Learning to Question Myself
My mental health story didn’t start when I finally admitted I wasn’t coping.
It started years before that.
It started when I was a child.
Growing up, I always felt like my brother was the favourite.
Other people may remember things differently, but that was my experience of my childhood.
I could see the differences. I could feel them.
And whenever I tried to speak about it, somehow I was the one who was wrong.
Wrong for noticing.
Wrong for being hurt by it.
Wrong for saying anything.
So I learned something very early:
“Sometimes it is easier to shut up than to try to explain how something makes you feel.”
I learned to question myself.
Maybe I’m imagining it.
Maybe I’m being dramatic.
Maybe I’m jealous.
Maybe I’m too sensitive.
Maybe everybody else is right and I’m the problem.
And when you learn that as a child, you don’t suddenly leave it behind when you become an adult.
You carry it with you.
I became very good at swallowing things.
Very good at keeping people happy.
Very good at laughing things off.
Very good at pretending something didn’t hurt because admitting that it hurt usually seemed to make everything worse.
When Boundaries Stop Feeling Like Your Own
Then I ended up in an abusive relationship.
And sex was part of that abuse.
I don’t want to soften that anymore by simply saying sex was “expected of me.”
My boundaries did not matter the way they should have.
What I wanted did not matter the way it should have.
Whether I actually wanted sex did not always feel relevant.
“I learned to go along with things because sometimes giving in felt easier than dealing with what happened if I didn’t.”
And that changes you.
It changes the meaning of intimacy.
It changes the meaning of touch.
Something that should be loving and safe becomes something your body can brace itself for.
Affection starts to feel as though it might come with an expectation attached.
You stop asking yourself what you want and start asking what you need to do to keep the other person happy.
Eventually you can lose touch with your own boundaries completely.
The relationship ended.
The effects of it didn’t.
I carried all of that with me.
The instinct to give in.
The guilt around saying no.
The fear of somebody feeling rejected.
The feeling that another person’s disappointment is somehow my responsibility to fix.
And underneath all of that was the same lesson I had already learned growing up:
“Maybe what I feel isn’t valid.
Maybe I’m the one who is wrong.”
Surviving Doesn’t Mean You’re Okay
At some point, everything became too much.
There was a point where I attempted suicide.
Even writing that sentence feels strange.
I don’t say it for shock value and I don’t want sympathy for it.
I say it because it happened, and leaving it out would mean leaving out one of the darkest parts of my mental health story.
I reached a point where the pain inside my head became so overwhelming that I genuinely could not see another way out of it.
I wasn’t thinking about making a statement.
“I wasn’t trying to prove anything to anybody.”
I was exhausted.
Completely, utterly exhausted.
Exhausted from feeling like I was the problem.
Exhausted from feeling like I was never enough.
Exhausted from carrying things I didn’t know how to put down.
Exhausted from trying to be okay for everybody else while quietly falling apart.
“I survived it.”
But surviving something does not mean you wake up afterwards magically grateful, fixed, or suddenly full of reasons to live.
Life carried on.
And so did everything inside my head.
There are still days when my own thoughts can become incredibly cruel.
There are still days when I feel useless.
When I feel like a burden.
When I convince myself I don’t deserve anything.
When I feel like I have no rights.
When my brain tells me that I am the problem.
And sometimes I get so exhausted by trying to work out what everybody needs from me that I think it would be easier to stop being a person altogether.
Just become a robot.
Do what is expected.
Say the right thing.
Don’t argue.
Don’t complain.
Don’t have needs.
Don’t need space.
Don’t have boundaries.
“Just keep everybody else happy.”
Trying to Make Myself Smaller
Now I’m married, and lately I’ve been forced to confront just how deeply everything I have lived through still affects me.
There are times when I genuinely do not want to be touched.
Sometimes constant touching actually hurts me.
And I have tried to explain that.
But something as simple as “I don’t want to be touched right now” can become something much bigger.
It becomes about rejection.
It becomes about whether I love somebody enough.
It becomes:
“I’ll sleep downstairs then because I can’t lie next to you without touching you.”
And suddenly I am feeling guilty because somebody else is upset by a boundary I needed to put in place.
That feeling is horribly familiar.
Recently my body physically reacted to being touched sexually.
I tried to explain that nerves reacting to stimulation does not mean that mentally I wanted what was happening.
A body can respond automatically.
A physical response is not consent.
But I was told that my body was saying one thing while my mind was saying another.
And that messed with my head more than I can properly explain.
Because after everything I have lived through, I need my mind to matter.
If I say I don’t want something, that needs to matter regardless of what an involuntary physical response does.
I need my no to mean no without having to prove that I mean it.
I need “please don’t touch me” to be enough.
I need to know that I can have a boundary without being made to feel guilty for having one.
Afterwards, even getting changed became uncomfortable because he started covering his eyes.
