What can I do to help…

I wish I could help more…

Have you tried…

All phrases almost guaranteed to cause rage, tears, blind panic and nausea in someone who has long since lost the ability to help themselves. The Trivial Pursuit pie questions of mental health. Our constant search for answers in our head is usually what has broken us so additions to the list, however well-meaning, isn’t always helpful. Just to make it interesting though, stunned silence in the face of our pain is problematic too. We want to you to shush and we also want you to have all the words – piece of piss really.

For the purposes of this blog, we’re going to have to be us/me/I – the broken and you/them – the not broken. I’m assuming that you don’t have a mental health problem and your brain is perfectly functioning. If it’s not the case then that’s some next level shit that I wouldn’t presume to be able to make reasonable suggestions about except to say when I’ve hunkered down with a fellow broken person we still seem to like a good fucking whinge like the rest of the world. And chain-smoking.

Read things and talk to us about it – Mental Health is a booming industry – blogs, apps, classes and for the deeply retro – books (the ones with actual pages that you can drop in the bath). A word of caution though, while it’s an industry it’s an unregulated one so there is a lot of trash talk out there but it’s a place to start.

For example The Mighty website, for all it’s clickbaityness, can at least start you with some of the words. If you don’t know if it applies (and if you really don’t then you need to start further down the pack) then use it to open real life conversations with things like – “I read this thing…maybe this is how you feel”. If you send me a link via Messenger with a question mark I will burn you with fire. Even if you’ve picked up on something completely irrelevant like a fear of rectangles, it’s an opening. A small window onto a world that, for us, says I’ve tried to do some of the thinking for you today.

Also those books you keep buying me – you can read those too – there isn’t a pre-requisite that says you have to be mental to read them.

Talk about yourself – Apparently this is a no-no when done incorrectly – if someone is pouring their heart out you are not to say “Well a similar thing happened to me”. What you can do is find the right moment to talk about what scares you, what makes you feel sad or hopeless. Us guys on the other side feel like we’re alone with what’s in our heads, and that no-one else possibly feels this way (Don’t worry we beat ourselves up for being self involved already). It can help level the playing field here if one or two so-called normal folk popped up to say sometimes I want to cry about this thing. It’s not the mundane shit we want either – the First Bus service gives me the shits as much as anyone but we’re subsumed by bigger feelings than that so you might need to dig a bit deeper.

Personally I find it a release from my own constant internalizing to listen to other people’s problems but I’m a help junkie so if I start smacking a vein while you’re talking about your deepest hopes and fears maybe change the topic for a while.

Watch us – I have no objections to people watching me sleep but this is more the none creepy form of observation. We don’t necessarily notice when things have gone tits up so we might need you to do it. I’m top of a Strava league for lack of personal hygiene when the going gets rough but at no point has anyone told me honey, you need to take a bath, or even better run one for me (Having just written this – I realize this would be an absolute fucking game changer). No, you aren’t fixing the myriad of broken emotional pathways in our brain but you are carrying a little something for us.

Mental health problems come with physical as well as emotional symptoms – our self care skills will generally be non-existent so if we have a headache then our field of fucks about taking a Paracetamol will be barren. Force feed it to us like we’re a cat if you have to.

Fight us  – That’s right – it’s ok to have a square go with someone with mental health issues. Clearly pick your battles, and do it nicely but it’s ok to point out that spending £94 on a pair of pole dancing boots to make me feel better is maybe turning off taps on the Titanic. You should obviously add that buying a £65 pair is much more reasonable. We might want to stab you in the heart with said boots but there’s a chance you’ll make us realise that someone gives a fuck.

Doggos – No regulation needed but dogs or pretty much any animal doing dumb shit on the Internet will always do it. Another personal favourite is Twitter accounts that show the world isn’t always cesspit of misery – I’m currently obsessed with The Museum of English Rural Life. They’re good people.

You won’t always get it right but that’s ok, you just taking a swing at it will mean everything to us.  There’s a line from the West Wing (which should also be on the list of things you can do to help) that has always struck a chord with me –  You don’t have the power to fix everything. But I do like watching you try.

I started writing this in Summer 2018. I haven’t travelled since and not sure I could. 

 

I’m travelling again. I’ve never fully formed the thought, or god forbid said it out loud but I think that being away from home played a part in what we should honestly just start calling my breakdown. The inexorable tumbling of my Jenga blocks to a foot bruising mess on the floor, with a lay over in Dubai.

The history first, I’ve travelled for work before and it never bothered me. I did months in Colombo, working 14 hours a day, under constant pressure and isolated from my family, friends and any colleagues that I didn’t get a vague sense of hatred from. I was ably supported by the bar staff at my hotel who became so close to being family that they still recognised me years later. They protected me from sleazy guys and on my last night sent me off to the airport absolutely guttered with not even a bar tab to pay for. They were also VERY apologetic that they couldn’t give me free cigarettes. I love Colombo now – it’s noisy, inconvenient, and insanely hot. Whenever I arrive there, when most people are weirded out by jet lag and insane trishaw drivers, it’s the closest I have to coming home.

