Finding Hope2023 in Review
Posted on January 1, 2024
TW: Discussion of depression, self harm, and suicidal thoughts and ideation.
Much like last year, I have no idea how to sum up this year. I don’t think I have it in me to write a long post that involves such intense emotions and I think that, if I wait until I do, we might all be waiting a very long time so I’m just going to write until I can’t anymore and that’ll be that. It’s just too hard.
While there have been good moments (some of which can be seen in the collage below), it’s been a fucking painful year and it’s now the third New Year’s Eve that I’ve spent crippled by depression, suicidal thoughts, and overwhelming fear and dread around the future. I’m pretty sure I’m in full autistic burnout and I feel like I’m living in a fog. Last year, I think I described my depression as a drought but, this year, I think the better metaphor is drowning: I feel like I’m drowning in this depression and I have so little energy left that staying afloat is feeling more and more impossible. I’m so tired. I’m tired of trying so hard, of feeling like I’m not trying hard enough; I’m tired of feeling this way, of feeling like things will never get better, like there’s no point in even trying to feel better because there’s nothing worth feeling better for. It just feels like there’s so much bad in the world, so much agony, that it isn’t a world I want to live in. I feel broken; I feel like a prime example of a defective human being. There have been good things, like I said, but it seems like they can never just be good things: there’s always so much bad or hard twisted up in them that enjoying them isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. I miss feeling safe. I miss feeling safe to feel things.
A big, hard part of this year has been that I started taking Phenelzine again, for the third time. I didn’t want to and I felt coerced by the circumstances to take it. I was so angry about it all that I made potentially my most dramatic, self destructive move so far: I cut my face and then, when it got infected, I was so reluctant to treat it that I’ve ended up with a fairly visible scar. The most confusing part of it was that, even though I didn’t want anyone to bring it up, I was surprised that no one did; it seemed like the kind of thing that would trigger some alarm. Just as I imagined voicing consistent suicidal would but no one’s really commented on that either. It only makes the experience more isolating and lonely. But back to the Phenelzine: while it helped me get out of bed and go out now and then, it hasn’t had the same impact that it’s previously had on my mood, even on the higher dose. And that means that I’ve officially run out of medication options. I’ve been going to therapy consistently, for the most part, but I feel like it’s getting harder and harder; there have been sessions where I’ve left feeling traumatised. We’ll be trying something different in the new year but I’m struggling to feel hopeful, but that’s not specific to just therapy.
I look at the collage I made for this year and although I remember each of these moments, I feel disconnected from them; the emotions feel dulled. A lot has happened, somewhat to my surprise…
I went to multiple small shows; I went to hydrotherapy religiously and started physiotherapy; I got adopted by a puppy and then had my heart broken when she was taken away; I went to Nashville for Tin Pan South; my application for an Autism Service Dog was successful; I released my single, ‘House on Fire,’ as well as creating all of the visuals for it; I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia; I went to art exhibitions (and even helped to build my favourite art piece, Breathing Room); I hung out with friends, online and in real life; I travelled to Germany for the wedding of one of my best friends and was reunited with multiple friends that I hadn’t seen in years; I got to hang out with some of my American friends when they performed here; I fought for Taylor Swift tickets; I had my heart broken again when the rescue puppy we applied for was homed with someone else; I went to some amazing concerts; I met Amanda Tapping again and she’s still one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever known; I started performing again; I read books and watched movies and TV shows that are now among my favourites; I adopted a puppy (which still doesn’t sound real to me); I swam 5km for Mind, raising over £600; I went to multiple Maisie Peters shows and got to meet her too; one of my cats got very sick and we had to nurse her back to health; my aunt died; I changed heart medications; and I worked on lots of different musical and academic work. I know all of these things happened; I remember them clearly but it’s like watching them play on a screen. I know these memories are mine but they don’t feel like mine. It’s weird and sad.
I’m so tired. I’m tired of masking but I don’t know how to stop. I feel broken – physically, mentally, and emotionally – but as hard as I try, it never feels like enough. Over ten years later, it should be getting better not worse, right?
I don’t know what else to say. Life feels increasingly scary, internally and externally, and I just feel too broken to manage. I don’t know how people walk around without all of the fear and grief and anxiety that I do, that I see as such an intrinsic part of being human. As I wrote last year, “I don’t know what tomorrow brings. I don’t know what I want it to. I didn’t want this year. I didn’t expect to still be here and I’m not happy or pleased or grateful for that. I feel pathetic and stupid and cowardly; I feel broken beyond repair. I feel frozen, overwhelmed by all of these big feelings. If feelings could kill you, I think these would have.“
Changing Therapist
Posted on November 5, 2023
TW: Mentions of self harm and suicidal thoughts and urges.
