For most of the last decade, I have been struggling with a range of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety and insomnia. I suffered on and off for a very long time before finally getting the help I needed and managing to turn my life around.
While I was in therapy, I made a lot of notes, and now I’m trying to turn those notes into something useful. “Let’s Talk About…” will be a series of blog posts that will help me process and organise my thoughts, but I also hope that some of this will be helpful to others who are going through similar things.
First, I wanted to explain how this all came about.
A Little Background
So, I thought I was living a perfectly happy life until 2011, when everything came crashing down around me. I won’t bore you with the details, but within the space of about two weeks, my relationship ended, I was made redundant from my job, and I had to give up my flat. I had to leave the city where I’d spent nearly a decade building a life for myself and move back in with my parents, where I spent most of the summer on their sofa, thoroughly miserable. It was during this time that I realised that I didn’t have much of a social life (as most of my uni friends had moved away), that I hated what I had thought was my dream job and that my relationship wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It turned out that I was depressed long before this all happened, I just didn’t realise it at the time.
Eventually, my parents persuaded me to return to university to start a PhD, which was the kick up the arse I needed to start getting on with my life. Still, things kinda dragged and didn’t really return to normal. It would be nearly seven years before I would complete the PhD and truly get my life back on track, and one of the key elements of that success was finally getting the right kind of help for me.
Professional Help
For over a year, I saw a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist called Jo. Before I met Jo, I’d been to lots of other kinds of counselling and therapy, but they had never really helped. It was my sessions with Jo that finally helped me to sort myself out. By 2017, I was finally off my medication and by the end of 2018, I was happily married and no longer receiving therapy.
During this time, I was encouraged to make notes. I had tried to write journals and diaries before, but it never seemed to help, so I never stuck with it. But under Jo’s guidance, it was different. I would write about whatever was going on in my head during the week and then report back to her. She would give me tips, advice and exercises designed to quiet my mind and to overcome my negative behaviours. I didn’t write every day, and when I did, it was usually about whatever topic had been dominating my thoughts. It really helped me to organise my thoughts, get it out of my head and onto the page, and to process what I was going through.
A Muggle’s Guide to Dementor Defence
Because I am an aspiring writer, I tried to write all this stuff down in an engaging way, as if I were writing it for someone else. I tried to throw as much humour into it as possible and tried to integrate Jo’s suggestions and exercises with examples of my own experience. Because I am a massive nerd, this collection of notes quickly became known as “A Muggle’s Guide to Dementor Defence”. However, I have decided to change it, because I did not want to be associated with She Who Must Not Be Named.
Now, a few years on, I’ve decided to revisit that big, messy, unorganised collection of notes, guidance and exercises and turn it into something that will hopefully be useful to someone. I plan to write a series of posts on everything from sleep to exercise to musings on topics like love, work and faith. There will be posts focusing on practical advice, such as how to cope with insomnia, as well as discussions about things like how I came to terms with losing my ‘dream job’.
As I said, I can only write about my own experience, and most of it probably won’t be relevant to most people. However, if even a single person can benefit from my experience – if just one person can have an easier time dealing with mental health issues than I did – then it will all have been worth it.
Final Thoughts
So, that’s the origin of this series. It was something I wrote for myself to get me through therapy, which I hope can now be used to help others.
For more, check out the rest of the Let’s Talk… series or my other posts on Mental Health.
As always, if you need more information or support, I can recommend Mind, the mental health charity and the NHS campaign Every Mind Matters, or talk to your GP.