My first trip to Hong Kong followed right after a week in Colombo. I felt terribly glamourous boarding my flight from Colombo to Hong Kong, confident that a week of car horns being used instead of indicators and arguments over 50p tri rides would prepare me for what I was expecting to be the batshit lunacy of HK. It took me maybe 30 minutes to realise how fundamentally wrong I’d been. I stood in a crowd of a billion people on Nathan Road and realised that I was a total farm girl. I survived that initial week of weirdness, including being offered whole roast birds to eat. I don’t care if it’s polite to eat it or deep fried to fuck – I’m just not eating the beak of a small bird. I marvelled at the logistics of organising a million people that don’t seem to give a fuck about where they are supposed to stand on the MTR and took precisely two photos. Job done, mental health intact and a box of pink coloured but green tea flavoured Kit Kats to take home.

My second trip was a shit show from the start. I failed to book my travel properly and found out on the day of travel that I wasn’t actually travelling. I shamefacedly communicated to the people I was supposed to work with that I was a fuckwit and would be arriving a week later. I arrived after a much longer flight from the UK and issued Code Red demands for company of the people I knew were there. They’re good people so my first day in the office was an absolute train wreck, thanks to all of the drink. I have one of those strange, almost genetic memories, about that night though. I woke up to sun streaming in the window (too pissed to close the electric blinds you see) which should have been like hot knitting needles through a bruised mind but I felt absolute stillness and peace. Like I was the only person in the world and I was completely content. I can’t remember feeling like that since, and I’m not even sure I remember every really feeling like that before either. Any feelings of tranquility were shattered the next morning when I walked to work through the wet markets of Monk Kok. For context, imagine Ikea on a bank holiday, with no passive aggressive arrows on the floor, an impressively large number of people with no sense of personal space and the umistakeable stench of dead animals, and some live ones. I got to the office where I strung together hungover, rum and BBQ sauce tinged conversations and prayed for the day to be over. The day ended with a $72 pizza and a bed that couldn’t do enough for me. It stopped being quite so helpful four hours later when my body clock disagreed with my assessment of how fucked I was and decided it was time to get up. Awk, jet lag I thought, everyone gets jet lag and misses a bit of sleep. It continued all week which would have been a pain in the tits if I hadn’t learned how to use a VPN app and taught myself a bit of Korean from an early morning gameshow. The only night I slept properly that whole week was after a couple of apparently quiet drinks which resulted in me being woken by a good friend’s girlfriend gently telling me I needed to get off her sofa bed and go to work. She was equally gentle about it an hour later when she had to wake me again. She was good people too as she took me to get me a poorly planned tattoo. I slept then…the tattoo lady seemed vaguely bemused that I was the first person to fall asleep in her chair but it had been 4 nights on 3 hours sleep, you take it where you can.

In early 2017 I was offered the chance to go to Hong Kong for a month. I’d heard of greater minds than me taking it on for longer periods and then promptly losing their shit and demanding to come home. I wasn’t worried though, I’d prided myself on a granite like shell to protect me from stress and worry, there was good work to be done and I had a support team. I had friends from work going, people I knew and felt comfortable with, felt safe with. I promised myself I wouldn’t turn up for the first day of work as battered as my last trip but when my sleep avoidance alarm went off at 1 in the morning I maybe overdid what I thought was a genius solution to not sleeping. I drank the entire minibar. To myself. It doesn’t sound like a lot but every beer, every spirit, all the wine was consumed. In about an hour. Strangely I didn’t touch the Pringles. I sat and stared at the constant lights outside and wept. You could have asked me what was wrong and my only answer at that time would have been…I can’t sleep. Having had an over fondness for drink in another life, I recognised the desperate drinking I’d done. I don’t like rum but I inhaled it like I couldn’t breathe without it. Grim whisky, which now has a whole special face dedicated to it, was no problem. And when it was done I lay on an icy cold bathroom floor alone, occasionally crawling to the self flushing toilet to puke. And yes, it kept flushing on me before I could move my head. The next morning I had a designated driver to get me on the MTR and slope through a day of work. I’ve manfully worked through many a hangover but I couldn’t shake the disquiet that came with the knowledge that I’d tried to intentionally drink myself into a coma for the first time in years. The jet lag continued and was usually staved off by copious amounts of fun alcohol. Leary, peanut strewn bars and nights at the races with other shit heads made me feel like I was doing ok. Everyone does this here I thought…it’s fine. There was even nights when I didn’t drink. Instead I experimented with falling asleep through repeated episodes of West World. I still woke up after a couple of hours but there was no recurrence of Minibargate. I even went running – I was training for a marathon so I would take to Nathan Road at 5 in the morning, which is the only time Nathan Road is empty enough to run along. My support team shuffled me through the days, or some days shuffled along with me when we were effectively just a combined drain on society. I got left behind one morning as a result of winning shithead of the night award the previous evening . The prize was a polite call to my room to gently remind me to get up for breakfast followed by an even politer Whatsapp that it might be prudent to get the fuck up. I was furious. You never leave a man behind. Looking back I think it was probably another early warning sign…unjustified rage with the addition of a new and uncomfortable feeling. Dependency. Not on alcohol or drugs but in people. I hadn’t relied on anyone in years but my emotional state had become linked inextricably to whether someone would offer up “Iced Caramel Latte” at exactly the right moment, or tell me the thing I was wearing was ok before I could leave my hotel. Or that I was going a good job. Normal things…that normal people worry about. I came home after my month – fatter, a little more fragile and smoking again.

