This is Bleak - you have been warned

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

The Moon and the Yew Tree by Sylvia Plath is a poem that lives in me. It makes up my personal language. It’s a poem I write about a lot, because it speaks to me with a soul deep chime of recognition. These two lines have been running through my head for a few weeks, a Greek chorus ribboning the background of my day to day life. I realised when I came to write this that I had been misquoting. I had been thinking; ‘this is the life of the mind, cold and planetary.’ On reflection this is more accurate for where I am right now.

Ever since we went to Wales and I accidentally punched through into some unresolved trauma, I’ve been struggling with my mental health. I feel a bit like a sea bird after an oil spill. I’m coated in the toxic mess that erupted from wherever I had buried it and now I’m leaving oily fingerprints on whatever I touch. Externally, things seem fine. Internally I am drowning but I am attempting to blow up the life raft.

Right now, the life of my mind does not match my external life at all. Outside, autumn is doing its best to enchant me, all the people I love are well (ish) and I am lucky enough to be able to fill my days with lots of lovely stuff. There is other stuff which is sad and difficult and I am trying to walk the line between the two by doing the things that help me feel well when my internal world starts to tilt. I’m walking, making and resting. I’m feeding myself in every way I know how, stockpiling positive situations against the darkness. I’m paying attention to the small wins and tiny moments of joy.

I keep reminding myself how lucky I am to be here in this life. It is hard. It’s difficult to talk/write about without coming across as an ungrateful bitch, because a lot of my life is extraordinary and wonderful but the truth is that I do not find my life easy to live at all. I don’t understand how to live a normal life. I don’t understand how other people do it. It is as if I live on the mad moon Plath describes. I can see the people down on earth going about their daily business, but I don’t know how to reach them. Even if I do, from time to time, tug at the hem of normality, I don’t understand how to wear it.

With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

and here feels a lot like madness.

The encroaching darkness is nipping hard at my heels and I feel myself tilting towards it. The life of my mind is cold and planetary. There isn’t much comfort in here where the black trees mass on the borders. I am finding it increasingly difficult to find my way out into the light. I have moments of despair but I am not entirely hopeless. There are some things that are different this time, and they need noting for the next time I forget.

When things went wrong in Wales I didn’t fall back into my old patterns of behaviour. In the past I would have worked harder to present as ‘normal’ and minimise any discomfort that I felt, pushing down all the ‘bad’ feelings for later when I would have felt them at a different time and immediately decided that this mismatch proved that I was properly ‘mad’. Apologies for all the quotation marks here, but I am trying to differentiate old language that I would routinely use to keep myself trapped in a self destructive cycle. In Wales I was able to make different choices, honour my feelings in the moment and act on them the way I really wanted to, rather than the way I think other people would want me to.

Sometimes, doing something new, even if it is healthier for me, causes massive anxiety, especially when it has to do with my mental health. For a long time, and sometimes even now, I felt that my mental health had to be hidden because it was clearly not healthy and it made me dangerous. For a few years I genuinely believed that if I told people about that dark, oily blackness inside me, it would pour out of my mouth, into their ears and infect them. I shut my teeth over the horror inside and it felt like a black hole massing inside me, that would obliterate everything in its path if I let my guard down. For many years, in the back of my mind I also believed that if I showed other people the workings of my mind, someone might section me and then I would be as officially mad as I felt. I couldn’t let that happen. I knew in my bones that was a death sentence and even when every day felt like hell, I still held onto a small flame at the bottom of the darkness that was the will to survive, the quiet hope that things might get better if only I could find a way to change. But change is hard and frightening, even when it’s good. It requires courage and courage requires a lot of energy, even when you’re exhausted. It’s not for the faint hearted.

For years and years, I thought the only way to change and get healthy was to pretend to be like everyone else. I was and am singularly terrible at it. I would do ok for a while, but the minute I stopped concentrating, a bit of the real me would burst out and ‘spoil’ everything. I learned to pretend that I was fine with everyone thinking I was a weirdo. To use annoying business speak, I leaned into it. I leaned so far into it that between pretending to be normal and pretending to be the female Timmy Mallett I would crash and burn and the darkness would take over for a while. I am better at balancing now, but it’s a work in progress that requires constant tweaking, and it makes me tired because I have to do it all the time. It’s like constantly rubbing my belly and patting my head, cooking the dinner and also delivering a TED talk. That kind of tired.

The TED talk bit is the constant negotiation between my mind, my life and people in the outside world on earth, where they live and I don’t. No wonder I’m obsessed by Duolingo. It’s all about the translation. How do I find the words to explain how going to Stratford Westgate on Friday night went from being a pleasant way to do some jobs with my husband to being a nightmare when I couldn’t block out the intrusive thought that reminded me that I might die in the next moment and never see my children again and what was the fucking point anyway because life is ultimately futile? And that run on sentence is exactly how the thoughts ribbon through my mind, like an endlessly looping tape. How do I explain that I live with that particular conversational show stopper running through my head 24/7? It stops me sleeping. It wakes me in a cold sweat. It happens at moments of deep and profound joy. It haunts my mind. So much of my energy is spent shutting it up, some days I don’t have energy to do much else. Some days, like on Friday, I can’t shut it up, and as I sit in a restaurant watching kids joyously rollerblading past and families laughing, I have to stop myself running from something I take with me wherever I go anyway.

