thoughts majeure

An overview: I must be a brilliant actress, presenting as very normal or extremely unusual, terribly well. When I’m with psychiatrists I think I’m so normal that I can’t believe we are wasting time on me. But then I remember when my psychiatrist disappeared in 2015 and I thought he’d been taken out by gangsters. He returned from paternity leave a few months later, back from the dead. It can be funny in fleeting moments, but terrifying and tireless at times.

For ten spirited years I’ve had an ever-present feeling of being watched. A paranoia I’ve lived with since my debut diagnosis of psychosis¹ in 2013. I lived secretly then for six months with microscopic cameras and the paranormal terrorising me. There was a crescendo chase from home by predators and fear and friends took me to a psychiatric ward the next day.

A spectrum of factors landed me there. From a deeply personal humiliation to scenes of Syrian massacres I forced myself to see. These devastations collided with extreme existential thinking during a year of yoga-teacher training and extreme fear of death. I was separated from my daughter’s father and lived with her only half the time. I had an eleven-year-old eating disorder and a voice that told me to kill myself two years before.

That voice is what I refer to as the ‘textbook’ time it happened. Like the grey lady ghost I saw as a child. She was ‘traditional,’ rather than the troll I saw in my cupboard on my twelfth birthday, the fairy when I was thirty or the phoenix, the werewolf, the leprechauns. This month I saw a woman by my bed, who I’ve still not had time to process. These have always been my vivid normal. Psychiatrists and statistics tell me that they have been hallucinations in turmoil. My brain having a tantrum. Throwing sight, sound and other senses around the room. 

I hate the term mental illness. I don’t feel ill. I do feel other. To say I feel normal is that I feel normal for me. My mind feels the same shape it always has. Sometimes disturbing pictures are put there, and sometimes hallucinations are projected into the world around me. The same can go for voices, the unknown people that have poked me and spoken inside my head. don’t you have that too? I assumed.

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Since that seismic spiral in 2013 diagnoses have danced from psychosis to schizophrenia and more. Stress makes things worse. I don’t sleep much, emotions are one or the other, I forget things that happened moments ago and I take rejection very badly. Psychiatrists (some progressive, and some not so brilliant): I tell them the truth, the half the truth and nothing but the truth. We shake the little bottle every so often to see what cluster of symptoms spill out. I’m then given a new and loaded label that means nothing to me other than stigma … so I silence it away. My Instagram captions have said next to nothing because my real thoughts are too much and confusing. I disclosed a shorter version of this story a few years ago that I quickly deleted. 

Medication sometimes mutes my mind. Other times I’m a heavy handful. But mostly I’ve worked silently and diligently in wonderland. Investigating a tedious plot of intrusion and ghosts and end times. And so I have been a recluse, with just forever people who boomerang back to doors that I constantly close. But even forever people mostly drop away. 

I fell behind in a career as a fashion and beauty journalist that demands being seen. When I was seen for rare interviews that I didn’t cancel (I cancelled so many) I was told I seemed too nervous in feedback from HR. I knew I looked unwell. I had an introductory meeting with the then-Editor of British Vogue within weeks of hospital. It was the day after I went to sleep with the barrel of an imagined gun directed in my bedroom window. I pulled my body to the safety of a wall. I have perfect colleagues in New York now, but when we first Skyped I thought they were part of a bigger plot than just to ‘headhunt’ me for a job.

I’ll disclose some of my descent. Declassify it for other complex mind people who feel their own kind of normal. Even at my worst I never felt mad. But my diary said if I am locked away at least we would be safe. For me, ‘madness’ happened around me. Yes, it attempts to live inside me, but my own mind is always there too – observing. I didn’t feel how you think I did. It hollowed and harrowed me. Maybe madness is just something other people see.

It’s been a decade of delusions, a lifetime of seeing and hearing things and I write as a writer beginning to tell. The small pictures, not the bigger picture. I’m not equipped to tell that story. Is anyone? Research is still in its infancy when it comes to psychosis. Never mind the psyche² itself. 

I’ve learned to live with this constant, contrary conversation. In 2020, during lockdown, invisible hands stroked the dip of my hip in the dark. I knew it was ghosts but knew it was time to call my doctor. To remember that while I can feel the magnitude of being alive at times, those feelings stretch beyond sadness and joy. I can fall horrendously in love and fear can extend and send me somewhere no one wants to go.

I rarely talk about my mental health but I’ve slowly started to venture out again. Last month I told someone I’d been absent from a decade of work dinners because of ‘some health issues.’ The fear of stigma still sticks to me.

Psychiatrists are perhaps well intended when they repeat that labels are not helpful. When they talk about “the umbrella of schizophrenia.” Well that sounds beautiful, I think. At an MRI in 2020, ‘severe mental illness’ scraped across the screen in red capital letters. That wasn’t helpful either.

My father died in 2015 and I grieved in front of hidden cameras. He also played his drums right beside my ear the night before his funeral and I woke to see him shuffling through papers on my desk a couple of years ago too. More magical things pepper my everyday. If I’m a flashy ‘mental illness’ then I think it’s bittersweet.

If you like this, there’s a little heart at the top, and if you click it, I feel it. A reminder of why I’m writing is here & I update on Instagram here.

Mental health emergencies are serious. If you or anyone you know is suffering with your mental health, you can contact the mental health charity MIND.

1. psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. This might involve seeing or hearing things that other people cannot see or hear (hallucinations) and believing things that are not actually true (delusions).

2. psyche

noun : the human soul, mind, or spirit.