Notes From A Tricky Brain

CW: brief mention of self-harm and self destructive behaviour. Please proceed only if you are comfortable with the subject matter.

Having barely navigated school, I duly went to university and did my four years. If I say that like I went off to serve a prison sentence, it’s because I’m deliberately drawing that analogy; I served my time, survived (but most certainly didn’t thrive in the environment), and came out ill prepared for life outside the walls of the institution that is the University of Glasgow. I chose to study Applied Maths…mostly just because I enjoyed Maths at school; I hadn’t really thought beyond my degree and what I might want to do in terms of work. I graduated, started applying for random jobs and eventually found myself working in the Financial Management department of the NHS…because why the Hell not?!

I’ve been thinking about this post since I created this site, and the conclusion I’ve drawn is that I have no coherent words to describe my six years of employment. I’m therefore just going to outline the things that lead to my (always inevitable) complete mental breakdown as a list of bullet points:

• A lack of social maturity, which I can now explain but, at the time, felt like a defect in me as a person.
• Difficulty in coping with phones, especially answering them with no clue what was going to be asked of me.
• The general bustle of a busy office. One thing I remember HATING, and still struggle with, was/is people standing directly behind me.
• Striving for perfection constantly whilst, paradoxically, having zero confidence in anything I ever did.
• Meetings with budget holders. I looked about 12 until I hit my 30s so always picked up on a lack of respect in terms of me advising NHS managers what they could and couldn’t spend public money on.
• Societal pressures and the expectation that I would continue to study and become “chartered” just because I was educated to a certain level; no one ever asked me if I enjoyed what I was doing.
• My inability to cope with anything that wasn’t a normal working day. We had occasion to move office as a team multiple times, and I never knew where to put myself in these situations. I remember once being sent to “open the mail” because I was merely getting in the way of an otherwise strategic operation.
• Social anxiety around eating, which led to me not eating an awful lot, which led to much bigger problems…but that’s for another post. I became known as “the girl who doesn’t eat” and my habits where a source of many a curiosity.

I started working for the NHS in 2005. I moved to a better role, within the same building, a couple of times in my first year and each was a huge ordeal. I struggled to cope with the change of environment and having to adjust to working with new colleague. These were the rare occasions where the mask would come off and I’d be openly emotional. No one, including my parents, could understand this. As a result, I languished in my third post for 5 years.

I was first medicated for anxiety in 2009. The reason I remember this is because it was a couple of days before I was due to go on a holiday that involved a long-haul flight, and that was the last time I ever went abroad. I somehow managed to soldier on for another couple of years, intermittently visiting the GP with vague symptoms of anxiety and depression, but I became too unwell to hide my incoming illness in the spring of 2011. My line manager tried to be helpful and referred me to Occupational Health but this only forced me to pay attention to how I was feeling and confront the fact that I was quickly loosing the ability to push my emotions down. I started eating even less, and self-harming every morning before work as a way of helping me cope with the upcoming day; a kind of trade-off, if you like. Eventually, that same line manager found me stimming in an empty office on 1st September 2011 and sent me home for “a couple of weeks” to “gather myself together” (I’m paraphrasing, really, it was all a bit of a blur…but that was the general sentiment). However, I knew as I walked out the door that day that I would never be back, and I wasn’t. I wish I could tell you that things improved after that, but I’d be lying; it wasn’t even close to how bad things were going to get.