How do I explain that having these thoughts doesn’t make me suicidal? I am terrified of death. Those thoughts just make me more terrified. I am trapped between a rock and a hard place, a life I don’t know how to manage and a death the thought of which brings me out in a cold sweat. Some days I am a thrumming thread of terror from top to bottom. You wouldn’t know it if you met me in real life. I hide it. I hide it until I can’t and then I attempt to fix what I can and get on. Life doesn’t stop lifing just because I don’t know how to live it.

How do I explain that it isn't personal? If you know me, this isn’t something you have done or failed to do. This is not about blame or guilt. That doesn’t help me. This is not about not telling me when you feel sad or bad or terrified or depressed, or when life has become a steaming pile of dung for you. This is not about you, in the nicest possible way. I don’t want you to stop being you or mind your language or hide bad things from me. That’s not the issue. The life of my mind is cold and planetary. This isn’t about the life of your mind. This is different and other. This is happening on an alien planet where you don’t live and as lonely as it is here, I am so grateful that you don’t. I want you to tell me about your sadness and your joy. I want you to keep being yourself while I figure out a way to be myself that isn’t killing me from the inside out. I love you and I need you to keep being you. You give me hope that things can be better. You remind me of reasons to stay here. You are beautiful and valuable to me, even on your darkest day.

How do I explain that I don’t want to talk about it, but I feel compelled to write about it again and again? I do that because I need to find a path out of the darkness and I can’t do that from in here. I can’t talk about it with you because it is so terrifying it makes me sweat and feel physically sick to voice what I have been hiding for so long. I can, under certain circumstances talk about it with a few people, and I do, but only when I either feel very brave or feel that I have no choice. It is not something I want to make chitchat about. The black hole still lurks at the back of everything, threatening to engulf all the beauty and the love and the people that I can’t manage without and it takes a lot to risk that and trust that I can change these feelings and that they don’t define me.

So, to honour any of my true feelings and talk about them feels incredibly exposing. That level of vulnerability causes me to freak out. I am in that panic phase right now. I know what is happening and why, but it doesn’t make me feel any safer. The urge to run away from it all, push everything back down and hide is profound. I am not doing that, but it is costing me dearly. I know it will be worth it, but when panic stands on the shoulders of panic and I feel myself sinking, it’s hard to keep going. I have been hiding for so long it is completely alien to step out of the shadows, but I need to keep doing it.

A few posts have really helped me this weekend. Great love to

Katherine May

whose book, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, made me start entertaining the idea that I might well be neurodiverse myself. This sounds so obvious now, but back then you were either mad or normal and I clearly wasn’t normal. Having someone so gently point out some powerful alternatives has been life changing. She writes about her own journey here.

Thanks to

Vicki Lesley

for her post this weekend, where she writes about her son’s autism diagnosis. She shares this quote, sent to her by a friend, which resonated hugely.

“Why do you need a label?” Because there is comfort in knowing that you are a normal zebra, not a strange horse… It is near impossible to be happy and mentally healthy if you’re spending all your life thinking you’re a failed horse, having others tell you you are a failed horse, when all along you could be thriving and understood if everyone, including you, just knew you were a zebra.”

Reading this reminded me that I can work to change the language around how I feel about myself. It’s important for me to be honest about the darkness inside me, but it’s easier to navigate if I can accept my zebra-ness too. At the weekend, Jason and I went to Whistable to watch the sun set. Walking down by West Beach we came across a bunch of people dressed as all kinds of animals. They were taking part in a ceremony to celebrate the animals they love. A lady explained to us that it had started during COVID, when a lot of people only had animals to comfort them, but it has grown every year since into something bigger, stranger and more wildly magical.

It was so wonderful to find people embracing their weird and being their own kind of zebra. It was just what I needed. It reminded me that the universe looks after me, even when I forget to look after myself. I identified strongly with the lady dressed as a jellyfish. She lives her life wherever the tides take her. It does me good to remember that.

And finally, this post by

Rachel Day

was beautiful about the power of the things we consume that affect us and can nourish us. She also writes about a documentary called Look Into My Eyes, about psychics working in New York, which I would love to see. It is described as a powerful exploration of mutual grief and healing. It resonated so deeply with me because I do this kind of work with people from time to time. I value that work for the deep connection it gives me to other human beings. It reminds me that maybe I’m not an alien after all, because the humanity and love in me totally recognises the humanity and love in them in a way that is missing in a lot of the rest of my life. I think that is something I very much need right now.

So things, as they so often are, are the same and also different. I am slowly learning to change things, stumbling around in this darkness. It’s hard and messy. I’m clumsy and I fuck up a lot, but I keep going even though I am a small, scared thing and life is really overwhelming right now, but death is worse - thankfully.