It’s been a year since I started therapy again after an unintentional break, essentially starting again with a new therapist. It’s been a hard and emotional process, and at times a distressing one; just going to therapy can make you feel so vulnerable and so open to further hurt as you dig into the hard stuff – wading into dark waters that you’d rather ignore and pretend don’t exist, even as they’re eroding your mental health – that adding difficulties to that already difficult thing can feel unfairly cruel. So, given that I’m me, I thought that, perhaps, writing about it might be helpful and maybe not just for me but for anyone going through a similar transition. And if not helpful, then hopefully validating in some way.
I’d been seeing Therapist A for almost seven years when everything changed. She was taking leave and I was on my own.
Pre-2021, I’d seen Therapist A once or twice a week pretty consistently since early 2016. Even when the UK went into lockdown due to COVID-19 at the beginning of 2020, we continued our sessions online; I didn’t find them as productive but it was better than nothing. We continued that way for a while, trying to manage my crippling anxiety over the pandemic, working on issues that came up as I persisted with my now online Masters classes, and continuing to work on the issues that had landed me in therapy in the first place. But then the schedule began to slip: Therapist A’s home life was pulling her away from work and I was working myself into the ground in order to complete the final project of my Masters. I barely saw her in the last four months of the course, which I really struggled with: I was digging into some pretty hard stuff, writing song after song about my experience of being autistic, and I craved that safe space to play them to her, to hear her perspective on what I was saying, talk about the feelings they were bringing up, and she wasn’t there. I told myself that it was a short term thing and that, once the Masters was over and her stuff was resolved, the schedule of our sessions would go back to normal. I think it’s safe to say that, given the title of this post, it didn’t.
I finished the Masters in September 2021 and officially graduated, walking the stage, a few months later in November. I had reduced and stopped taking Phenelzine at this point, in preparation for trying ADHD meds (and we all know how appallingly that went), and my depression was creeping back in; the situation was getting pretty desperate. But luckily, that was when Therapist A reached out and we started having sessions again. We had a lot of catching up to do but, by mid-December, we were up to date. Unfortunately, the ADHD medication was already hitting me hard and my depression had gone from a state I recognised to a whole new level of despair with increasingly overwhelming suicidal thoughts. My most vivid memory from that time is sitting in Therapist A’s new office, staring at the unfamiliar rug and hearing my voice in my ears as I confessed to those thoughts, my voice completely flat (this is known as ‘flat affect,’ a recognised symptom of depression and other mental health conditions). It still makes me nauseous to think about, even though so much time has passed and my depression has gotten so much worse since; I think, in my head, that was the beginning of this awful, awful time.
My last session was on New Years Eve and I was drowning, all of the impending new beginnings feeling more like a threat than a promise. When we hung up, I felt achingly hollow and that was only the beginning of a terrible night. But that’s a story for another time. January was passing around me, aimless and anxious, when I finally heard from Therapist A. But instead of setting up our next session, she was letting me know that she was taking leave indefinitely. Her reasons aren’t mine to tell but, between those, my ongoing abandonment issues, and my overwhelmingly bad mental health, I was devastated, spiralling into some grotesque hybrid of a meltdown and a panic attack that went on for hours: I screamed, I cried, I scratched at my face, I tore at my hair, I shrieked like an animal in pain. I guess that’s what I was. I felt like I was trying to exorcise a corrosive demon from my body but nothing helped, nothing alleviated the pain. I was shattered as brutally as if I’d been hit by a wrecking ball. That’s what it felt like, what my life felt like.
Eventually I physically ran out of energy and fell asleep, too tired and emotionally drained to even engage with the world. My depression became more and more overwhelming, compounded by the devastating effects of the ADHD medications and the loss of a massive source of support in my life, and, for months afterwards, I barely got out of bed, barely ate, barely talked. I abandoned social media and I avoided mirrors at every opportunity, to the point where I started to forget what I looked like. The suicidal thoughts were only getting stronger, stronger than they’d ever been in my life, and the feeling of being intrinsically, irreparably broken was – and is – a constant weight in my chest.