“I was told I needed to make more effort.”
And suddenly I found myself doing the same thing I have done for years.
Looking at myself.
Blaming myself.
Asking what I should change.
Maybe I should be more affectionate.
Maybe I should tolerate more touching.
Maybe I should make more effort.
Maybe I should stop complaining.
Maybe I should just give people what they want.
Maybe I should stop being difficult.
Maybe I should just shrink.
It has even reached stupidly ordinary things.
Music.
Songs being changed because the lyrics weren’t liked.
Delusional being turned off.
And I remember thinking:
“I can’t even listen to the music I want anymore.”
On its own that probably sounds tiny.
But when you already feel as though you have spent your entire life giving pieces of yourself away to keep other people comfortable, small things stop feeling small.
They start to feel like one more piece of you disappearing.
I constantly find myself checking myself.
Is this okay?
Will this upset somebody?
Can I say that?
Should I keep quiet?
Am I allowed to be angry?
Am I allowed to be uncomfortable?
Am I allowed to say no?
Or am I wrong again?
And that last question is probably the one that has followed me for most of my life.
“Am I wrong?”
Because as a child, when I said something hurt me, I was told I was wrong about what I was seeing.
In an abusive relationship, my boundaries were treated as though they mattered less than somebody else’s wants.
And now when I try to put boundaries around my own body, I can still end up feeling as though I have done something wrong simply by having them.
Somewhere along the way, I learned that everybody else’s feelings came before mine.
And my mental health has paid for it.
I Just Wanted To Be Heard
The terrifying thing is that most people looking at me would have absolutely no idea any of this was happening inside my head.
I am extremely good at appearing okay.
I joke.
I’m sarcastic.
I work.
I pick up my camera.
I look after my children.
I post stupid sh*t online.
I laugh.
I say:
“I’m fine.”
And sometimes nobody would know that underneath all of it I feel like I am completely falling apart.
Recently I tried to do the thing everybody tells you to do when your mental health gets bad.
I reached out.
Samaritans rang me.
111 told me to speak to my GP.
SHOUT took nearly four hours to reply and then I was sent links.
I understand that services have limitations.
I understand that nobody can magically fix another human being.
But I wasn’t asking to be fixed.
I just wanted to be heard.
That is the part I think gets completely missed when we tell people to “reach out.”
Sometimes saying the words “I’m not okay” has already taken everything somebody has.
And when you have spent most of your life being told, directly or indirectly, that your feelings are wrong, dramatic, inconvenient or less important than everybody else’s, speaking up is fu*king terrifying.
Sometimes I don’t even know how to explain what is happening.
Sometimes it comes out as anger.
Sometimes crying.
Sometimes sarcasm.
Sometimes “I’m tired.”
Sometimes I go quiet.
Sometimes I say I’m fine because finding the words feels impossible.
That doesn’t mean I’m okay.
This Is My Story
I’m beginning to understand that there isn’t one single reason my mental health is the way it is.
There are layers.
There is the little girl who felt second best and was told she was wrong when she tried to say it.
“There is the woman who survived an abusive relationship.”
There is the part of me whose relationship with sex and touch was damaged by that abuse.
There is the person who became so overwhelmed by everything that she attempted suicide.
There is the part of me that still feels guilty saying no.
There is the wife desperately trying to explain that needing physical space does not mean she doesn’t love somebody.
There is the mother trying to make sure her own children never feel the way she did.
There is the photographer.
There is the sarcastic idiot who will find something inappropriate to laugh at in almost any situation.
And underneath every version of me is somebody who is completely fu*king exhausted from spending so much of her life trying to be easy for everybody else.
I don’t want sympathy.
I don’t particularly want to be called brave.
And I definitely don’t want this turned into some inspirational story about how everything happens for a reason.
Some things should never have happened.
I just want to be allowed to exist as myself without constantly wondering whether I’m doing it wrong.
I want my feelings to count.
I want my experiences to count.
I want my body to belong to me.
“I want “no” to be enough.”
I want affection that feels safe rather than something I have to brace myself for.
I want to stop automatically making myself responsible for everybody else’s emotions.
I want to listen to a fu*king song because I like it.
I want to stop apologising for taking up space.
I want to stop shrinking.
Mostly, I want to find out who I actually am underneath all the years of trying to be who everybody else needed me to be.
I don’t have a neat ending to this story.
I’m not “better.”
Right now, some days are really fu*king hard.
But maybe this is where something starts changing.
Not because I suddenly know how to fix everything.
But because for once I am saying:
This happened to me.
This hurt me.
This is how it affected me.
I survived a point where I genuinely didn’t think I could keep going.
And I am still here.
I am not wrong for talking about what happened to me.
“This is my story.”
Not everybody else’s version of it.
Mine.
And I’m tired of disappearing from my own life just to make everybody else comfortable.