So, I’ve been away. Since August. Now I’m back from a bout of mental illness. A full-on, stinking, steaming, absolute mud-pat of depression and OCD. Despite having had it before, I did not catch it quickly. I did not heed any of the warning signs. I was frantic with anxiety, headlocked, relentless bullets of disordered and, frankly, insane, thoughts showering down on me thousands of times a day.

I was stuck ruminating on a decision I had to make, swinging back and forth every second of every hour of every day. I spent hours upon hours looking for ‘evidence’ to support my decision – a decision which I randomly imposed on myself and didn’t even need to make. I couldn’t write (this will be a poor post, I still can’t) and could barely speak. I went for a brain scan because I thought I had a tumour, thinking it could be the only explanation for my behaviour.

I cried, often. I kept bursting out into tears. My children were worried. Mummy, don’t cry. Everything is ok. They said this several times. It was confusing to them, these periods of crying for seemingly no reason. I became consumed by a desire to sleep during the day so I could escape the hell in my head. I cried in front of neighbours, I cried in front of strangers. I told everyone who so much as looked at me the full extent of my worries, explaining my problem in rambling, anxious and disordered speech.

I thought about death – how useless I was anyway, how I’d failed at everything in life, how I’d totally messed up, missed opportunities, made the wrong choices. My brain kept circling back to The Decision. It throttled me. It went on and on, I was drowning, choking, covered in the relentless muck of rumination.

Then, in the black pit, in the stifling dark, in the bleak horror of the unbroken night, I realised that I was in full flight, I was up there, I was gone: I was peaking in an utterly useless and tortuous bout of obsessive compulsive disorder. Brick by brick, since the beginning of this pandemic, I’d been building my house of ‘safety’. I’d been accumulating ‘evidence’ of how to ‘get through this.’

I called the doctor, and started taking an antidepressant immediately. Within a few weeks, the brick house revealed itself to be smoke and mirrors. The ‘evidence’ fell away, for how can there be evidence when the proposition being examined isn’t based on reality? There was no problem, there was no decision to be made. The hailstones of thoughts stopped. They just stopped; they went away.

I’m not a fan of pills. I started meditating some years ago because I believe there has to be a better way to manage your mental health than numbly taking a white tablet every day. However, I caught this just in time. The fact that a pill took away such a prolonged and dangerous onslaught of disordered thinking has made me reassess my attitude to medication.

Sometimes it’s necessary.

Just some things I’m frightened of right now: starting this blog, opening the letter in the hallway from my health insurer, driving on small country roads, that leaving my job was a Bad Idea and not a Good Idea, that one of my children has some kind of weird unidentifiable tummy bug that every doctor will miss and I’ll have to get a poo sample to send off in the post, that my bouts of forgetfulness are not caused by three babies in four years and multiple night feeds but early onset Alzheimer’s, and that I’ll never crack the ant problem that has suddenly invaded my kitchen.

Not to mention the general fear of everything that I feel in my stomach, present now as I write this. And it’s ok. I know what it is, so I’ll just keep going, go pick up the kids from school, take them to the park, make a roast chicken – do normal things.

I re-read Susan Jeffer’s classic Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway recently. Of course, its title says it all. But I think it’s important to remember that The Fear doesn’t have to be about the giant, life-changing things – it’s about the minutiae of life too.

Fear is an absolute stinker. But we can watch it, we can step back from it and we can even be rude to it – we can unfriend it. It’s got nothing to do with us. We are behind all that fear. We are not afraid.

In the past, I’ve had fits of rage that were so violent it felt like my body was being taken over by outrageous weather. Like a hurricane. They were brief, explosive bouts of emotion that I couldn’t control.

In week nine of my first pregnancy, when the hormones were peaking and I had no understanding of what was going on in my body, I ripped an enormous, framed picture off the wall and flung it down the stairs. The glass shattered into tiny shards across the hallway, the beautiful painting flopped down, as if its artistic spirit was broken by what I’d just done.

It was horrifying. I couldn’t understand how anger like this came from me. Why it was so ridiculously out of proportion to whatever it was that had sparked the rage.

Inside me, a little life was unfolding.

I had to find a way to face the anger. Not shove it down and pretend it wasn’t there. Look at it properly. That was five years ago and the storms still come, less often and much more gently. Mild winters, not monstrous monsoons. Becoming a mother made me want to change, and learning how to meditate changed me.

I use the vocabulary of storms now with my own children, whose meltdowns are frequent and a necessary part of growing, day by day. Can you feel the storm inside you? I say. Let it pass through you, I tell them. The weather always changes. The waves will die down. That wild sea isn’t you, I explain.

You are the boat. 

In the playground at my son’s school there is a round blue sign attached to the red brick wall. It says: ‘Friendship Stop. If you are feeling worried about something then stop here, a playground friend will come and have a chat with you.’

Imagine what life would be like if we had ‘friendship stops’ dotted across the country.

You could be walking around having one of those days, trudging through bleak hours where it feels like there is a tight rubber band around your head. An intrusive entity carving grooves onto your brain, felt in tiny, destructive ways. That in time, imprint in monumental, terrifying ways.

Before that rubber band pinged back into the world, before it harmed someone, before it got tighter, you could loosen it at the nearest friendship stop.

We’re grown ups. We can’t have specially designated stops like these. But look around, everywhere, there are people. Look a little closer, and you can see their faces. Their eyes. Find a face you like, and make a friendship stop.

Tell them.