I stumbled through a trip to Kolkata later in the year and while I felt outwardly ok, when I looked back with the doctors and the therapy lady at Christmas I realised that it was after that trip that I stopped sleeping properly at home. I can’t remember (again) how shitty I felt in the months up to the last trip to Hong Kong. I think I was on some kind of autopilot, trying to keep everything going – work, a home, a charity – papering over the cracks, assuming that everyone felt this kind of stress. Surely I wasn’t doing any more than any one else did with their lives. I travelled for what I hoped was the last time, my intention being to get the job I needed to do done so I could rest. This time I travelled by myself  with no support team and an already fractured brain. I actually found I stopped caring about the job I needed to do, I picked easy things to do, I stopped fighting with people to get a job done. I averaged a couple of hours sleep most nights and stopped even trying. I would sit up chatting on line to people back home, or anyone I knew who might be awake at the same time as me. I’m not sure all of them really realised that it was ridiculous for me to be talking to them, given where I was in the world compared to where they were.  When I confessed my lack of sleep to one of my online voices they suggested that something to help me sleep wouldn’t hurt – I suspect they meant a warm bath and hot milk but I’d already heard of the easy availability of sleeping pills in Hong Kong. When I say heard, I mean frantically Googled and nearly cried when I found that one of these pharmacists was just round the corner from my hotel. Numbers are funny things – in the context of buying dodgy Chinese sleeping pills at least. If someone says 100, while nodding enthusiastically, why wouldn’t you think they meant 100mg tablets. Not “Here’s a family size bottle of narcotics to get you through the next week”. I clutched my tiny, over stuffed bottle of what I hoped was happiness and shuffled my way through the crowds back to my hotel room.

Let’s not be coy here – these bad boys work, and work hard. I had 6 hours of blissful un-interrupted sleep and, aside from that freshly crapped turd feeling in my mouth when I woke up, no other ill effects. Except I didn’t feel “better”. My brain was still overwhelmed and hiding itself in a fog on a daily basis. I emotionally limped through the rest of the trip and hoped the HK effect would wear off when I got home.

Two weeks later I cried on the short walk from the waiting room to the doctors office to confirm what I already knew. I was having a breakdown.

I struggled to fry some eggs this morning. Not in a “aww fuck it I broke a yolk” way but in a “this simple task is absolutely fucking my brain” kind of way. What’s worse is I woke up like this. There was no reason to feel off but there I am staring at a frying pan like I’m about to wrestle an angry hoard, trying not to cry about some eggs. 

My path way to crazy is usually pretty easy to recognise. Things stack up a little at a time, the rampant over thinking starts and the kill switch in my brain ultimately kicks in. Tears or shouting usually follow. The final outcome is a nap and general sense of exhaustion and feeling that I can’t keep going through this. On good days I can avert disaster by not interacting with people. I used to wonder at the advice on mental health websites saying people often don’t respond to messages when their health has taken a dive. How hard can it be. And I realise – it is hard, doing a good human in the face, or screen, of other humans.  Them “How are things”, Me “I having gaping wound in my soul and I can’t put toothpaste on my toothbrush but otherwise – I’m fine”. It’s not good humaning. 

Lack of sleep is also a factor. When I was at my worse I was averaging about 4 hours solid sleep a night. The rest of the time was punctuated by reading books I’d read a thousand times, smoking or silently crying in the dark. I now live with a vague fear of not sleeping. There is a stash of dodgy sleeping pills by the bed for just such an occasion but I feel like these small white tablets judge me. Taking them is a failure of resolve for me. Also they make your mouth taste like a badger has shat in it while you’re asleep. 

Trying to do much also comes with a health warning. I’m still not entirely comfortable with having any “me” time but therapy lady was very keen that I learn to switch off. I can stack jobs up, planned with meticulous precision to make sure I do ALL the things but apparently that’s not good for me so today I only had to do some doggo things and then…well…nothing. I suspect free time worries me as it’s a chance to be alone with my thoughts but I kind of regard my own thoughts like a creepy guy at work that I would like to spend as little time alone with as possible.  

Today though, none of these things were a problem. A blissfully silent message box, a relatively good night sleep, with the exception of a tap dancing dog at 2am and a relatively empty day. So why the egg related hysteria? The frustrating part is that I honestly don’t know and the reality is that not knowing doesn’t help. At this exact point I’ve stalled, trapped in a deck chair when I HAVE to find a solution to the problem otherwise my brain will continue to whirr incessantly. I feel weird and queasy but I want to function. Any minute now, honestly I will function.