I’m not sure when or why I started getting out of bed, why I decided that I needed to go back to therapy. I think I knew I was getting into a very precarious position mentally and the excruciating pain of being inside my head was getting so unbearable that I was willing to do anything to lessen the pressure. I did see a consultant at the local mental health unit but the experience was another traumatic one: after a panic attack at the front door, a junior doctor took my history and then brought in the consultant who told me about ECT and the Ketamine trials before telling me why I shouldn’t do them and recommending doing more of the things I love (which I’d already told him I couldn’t engage with because I was so depressed). So that didn’t improve my relationship with doctors and the medical profession.
For a short while, I worked with a therapist I’d met several years previously but the sessions only made me feel worse and while I have no doubt that it wasn’t intentional, I ended up feeling more broken and more traumatised by some of the things he said, trauma that I’m still carrying around with me. So I stopped seeing him and met with several new therapists, trying to get a feel for them and their methods before committing to someone new. But, just like with Therapist A, Therapist B was the first of the group that I met (a year ago yesterday, I believe) and between her therapeutic approach, her personality, and the fact that she’d brought along a dog she knew in order to put me at ease, she was the obvious choice.
As therapists, they both trained in several of the same disciplines and their skillsets overlap to a certain degree but, when discussing a particular issue, there were differences to how they’d approach it; there has been a fair amount of whiplash in getting use to Therapist B’s approach after so many years with Therapist A. But the point of this post isn’t to compare them – they’re both lovely people and very good at what they do, at least as far as I can tell – but rather to reflect on the process of moving from one to another and the feelings that that kicked up. And a lot of feelings there were – I even wrote a song about it called ‘Grave Digger.’ During the early sessions with Therapist B, we made a timeline of my life and discussed some of the biggest moments, many of which were difficult and distressing (and remain so to this day). Revisiting and recounting the hardest parts of my life was gruelling but I did my best to push through the internal resistance and breathe through the resulting turmoil; between that and the ongoing mental anguish, it was a difficult few months. I don’t mean to make it sound like one continuous torture because that isn’t true -we’ve talked about the good experiences that’ve made me who I am, of course, and there have been sessions where we’ve laughed a lot – but I think that building a strong relationship with a therapist and making progress will always involve periods of incredible vulnerability, which is always scary and, at times, painful.
Sometimes – okay, often – I feel like I’m not making any progress at all, partly because of all the disruption and the distress it’s caused. A year ago, I hadn’t expected to see 2023 and my depression and chronic suicidal thoughts haven’t lessened, even though I am taking Phenelzine again (at a higher dose, in fact) – after many discussions with Therapist B. It has made me more functional, to a certain degree, but the decision came with a price tag: my self harming escalated from cutting my arm to cutting my face. I’m not convinced anything’s changed; I don’t feel any better. But I can see that some things have changed and changed for the better, even though I can’t feel the effects yet: something has allowed me to start talking about some of the worst stuff in my brain, even if only a little. It’s something I could never have imagined doing so I know that that’s progress, even though I struggle to feel it.
I have heard from Therapist A several times now; the news has generally been positive, which has been a great relief (and I appreciate having a little less uncertainty in my life). Therapy is continuing as normal – the current version of normal at least – which I’m pretty sure is a good thing: the idea of trying to work my way through all of the emotions that I know would come up as a result of any potential change makes me feel physically nauseous.
I’m not always convinced that I’ve adjusted and sometimes I forget that I’m not going to see Therapist A, my body moving in the direction of that office as the car turns down a different road; that experience is more ingrained than I had realised at the time. And I know I’m still carrying a lot of hurt and anger over the whole thing, even though over a year has passed. I’m not angry at the people involved – nobody chose any of this – but there is anger and, although I’ve been slower to realise it, hurt too. I think it’s easier to be angry than to be hurt. Not always but sometimes. And, as I said, I have abandonment issues, issues that I’ve struggled with for a long time, which – unsurprisingly – have been exacerbated by this whole thing. It’s hard to lose someone that you trusted to never leave (a naïve ideal, I know) and it’s hard to trust someone new, ignoring the whispers that they’re just another person who will inevitably walk away. I think these issues are important to mention but they probably need their own blog post rather than taking up space here: when talking about changing therapists, it’s not something that everyone has mixed into the equation. All of that said, I’m trying to trust and I think that, for the most part, I am, even if it does sometimes feel like a conscious, concentrated effort. The progress isn’t as fast as I’d hoped it would be when I committed to therapy again last year but the proof is there. I’m sharing things I never thought I’d share and that’s certainly not nothing.
Finding Hope 