I’m not sure how I’ve written roughly two hundred blog posts and never told this story but I recently found the letters containing all the details and so I thought I’d finally tell it because it was a really important moment in my life.

I’d struggled with what obviously turned out to be Autism and the mental health issues that developed due to that going undiagnosed for years but I’d always been dismissed, told that “every teenager struggles.” But if that was true, I couldn’t figure out why everyone seemed to be coping so much better than me. It was awful and I just felt like I was failing and wrong and always slightly out of sync with everyone else. But if this was normal, then I was going to have to figure out how to live with it. Because apparently everyone else had.

As a teenager, I went to the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye, Wales a handful of times. It’s a really cool arts festival and I’ve heard (and met) some of my favourite authors there over the years. But my most significant memory is from when I heard Stephen Fry speaking about mental health. What he said changed my life. He talked about his experience with depressive episodes and suicidal ideation and equated the ups and downs of mental health to the weather:

“I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather. Here are some obvious things about the weather: It’s real. You can’t change it by wishing it away. If it’s dark and rainy, it really is dark and rainy, and you can’t alter it. It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row. BUT it will be sunny one day. It isn’t under one’s control when the sun comes out, but come out it will. One day. It really is the same with one’s moods, I think. The wrong approach is to believe that they are illusions. Depression, anxiety, listlessness – these are all are real as the weather – AND EQUALLY NOT UNDER ONE’S CONTROL. Not one’s fault. BUT they will pass: really they will. In the same way that one really has to accept the weather, one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes, ‘Today is a really crap day,’ is a perfectly realistic approach. It’s all about finding a kind of mental umbrella. ‘Hey-ho, it’s raining inside; it isn’t my fault and there’s nothing I can do about it, but sit it out. But the sun may well come out tomorrow, and when it does I shall take full advantage.'”

(This isn’t the exact quote from the event but this is a metaphor he’s used multiple times and is very similar to what he said that day.)

Everything he was talking about made absolute sense to me; for the first time, someone was saying ‘this isn’t normal,’ ‘this isn’t something you should have to learn to live with,’ ‘this is something that can be helped.’ For the first time in my life, I felt like someone understood what I was going through. Some of the feelings and experiences he described were so similar to mine that it took my breath away. I walked out of the tent in a daze and as soon as we had a bit of privacy, I told my Mum everything.

After that, we went to see my GP and started steadily exploring the options that the NHS provided. Things really deteriorated and the search became much more urgent after I failed an exam (I talk about that in this post and this post) and we were forced to go private to get me the help I needed as fast as possible, before it got worse. If you’ve read the posts about me getting my various diagnoses, you’ll know that, after several years of talking to lots of different people, I ended up being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Depression, Anxiety, Social Anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder.

And on and off during that time, I thought about that Stephen Fry talk and what he’d said and how everything might’ve turned out differently if not for that moment. So, not long after I got my diagnoses, I wrote to him. I wanted to thank him for his part in my journey. I didn’t know if he’d get it but I wanted to try anyway.

To my utter surprise, he not only got it but a few months later, I got a response. I don’t feel comfortable sharing it because he wrote it only for me and to circulate it feels like a breach of trust. I don’t know if that’s how he’d feel but that’s how it feels to me. But he was warm and kind and generous with his words and I’m so, so grateful. I’ve often returned to it in times of difficulty and it’s helped me pick myself up again and again. This letter is a deeply cherished possession, a gift I never in a million years thought I’d receive.