was looking at was shrinking. I had to get outside into the open air and fast. I never found out why that went away. Perhaps the mental health treatment was working even though I had no idea I was being treated.
And it was my unhappy childhood. I didn’t remember it as being all that unhappy, but the more I talked, the more I realised it was. I never felt the odd one out at school, even though everyone else had fathers and mothers and I just had the one living at home with me. I seemed to be managing perfectly well despite having a near permanently absent father living halfway round the world, except that in retrospect, I wasn’t managing well. I was coping, just about getting by but no more. No one pushed me at school, no one noticed that my academic career was a car crash. I was just left to get on with it with the inevitable consequences which were leaving school with minimal qualifications and no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
And so I made all the decisions, such as they were. No parental guidance on anything at all, nothing. The jobs I applied for, they were done by me and me alone. I am not saying I should have been spoon fed, but I was, after all, just 17. I was drifting like a cork on the ocean. And it’s been that way ever since.
I don’t blame anyone for the relative mess that inevitably followed. My mother and father did what I am sure they thought was their best and in their different ways it probably was. There is no set of rules for a divorced Dutch woman bringing up a child in England whilst her ex husband is in the process of emigrating to Canada so they are not to blame either. I suspect my mother didn’t have enough time to do anything else beyond working, putting food on the table, sleeping and then going to work again.
It has always seemed to me that I have never possessed sufficient tools to live a “normal” life. I graduated from the school of life out of necessity. The alternative would have been too ghastly to contemplate. And the therapy sounds to me – and I am the one doing most of the talking – as one long whinge.
I learned long ago that, perversely, the state of depression is oddly comforting too. When you know the black dog as well as I do, especially when you know when he is coming back into your life, then at least you have some certainty. It is an ugly, destructive, negative phase but is a familiar phase too and as with anything else, there is a big fear that change could be even worse. And that is what a lot of my therapy is all about. Of course, I want to change and for life to be better, but is it worth it and is it anyway all too late?
I never turn down a chance of therapy and I hope I never will. It is difficult and mentally exhausting, but it can be rewarding and you do learn and remember many things about your life and how they may have influenced its course.
The hope is that, despite the fear, change will come and the black dog will disappear for good. I don’t see that happening, ever, to be honest, but that’s not a reason to give up.
